Describe Tennyson's 'In Memoriam' as an elegy

The poem partly belongs to the genre of elegy, which is a poem occasioned by the death of a person. The standard elegy includes ceremonial mourning for the deceased, extolling his virtues, and seeking consolation for his death. Other famous elegies, to which In Memoriam is often compared, include John Milton’s Lycidas, Shelley’s Adonais, and Wordsworth’s “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d.” The epilogue is also an epithalamion, or a classical wedding celebration poem. The stanzas of the poems have uneven lengths but have a very regular poetic meter. The style, which Tennyson used to such great effect that it is now called the “In Memoriam stanza,” consists of tetrameter quatrains rhymed abba. The lines are short, and the rhythm is strict, which imparts a sense of stasis as well as labor to move from one line to the next.