121.  AUTHORITY—­KING.  This line has been described as Shakespearian.  Its strength is derived from the force of the metaphorical personification.  The boldness of the poetical construction is carried into the metaphor in the next line.

129.  FOR A MAN.  Because a man.

132.  AND SLAY THEE WITH MY HANDS.  Compare Malory:  “And but if thou do now as I bid thee, if ever I may see thee, I shall slay thee with mine own hands, for thou wouldest for my rich sword see me dead.”  In Rowe and Webb’s edition it is suggested that ‘with my hands’ is added for one of two reasons,—­either “because he had now no sword; or more probably, these words are introduced in imitation of Homer’s habit of mentioning specific details:  cf. ‘he went taking long steps with his feet.’” This explanation is ingenious, but unnecessary in view of the quotation from Malory.  The note proceeds:  “Notice the touch of human personality in the king’s sharp anger; otherwise Arthur is generally represented by Tennyson as a rather colourless being, and as almost ’too good for human nature’s daily food.’”

133-142.  Brimley in his valuable essay on Tennyson, analyses this poem in some detail.  Of this passage he writes:  “A series of brilliant effects is hit off in these two words, ‘made lightnings.’  ’Whirl’d in an arch,’ is a splendid instance of sound answering to sense, which the older critics made so much of; the additional syllable which breaks the measure, and necessitates an increased rapidity of utterance, seeming to express to the ear the rush of the sword up its parabolic curve.  And with what lavish richness of presentative power is the boreal aurora, the collision, the crash, and the thunder of the meeting icebergs, brought before the eye.  An inferior artist would have shouted through a page, and emptied a whole pallet of colour, without any result but interrupting his narrative, where Tennyson in three lines strikingly illustrates the fact he has to tell,—­associates it impressively with one of Nature’s grandest phenomena, and gives a complete picture of this phenomenon besides.”  The whole essay deserves to be carefully read.

143.  DIPT THE SURFACE.  A poetical construction.

157.  Note the personification of the sword.

182-183.  CLOTHED—­HILLS.  His breath made a vapour in the frosty air through which his figure loomed of more than human size.  Tennyson gives us the same effect in Guinevere, 597: 

  The moving vapour rolling round the King,
  Who seem’d the phantom of a Giant in it,
  Enwound him fold by fold.

But the classical example is found in Wordsworth’s description of the mountain shepherd in The Prelude, Book VIII.

  When up the lonely brooks on rainy days
  Angling I went, or trod the trackless hills
  By mists bewildered, suddenly mine eyes
  Have glanced upon him distant a few steps,
  In size a giant, stalking through thick fog,
  His sheep like Greenland bears, or as he stepped
  Beyond the boundary line of some hill-shadow,
  His form hath flashed upon me, glorified
  By the deep radiance of the setting sun,