Ah Christ, that it were possible
For one short hour to see
The souls we loved, that they might tell us
What and where they be.

These lines are from Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s long elegy *In Memoriam A.H.H.* (published 1850), written over many years after the sudden death in 1833 of his close friend Arthur Henry Hallam. The poem records Tennyson’s grief, doubt, and yearning for assurance about the fate of the dead amid Victorian tensions between Christian belief and emerging scientific/historical skepticism. The quoted stanza voices an intense, almost desperate wish—addressed directly to Christ—for a brief revelation: to see departed loved ones and learn their condition and whereabouts in the afterlife.

The speaker’s cry combines faith and anguish: invoking Christ suggests belief in a divine order, yet the plea implies that ordinary religious consolations feel insufficient. The desire is not merely for comfort but for knowledge—“what and where they be”—a demand for concrete certainty about the dead. In the larger elegiac context, the lines dramatize grief’s longing to breach the boundary between life and death and to replace speculation with testimony. Their power lies in the tension between human need for reunion and the silence that follows bereavement, a central theme throughout *In Memoriam*.