ABSTRACT
The dying Arthur's speech from Tennyson's Morte d'Arthur (1842), written in the aftermath of the death of the poet's close friend, Arthur Hallam, and later incorporated in the last idyll, 'The Passing of Arthur' (1869), highlights the extent to which Idylls of the King is about loss and transition; about the ritual of 'holdings-on' and 'lettings go'.
