In Memoriam A.H.H.
133 lyric poems written over 17 years mourning the death of Arthur Henry Hallam, Tennyson's closest friend. In Memoriam is the Victorian age's great confrontation with religious doubt in the face of both personal grief and emerging evolutionary science; Darwin's ideas appear in it before Darwin published them. Its famous declaration ("'Tis better to have loved and lost / Than never to have loved at all") has become proverbial. Queen Victoria said it comforted her after Albert's death.
Grief gets 133 sections and one stanza form, and the ABBA rhyme becomes a metronome long before the end. Tennyson's doubt is the living part; the faith that finally answers it arrives by sheer will, asserted rather than earned. Read twenty sections and you have the poem. The rest is the mourning, repeating.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
