ABSTRACT
Published 1842. Written 1833–4 (Mem. i 129, 138, and Heath MS), under the shock of Arthur Hallam’s death, the news of which was sent to T. on 1 Oct. 1833. Cp. Merlin and the Gleam 77–80: ‘Arthur had vanished/I knew not whither,/The king who loved me,/And cannot die.’ R. J. Tennant wrote to T., 30 Sept. 1834: ‘You promised to send me your Mort d’Arthur if you could get it written out’ (Letters i 119). T. wrote to Spedding, early Oct. 1834: ‘I cannot write the Suicide for you –tis too long, nor Mort d’Arthur (which I myself think the best thing I have managed lately) for tis likewise too long’ (Letters i 125). On 16 Oct. 1834, Hallam’s sister Ellen noted the visit of T.’s sister Emily: ‘My dear Emily read to me this morning a little poem of Alfred’s –a kind of ballad upon the death of King Arthur’, Martin (p. 195) comments: ‘If this was the Morte d’Arthur, the description is a strange one’.
