Dramatic Subjects in Very Organized Poems
Tennyson had a long career (this is a pretty early poem), so he wrote a lot of different kinds of poetry after he finished with this King Arthur stuff. Still, he never got tried of big, dramatic, exciting stories. A lot of his poems deal with terrible grief, huge monsters, death-defying battles and things like that. Still, he usually approaches those subjects in the same tight, controlled style you see here. The lines are short, the stanzas are regular, and the rhymes are carefully laid out. The emotions and the events are huge, but you never feel like the poem gets completely carried away by them.