The moral significance attached by the nineteenth century to Lord Tennyson's Idylls of the King has been largely responsible for its gentle disappearance into that twilight world of poems known to all but read by none. However, when once the poem can be understood as something more than a tapestry of allegorical figures on a medieval landscape, the way is clear to see its connection with such a poem, for example, as The Waste Land, on the surface so apparently antithetical. Eliot's use of the Grail legend and his symbolic revelation of man's moral infertility have their counterparts in Tennyson's epic—the difference, if there is one, being that between suggestion and explication. Eliot says: “He who was living is now dead / We who were living are now dying / With a little patience” (v. 328-330). This characteristic motif of the poem has a relevant connection with the passing of Arthur and the demoralization of the Round Table. But in neither poem is there a curate's moral to be extracted, a reformer's remedy suggested. Both poems simply present, in a form suitable to their century's tastes, a diagnosis of modern civilization—a civilization as hollow as the sacred Mount of Camelot.