Then spake King Arthur to Sir Bedivere: 
  “Far other is this battle in the west
  Whereto we move, than when we strove in youth,
  And brake the petty kings, and fought with Rome,
  Or thrust the heathen from the Roman wall,[1]
  And shook him thro’ the north.  Ill doom is mine
  To war against my people and my knights. 
  The king who fights his people fights himself. 
  And they my knights, who loved me once, the stroke
  That strikes them dead is as my death to me. 
  Yet let us hence, and find or feel a way
  Thro’ this blind haze, which ever since I saw
  One lying in the dust at Almesbury,[2]
  Hath folded in the passes of the world.”

[Footnote 1:  Shortly after his accession to the throne, according to the legend, Arthur was called upon to send tribute to Rome.  He refused, however, and was successful in the battle against Rome which his refusal caused.  The heathen in his own country he also defeated, driving them beyond the “Roman wall”—­the wall which had been set up by the Romans at the time of their occupancy of Britain to mark the northern boundary of their territory.]

[Footnote 2:  Queen Guinevere, after her falseness to Arthur had been proved, had withdrawn to a nunnery at Almesbury.  Here Arthur had had an interview with her before setting out on his last campaign.]

  Then rose the King and moved his host by night,
  And ever push’d Sir Modred, league by league,
  Back to the sunset bound of Lyonnesse—­
  A land of old upheaven from the abyss
  By fire, to sink into the abyss again;
  Where fragments of forgotten peoples dwelt,
  And the long mountains ended in a coast
  Of ever-shifting sand, and far away
  The phantom circle of a moaning sea. 
  There the pursuer could pursue no more,
  And he that fled no further fly the King;
  And there, that day when the great light of heaven
  Burn’d at his lowest in the rolling year,[3]
  On the waste sand by the waste sea they closed. 
  Nor ever yet had Arthur fought a fight
  Like this last, dim, weird battle of the west. 
  A deathwhite mist slept over sand and sea: 
  Whereof the chill, to him who breathed it, drew
  Down with his blood, till all his heart was cold
  With formless fear; and ev’n on Arthur fell
  Confusion, since he saw not whom he fought. 
  For friend and foe were shadows in the mist,
  And friend slew friend not knowing whom he slew;
  And some had visions out of golden youth,
  And some beheld the faces of old ghosts
  Look in upon the battle; and in the mist
  Was many a noble deed, many a base,
  And chance and craft and strength in single fights,
  And ever and anon with host to host
  Shocks, and the splintering spear, the hard mail hewn,
  Shield-breakings, and the clash of brands, the crash
  Of battle-axes on shatter’d helms, and shrieks
  After the Christ, of those who falling