More things are wrought by prayer than this world dreams…

In “Morte d’Arthur”, the wounded king lies in the barge that will bear him away. Sir Bedivere, the last of his knights, cries out that the Round Table is dissolved and that he must go forth “companionless” among “new men, strange faces, other minds”. Arthur answers slowly from the barge: “The old order changeth, yielding place to new, And God fulfils himself in many ways, Lest one good custom should corrupt the world.” If Bedivere should never see his face again, let him pray for his soul, and the line follows. Let his voice “Rise like a fountain for me night and day”, for the whole earth “is every way Bound by gold chains about the feet of God”.

Tennyson wrote the poem in the years after the death of his friend Arthur Hallam in 1833 and published it in the Poems of 1842. He later enlarged it into “The Passing of Arthur”, the close of Idylls of the King.

The line is quoted in sermons as a plain statement of faith in prayer.

Morte d’Arthur, the dying King Arthur, 1842

Checked word for word in the work itself.

Read the passage in the work