William Black, in the table of causes of admission to Bethlem madhouse documented in Dissertation on Insanity cited at the start of this discussion, notes that the most prominent factor instigating mental illness is ‘Disappointments, Grief’. In Memoriam, a collection of lyrics written between 1833 and 1850 and published anonymously at the end of May in the latter year, is an elegaic response to the death of Tennyson's closest friend during his Cambridge days, Arthur Henry Hallam, who died on 15 September 1833 in Vienna. Where ‘St Simeon Stylites’ represents religious turmoil and inner dislocation stemming from a possibility that there is no meaning behind the excesses of self-mortification, similar expressions of self-doubt and religious disorientation in In Memoriam are a result of the fact that the poem is comprehensively overshadowed by grief and the personal disruption that this emotion involves. Bernard Reardon describes the poem as