that Tennyson sings of is the great King Arthur.

Tennyson takes his stories, some from The Mabinogion, some from
Malory, some from other books. He has told them in very
beautiful English, and it is the English such as we speak to-day.
He has smoothed away much that strikes us as rough and coarse in
the old stories, and his poems are as different from the old
stories as a polished diamond is different from the stone newly
brought out of the mine. Yet we miss something of strength and
vigor. The Arthur of the Idylls is not the Arthur of The
Mabinogion nor of Malory. Indeed, Tennyson makes him "almost too
good to be true": he is "Ideal manhood closed in real man,
rather than that gray king" of old.

And now I will give you part of the last of the Arthur poems, The
Passing of Arthur, so that you may read it along with Layamon's
account of the hero's death, and see for yourselves the
difference between the two. The Passing of Arthur is written in
blank verse, that is verse which does not rhyme, and which
depends like the old English verse on the accent. Yet they are
not alike.

"So all day long the noise of battle roll'd
Among the mountains by the winter sea;
Until King Arthur's Table, man by man,
Had fall'n in Lyonnesse about their lord,
King Arthur. Then, because his wound was deep,
The bold Sir Bedivere uplifted him,
And bore him to a chapel nigh the field,
A broken chancel by a broken cross,