Morte D Arthur - Analysis

A dying king insists on an ending that feels like waste

Tennyson’s poem treats Arthur’s death not as a private tragedy but as a test of whether a whole ideal can be concluded cleanly. Arthur’s central demand is blunt: Bedivere must take Excalibur and fling him back into the mere. The order looks, on the surface, like throwing away value—especially when the sword’s haft twinkled with diamond sparks and topaz-lights. But the poem argues that the survival of Arthur’s meaning depends on relinquishing the relic. If the sword becomes a museum piece, Arthur becomes a story of possessions and display; if it returns to the lake, the kingship keeps its mysterious source and its proper limit.

The tone at the start is already funereal: the noise of battle roll’d among mountains by a winter sea. Everything is cold, stony, and final—yet the poem keeps straining toward something beyond the battlefield, as if the physical world can’t fully contain what is ending.

The winter landscape makes the Round Table feel already ruined

Before we even reach the moral conflict, the setting announces collapse. Bedivere carries Arthur to a broken chancel with a broken cross on a dark strait of barren land. The geography itself is a border: on one side the Ocean, on the other a great water, with a full moon above. It’s a place of thresholds—land squeezed between waters, a chapel reduced to fragments—mirroring a civilization squeezed between what it once was and whatever will replace it.

Arthur’s first speech makes the loss social and intimate at once. He doesn’t only mourn death; he mourns the end of shared speech: no more talk of knightly deeds while walking in the gardens and halls of Camelot. The Round Table’s greatness is framed as fellowship and conversation, not just military prowess. That is why the dissolution feels like an unsoldering: unsolders all suggests a seam coming apart, the way a crafted object fails when its binding melts.

Bedivere’s temptation is not greed alone, but the desire to keep proof

Bedivere’s failure is easy to read as simple weakness—Arthur even accuses him of lust of gold—but the poem lets us hear a more anxious logic. The sword looks like concentrated meaning: it is curiously and strangely chased, and Bedivere’s eyes are literally dazzled. He wants to convert a sacred object into a public guarantee. He imagines the sword stored in some treasure-house so that later someone can say, King Arthur’s sword, and win reverence. In other words: he fears that without a relic, the story will dissolve into empty breath and rumours.

This is the poem’s key tension: Arthur demands obedience to an act that seems unprofitable, while Bedivere can only imagine profit in the form of visible legacy. Bedivere even asks the pragmatic questions any modern mind might ask: What good should follow? What harm, undone? The poem doesn’t mock those questions; it shows how plausible they are when a world is collapsing and history feels fragile.

The repeated lie is a crisis of faith, not only of discipline

When Bedivere returns twice claiming he only heard the ripple washing and water lapping, the repetition is more than plot; it exposes how duty fails when wonder is treated as private property. Arthur’s anger is ferocious because the lie contaminates the very thing a knight is supposed to be: This is a shameful thing for men to lie. Yet Arthur also reads it as a failure of recognition. He expects a surer sign—some answering gesture from the mere—because the sword belongs to a larger order that should respond when the rite is performed. Bedivere’s false report is not just disobedience; it’s a refusal to let the world be enchanted in the way Arthur insists it is.

The tone shifts sharply here. Arthur goes from faint, to pale, to much in wrath, calling Bedivere traitor-hearted. The poem makes that wrath feel desperate rather than petty: Arthur is laid widow’d of the power that used to bow’d the will. Authority is dying, and the last knight’s wavering becomes a symbol of an age that can no longer make people obey purely because something is right.

When the sword finally flies, the poem restores the world’s old magic—briefly

The moment Bedivere throws Excalibur is the poem’s hinge from moral argument to vision. The sword becomes a piece of northern weather: it Made lightnings, Shot like a streamer of the northern morn, amid noises of the northern sea. The extravagance is purposeful: the sword can’t simply be dropped; it must be returned with splendor, as if the act repairs reality for a second.

Then comes the confirming miracle: rose an arm Clothed in white samite that caught him by the hilt and brandish’d him three times before drawing it under. The thrice-brandishing feels like a ritual salute, a farewell that is also a sealing. Bedivere, telling it afterward, admits he closed mine eyelids lest the gems blind my purpose. The line makes the poem’s moral psychology precise: temptation arrives as beauty, and fidelity sometimes requires not looking.

The barge and the Queens turn defeat into a mourned passage

Once Excalibur is returned, Arthur can be moved—physically and spiritually—toward departure. The journey across the tombs is nightmarish: Arthur pants Like one that feels a nightmare in a silent house, and Bedivere strides through icy caves and barren chasms with his mind driving him like a goad. The world is all hard surfaces and echoing cliffs, until the lake opens into the long glories of moonlight and the arrival of the dusky barge, Dark as a funeral scarf.

The lamentation of the black-hooded forms and the Three Queens is almost cosmic in its loneliness, like a wind that shrills in a wasteland where no one comes since the making of the world. Arthur is made small in his broken body—his face white and colourless, his old brightness reduced to dust-clotted curls—yet the Queens’ care dignifies the ruin. The scene insists that the end of an ideal deserves ceremony, not sarcasm.

Arthur’s farewell blesses change, but cannot stop doubting

Bedivere’s cry is the poem’s most naked grief: the true old times are dead, the Round Table dissolved, and he must walk among new men with other minds. Arthur answers with a larger, steadier tone: The old order changeth, and God fulfills Himself in many ways so that one good custom does not corrupt the world. The claim is bracing because it refuses to idolize Camelot. The poem’s loyalty is real, but not simplistic: even something noble can harden into corruption if it becomes permanent and unquestioned.

Yet the farewell is not pure confidence. Arthur asks for prayer—Pray for my soul—and admits all my mind is clouded. Even his destination, the healing island of Avilion where falls not hail and orchards spread in calm weather, is offered with a conditional: if indeed I go. The poem leaves a residue of uncertainty at the heart of its grandeur: the king can preach providence and still not know what comes next.

The frame-and-dream ending turns legend into a recurring need

The final turn is surprising: the poem steps back into a room where Hall has been reading aloud, and the listeners half-grumble, half-marvel. The shift risks deflating the legend, but it actually explains how such stories live. The narrator confesses they were Sat rapt, not entirely sure why—maybe Hall’s tone, maybe modern touches, maybe affection for the man. In other words, belief is messy; it depends on voice, company, and hunger.

Then the narrator dreams Arthur returning like a modern gentleman, and the crowd cries, Arthur is come again. The poem ends with actual church-bells ringing on Christmas morn, blending myth with communal ritual. Arthur’s possible return is less a literal promise than a psychological and cultural one: when an age feels exhausted, people summon an image of rightful rule and moral clarity and insist he cannot die. The legend persists because the need persists—even as the poem, honestly, keeps the doubt in view.