Friday, September 13, 2013

In "Morte D'Arthur," what does "the old order" mean in Arthur's perspective in the quote "the old order changeth, yielding place to new"?"Morte...

In the poem "Morte D'Arthur" by Tennyson, Sir Bedivere had
been mourning the loss of the old way of life of the Knights of the Round Table as he
was saying that "the true old times are dead" and that the "whole Round Table is
dissolved." As the wounded Arthur prepares to sail for the legendary Avilion, he
attempts to give Bedivere some comfort or at least courage by agreeing that, yes, his
Knights and the Round Table were done but that it was just the changing of the tides of
time as the old moves out to make way for the new.


From
Arthur's perspective, the "old order" was his kingdom and the ideology that he had
established that his Knights had lived by. So he says the "old order changeth" and means
that order--the governance, the established way of things--represented by himself and
his Knights was over, was gone, was changed and that something new would now arise to
fill the gap, the empty space left by the dissolution of the Round
Table.

No comments:

Post a Comment

In Act III, scene 2, why may the establishment of Claudius's guilt be considered the crisis of the revenge plot?

The crisis of a drama usually proceeds and leads to the climax.  In Shakespeare's Hamlet , the proof that Claudius is guilty...