Love and loss

Alfred Lord Tennyson's most-quoted line from In Memoriam, his most famous poem, says that it is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. Many mistake it to be a reflection on the need to get a move on after the end of a romantic relationship. In reality, Tennyson was referring to his Cambridge friend, Arthur Henry Hallam, who had died of stroke in Vienna, 17 years before completion of the poem.

One of its countless fans was Queen Victoria, who treasured it as a source of solace after the death of Prince Albert in 1861. "Next to the Bible, In Memoriam is my comfort," Victoria told the poet during a personal audience the Queen herself had requested.

The original title of the poem was Way of the Soul in which Tennyson affirmed his Christian faith which progressed from 'Godless deep' to hope, "a warmth within the breast (that) would melt / The freezing reason's colder part".

Buddhism provides a similar insight but within the bounds of 'frozen reason' without having to subscribe to the idea of the soul's eternal existence! According to its concept of Anicca (from the Sanskrit Anitya), impermanence is an undeniable and inescapable fact of life from which nothing that belongsto the realm of earthly existence is ever free.

But what if the imperishable soul were to be dimensionally different from its mortal coil? That possibility comes from Hinduism, which holds that our gnawing sense of impermanence can be stilled by locating and uniting with the centre of permanence, call it Atman or Brahman, which exists within oneself.