Tennyson spent seventeen years writing this elegy for his closest friend Arthur Hallam, who died suddenly at twenty-two. The poem moves through 131 sections of varying moods: despair, doubt, tentative faith, and something like acceptance. The stanza form Tennyson invented for it, with its enclosed rhyme scheme, creates a sense of turning inward, of thought circling back on itself. Victorian England found in it a language for grief that accommodated religious uncertainty. 'Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all: the line has become so familiar we forget it was forged in genuine anguish. The poem is a cathedral built from loss.