Note: This work is the original frame for Tennyson's "The Passing of Arthur"
      Tennyson went on to write other chronicles of Arthur and this frame was dropped: 

The Epic [Morte d'Arthur]

Opening

At Francis Allen's on the Christmas eve--
The game of forfeits done--the girls all kissed
Beneath the sacred bush and passed away--
The parson Holmes, the poet Everard Hall,
The host, and I sat round the wassail-bowl,
Then halfway ebbed; and there we held a talk,
How all the old honor had from Christmas gone,
Or gone or dwindled down to some odd games
In some odd nooks like this; till I, tired out
With cutting eights that day upon the pond
Where, three times slipping from the outer edge,
I bumped the ice into three several stars,
Fell in a doze; and half-awake I heard
The parson taking wide and wider sweeps,
Now harping on the church-commissioners,
Now hawking at geology and schism;
Until I woke, and found him settled down
Upon the general decay of faith
Right through the world: "at home was little left,
And none abroad; there was no anchor, none,
To hold by." Francis, laughing, clapped his hand
On Everard's shoulder, with "I hold by him."
"And I," quoth Everard, "by the wassail-bowl."
"Why yes," I said, "we knew your gift that way
At college; but another which you had--
I mean a verse (for so we held it then),
What came of that?" "You know," said Frank, "he burnt
His epic, his King Arthur, some twelve books"--
And then to me demanding why: "Oh, sir, 
He thought that nothing new was said, or else
Something so said twas nothing-- that a truth
Looks freshest in the fashion of the day;
God knows; he has a mint of reasons; ask.
It pleased me well enough." "Nay, nay," said Hall, 
"Why take the style of those heroic times?
For nature brings not back the mastadon,
Nor me those times; and why should any man
Remodel models? These twelve books of mine
Were faint Homeric echoes, nothing-worth,
Near chaff and draff, much better burnt."
"But I," said Francis, "picked the eleventh from this hearth,
And have it; keep a thing, its use will come.
I hoard it as a sugarplum for Holmes."
He laughed, and I, though sleepy, like a horse
That hears the corn-bin open, pricked my ears;
For I remembered Everard's college fame
When we were Freshmen. Then at my request
He brought it; and the poet, little urged,
But with some prelude of disparagement,
Read, mouthing out his hollow o's and a's,
Deep-chested music, and do this result.

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Closing

Here ended Hall, and our last light, that long
Had winked and threatened darkness, flared and fell;
At which the parson, sent to sleep with sound,
And waked with silence, grunted "good!" but we
Sat rapt: it was the tone with which he read--
Perhaps some modern touches here and there
Redeemed it from the charge of nothingness--
Or else we love the man, and prized his work;
I know not; but we sitting, as I said, 
The cock crew loud, as at that time of year
The lusty bird takes every hour for dawn.
Then Francis, muttering like a man ill-used
"There now--that's nothing!" drew a little back,
And drove his heel into the smoldered log,
That sent a blast of sparkles up the flue.
And so to bed, where yet in sleep I seemed
To sail with Arthur under looming shores,
Point after point; til on to dawn, when dreams
Begin to feel the truth and stir the day,
To me, methought, who waited with the crowd, 
There came a bark that, blowing forward, bore
King Arthur, like a modern gentleman
Of statliest port; and all the people cried,
"Arthur is come again:  he cannot die."
Then those that stood upon the hills behind
Repeated -- "Come again, and thrice as fair";
And further inland, voices echoed-- "Come 
With all good things, and war shall be no more."
At this a hundred bells began to peal,
That with the sound I woke, and heard indeed 
The clear church bells ring in the Christmas morn.