Tristram and Iseult, published in 1852 by Matthew Arnold, is a narrative poem containing strong romantic and tragic themes.

[1] In a November 1852 letter, he explained:[2]I read the story of Tristram and Iseult some years ago at Thun in an article in a French Review on the Romance Literature: I had never met with it before, and it fastened upon me: when I got back to England I looked at the Morte d'Arthur and took what I could, but the poem was in the main formed, and I could not well disturb it.

[4] The poem's narrator recalls Tristram's past as a Cornish knight, telling of his mission to escort Iseult, an Irish princess, for marriage to King Marc.

[7] Tristram embarks on adventures with King Arthur and his knights, becomes wounded in their war against the Romans, and hallucinates the face of Iseult of Ireland in the water as he takes refuge in a forest.

[8] As Tristram recounts his life, he begins to doubt that Iseult of Ireland will arrive in time to see him, despite the assurances of his messenger from Cornwall.

Clough disliked the abrupt shifts between Tristram's and the narrator's points of view, and felt that the passage about the tapestry of the huntsman was difficult to understand.

[10] Arnold's revisions included the addition of asterisks to separate the passages of Tristram and the narrator, and a rewrite of the tapestry scene.

[12] The narrator's passages are written mostly in trochaic tetrameter and have an archaic and lyrical quality,[12] similar to Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Christabel.

[16] Part III ("Iseult of Brittany") is 224 lines of heroic couplets, resembling works by John Keats and William Cowper.

Tristan's obsession with the long-awaited Iseult blinds him to a recognition of "the redemptive power of home" so prized by Victorian domestic ideology.