Edith J. R. Isaac’s critical analysis of “Merlin” reads as follows: The poem is entirely modern in its spirit and treatment, with lines like these that mark its date:[1] ... Time swings A mighty scythe, and some day all your peace Goes down before its edge like so much clover.
In Robinson's poem, King Arthur and his knights are not romantic heroes, as other poets have made them, not "our conception of what knighthood should be"; they are a modern poet's conception of what leaders of men always and universally are – king, warrior, lover, fool; Arthur, Gawaine, Lancelot, Dagonet.
Nor is Robinson's Merlin like Tennyson's – a magician in his dotage falling a victim to the wiles of a false woman.
In Merlin, Robinson revivifies, not the age of chivalry, but our own time, our own double world of hope and of reality, with its loves, faith, fears, wars and failures.
In Camelot, much has changed: Lancelot’s rescue of Guinevere from being burned as an adulteress entailed slaying many knights, including two of Gawaine’s brothers, which has made the formerly lighthearted Gawaine grow bitter and led him to seek vengeance.