From Morte D'Arthur by Alfred Lord Tennyson

Just re-read this poem for the first time since my school days. It's much better than I recall. It's haunted at once by a kind of nostalgia for a bygone age and a fear of the future. 'The old ways are dying' would be an apposite summary. The verse is also imbued with Tennyson's own peculiar sense of fearfulness, desolation and loneliness it seems to me.

So said he, and the barge with oar and sail
Moved from the brink, like some full-breasted swan
That, fluting a wild carol ere her death,
Ruffles her pure cold plume, and takes the flood
With swarthy webs. Long stood Sir Bedivere
Revolving many memories, till the hull
Look'd one black dot against the verge of dawn,
And on the mere the wailing died away.

MORE