This is the philosophy that we find in Wordsworth’s Ode to Duty.

  Stern Lawgiver!  Yet thou dost wear
  The Godhead’s most benignant grace;
  Nor know we anything so fair
  As is the smile upon thy face: 
  Flowers laugh before thee on their beds,
  And fragrance in thy footing treads;
  Thou dost preserve the stars from wrong,
  And the most ancient heavens, through thee,
    are fresh and strong.

165-167.  Note how dramatic this interruption is.

170.  IDALIAN APHRODITE.  Idalium was a town in Cyprus; an island where the goddess was especially worshipped.  She was frequently called Cypria or the Cyprian.

171.  FRESH AS THE FOAM.  Aphrodite was born from the waves of the sea, near the Island of Cyprus.

NEW-BATHED IN PAPHIAN WELLS.  Paphos was a town in Cyprus.  Aphrodite was said to have landed at Paphos after her birth from the sea-foam.  She is sometimes called the Paphian or Paphia on this account.

184.  SHE SPOKE AND LAUGH’D.  Homer calls her “the laughter-loving Aphrodite.”

195-l97.  A WILD—­WEED. The influence of beauty upon the beasts is a common theme with poets.  Cf.  Una and the lion in Spenser’s Faery Queen.

204.  THEY CUT AWAY MY TALLEST PINES.  Evidently to make ships for Paris’s expedition to Greece.

235-240.  THERE ARE—­DIE.  Lamartine in Le Lac (written before 1820) has a very similar passage.

250.  CASSANDRA.  The daughter of King Priam, and therefore the sister of Paris.  She had the gift of prophecy.

260.  A FIRE DANCES.  Signifying the burning of Troy.

THE EPIC AND MORTE D’ARTHUR

First published, with the epilogue as here printed, in 1842.  The Morte d’Arthur was subsequently taken out of the present setting, and with substantial expansion appeared as the final poem of the Idylls of the King, with the new title, The Passing of Arthur.

Walter Savage Landor doubtless refers to the Morte d’Arthur as early as 1837, when writing to a friend, as follows:—­“Yesterday a Mr. Moreton, a young man of rare judgment, read to me a manuscript by Mr. Tennyson, being different in style from his printed poems.  The subject is the Death of Arthur.  It is more Homeric than any poem of our time, and rivals some of the noblest parts of the Odyssea.”  A still earlier composition is assured by the correspondence of Edward Fitzgerald who writes that, in 1835, while staying at the Speddings in the Lake Country, he met Tennyson and heard the poet read the Morte d’Arthur and other poems of the 1842 volume.  They were read out of a MS., “in a little red book to him and Spedding of a night ‘when all the house was mute.’”

In The Epic we have specific reference to the Homeric influence in these lines: