Alfred, Lord Tennyson - Delphi Poets Series

by Lord Tennyson Alfred

  And thou remaining here wilt learn the event;

  But hither shall I never come again,

  Never lie by thy side; see thee no more —

  Farewell!’

  And while she grovelled at his feet,

  She felt the King’s breath wander o’er her neck,

  And in the darkness o’er her fallen head,

  Perceived the waving of his hands that blest.

  Then, listening till those armed steps were gone,

  Rose the pale Queen, and in her anguish found

  The casement: ‘peradventure,’ so she thought,

  ‘If I might see his face, and not be seen.’

  And lo, he sat on horseback at the door!

  And near him the sad nuns with each a light

  Stood, and he gave them charge about the Queen,

  To guard and foster her for evermore.

  And while he spake to these his helm was lowered,

  To which for crest the golden dragon clung

  Of Britain; so she did not see the face,

  Which then was as an angel’s, but she saw,

  Wet with the mists and smitten by the lights,

  The Dragon of the great Pendragonship

  Blaze, making all the night a steam of fire.

  And even then he turned; and more and more

  The moony vapour rolling round the King,

  Who seemed the phantom of a Giant in it,

  Enwound him fold by fold, and made him gray

  And grayer, till himself became as mist

  Before her, moving ghostlike to his doom.

  Then she stretched out her arms and cried aloud

  ‘Oh Arthur!’ there her voice brake suddenly,

  Then — as a stream that spouting from a cliff

  Fails in mid air, but gathering at the base

  Re-makes itself, and flashes down the vale —

  Went on in passionate utterance:

  ‘Gone — my lord!

  Gone through my sin to slay and to be slain!

  And he forgave me, and I could not speak.

  Farewell? I should have answered his farewell.

  His mercy choked me. Gone, my lord the King,

  My own true lord! how dare I call him mine?

  The shadow of another cleaves to me,

  And makes me one pollution: he, the King,

  Called me polluted: shall I kill myself?

  What help in that? I cannot kill my sin,

  If soul be soul; nor can I kill my shame;

  No, nor by living can I live it down.

  The days will grow to weeks, the weeks to months

  The months will add themselves and make the years,

  The years will roll into the centuries,

  And mine will ever be a name of scorn.

  I must not dwell on that defeat of fame.

  Let the world be; that is but of the world.

  What else? what hope? I think there was a hope,

  Except he mocked me when he spake of hope;

  His hope he called it; but he never mocks,

  For mockery is the fume of little hearts.

  And blessed be the King, who hath forgiven

  My wickedness to him, and left me hope

  That in mine own heart I can live down sin

  And be his mate hereafter in the heavens

  Before high God. Ah great and gentle lord,

  Who wast, as is the conscience of a saint

  Among his warring senses, to thy knights —

  To whom my false voluptuous pride, that took

  Full easily all impressions from below,

  Would not look up, or half-despised the height

  To which I would not or I could not climb —

  I thought I could not breathe in that fine air

  That pure severity of perfect light —

  I yearned for warmth and colour which I found

  In Lancelot — now I see thee what thou art,

  Thou art the highest and most human too,

  Not Lancelot, nor another. Is there none

  Will tell the King I love him though so late?

  Now — ere he goes to the great Battle? none:

  Myself must tell him in that purer life,

  But now it were too daring. Ah my God,

  What might I not have made of thy fair world,

  Had I but loved thy highest creature here?

  It was my duty to have loved the highest:

  It surely was my profit had I known:

  It would have been my pleasure had I seen.

  We needs must love the highest when we see it,

  Not Lancelot, nor another.’

  Here her hand

  Grasped, made her vail her eyes: she looked and saw

  The novice, weeping, suppliant, and said to her,

  ‘Yea, little maid, for am I not forgiven?’

  Then glancing up beheld the holy nuns

  All round her, weeping; and her heart was loosed

  Within her, and she wept with these and said,

  ‘Ye know me then, that wicked one, who broke

  The vast design and purpose of the King.

  O shut me round with narrowing nunnery-walls,

  Meek maidens, from the voices crying “shame.”

  I must not scorn myself: he loves me still.

  Let no one dream but that he loves me still.

  So let me, if you do not shudder at me,

  Nor shun to call me sister, dwell with you;

  Wear black and white, and be a nun like you,

  Fast with your fasts, not feasting with your feasts;

  Grieve with your griefs, not grieving at your joys,

  But not rejoicing; mingle with your rites;

  Pray and be prayed for; lie before your shrines;

  Do each low office of your holy house;

  Walk your dim cloister, and distribute dole

  To poor sick people, richer in His eyes

  Who ransomed us, and haler too than I;

  And treat their loathsome hurts and heal mine own;

  And so wear out in almsdeed and in prayer

  The sombre close of that voluptuous day,

  Which wrought the ruin of my lord the King.’

  She said: they took her to themselves; and she

  Still hoping, fearing ‘is it yet too late?’

  Dwelt with them, till in time their Abbess died.

  Then she, for her good deeds and her pure life,

  And for the power of ministration in her,

  And likewise for the high rank she had borne,

  Was chosen Abbess, there, an Abbess, lived

  For three brief years, and there, an Abbess, past

  To where beyond these voices there is peace.

  (THIS IS THE END OF THE ‘ROUND TABLE’ COLLECTION PIPPY!)

  The Passing of Arthur

  1869

  THAT story which the bold Sir Bedivere,

  First made and latest left of all the knights,

  Told, when the man was no more than a voice

  In the white winter of his age, to those

  With whom he dwelt, new faces, other minds.

  For on their march to westward, Bedivere,

  Who slowly paced among the slumbering host,

  Heard in his tent the moanings of the King:

  ‘I found Him in the shining of the stars,

  I marked Him in the flowering of His fields,

  But in His ways with men I find Him not.

  I waged His wars, and now I pass and die.

  O me! for why is all around us here

  As if some lesser god had made the world,

  But had not force to shape it as he would,

  Till the High God behold it from beyond,

  And enter it, and make it beautiful?

  Or else as if the world were wholly fair,

  But that these eyes of men are dense and dim,

  And have not power to see it as it is:

  Perc
hance, because we see not to the close; —

  For I, being simple, thought to work His will,

  And have but stricken with the sword in vain;

  And all whereon I leaned in wife and friend

  Is traitor to my peace, and all my realm

  Reels back into the beast, and is no more.

  My God, thou hast forgotten me in my death;

  Nay — God my Christ — I pass but shall not die.’

  Then, ere that last weird battle in the west,

  There came on Arthur sleeping, Gawain killed

  In Lancelot’s war, the ghost of Gawain blown

  Along a wandering wind, and past his ear

  Went shrilling, ‘Hollow, hollow all delight!

  Hail, King! tomorrow thou shalt pass away.

  Farewell! there is an isle of rest for thee.

  And I am blown along a wandering wind,

  And hollow, hollow, hollow all delight.’

  And fainter onward, like wild birds that change

  Their season in the night and wail their way

  From cloud to cloud, down the long wind the dream

  Shrilled; but in going mingled with dim cries

  Far in the moonlit haze among the hills,

  As of some lonely city sacked by night,

  When all is lost, and wife and child with wail

  Pass to new lords; and Arthur woke and called,

  ‘Who spake? A dream. O light upon the wind,

  Thine, Gawain, was the voice — are these dim cries

  Thine? or doth all that haunts the waste and wild

  Mourn, knowing it will go along with me?’

  This heard the bold Sir Bedivere and spake:

  ‘O me, my King, let pass whatever will,

  Elves, and the harmless glamour of the field;

  But in their stead thy name and glory cling

  To all high places like a golden cloud

  For ever: but as yet thou shalt not pass.

  Light was Gawain in life, and light in death

  Is Gawain, for the ghost is as the man;

  And care not thou for dreams from him, but rise —

  I hear the steps of Modred in the west,

  And with him many of thy people, and knights

  Once thine, whom thou hast loved, but grosser grown

  Than heathen, spitting at their vows and thee.

  Right well in heart they know thee for the King.

  Arise, go forth and conquer as of old.’

  Then spake King Arthur to Sir Bedivere:

  ‘Far other is this battle in the west

  Whereto we move, than when we strove in youth,

  And brake the petty kings, and fought with Rome,

  Or thrust the heathen from the Roman wall,

  And shook him through the north. Ill doom is mine

  To war against my people and my knights.

  The king who fights his people fights himself.

  And they my knights, who loved me once, the stroke

  That strikes them dead is as my death to me.

  Yet let us hence, and find or feel a way

  Through this blind haze, which ever since I saw

  One lying in the dust at Almesbury,

  Hath folded in the passes of the world.’

  Then rose the King and moved his host by night,

  And ever pushed Sir Modred, league by league,

  Back to the sunset bound of Lyonnesse —

  A land of old upheaven from the abyss

  By fire, to sink into the abyss again;

  Where fragments of forgotten peoples dwelt,

  And the long mountains ended in a coast

  Of ever-shifting sand, and far away

  The phantom circle of a moaning sea.

  There the pursuer could pursue no more,

  And he that fled no further fly the King;

  And there, that day when the great light of heaven

  Burned at his lowest in the rolling year,

  On the waste sand by the waste sea they closed.

  Nor ever yet had Arthur fought a fight

  Like this last, dim, weird battle of the west.

  A deathwhite mist slept over sand and sea:

  Whereof the chill, to him who breathed it, drew

  Down with his blood, till all his heart was cold

  With formless fear; and even on Arthur fell

  Confusion, since he saw not whom he fought.

  For friend and foe were shadows in the mist,

  And friend slew friend not knowing whom he slew;

  And some had visions out of golden youth,

  And some beheld the faces of old ghosts

  Look in upon the battle; and in the mist

  Was many a noble deed, many a base,

  And chance and craft and strength in single fights,

  And ever and anon with host to host

  Shocks, and the splintering spear, the hard mail hewn,

  Shield-breakings, and the clash of brands, the crash

  Of battleaxes on shattered helms, and shrieks

  After the Christ, of those who falling down

  Looked up for heaven, and only saw the mist;

  And shouts of heathen and the traitor knights,

  Oaths, insults, filth, and monstrous blasphemies,

  Sweat, writhings, anguish, labouring of the lungs

  In that close mist, and cryings for the light,

  Moans of the dying, and voices of the dead.

  Last, as by some one deathbed after wail

  Of suffering, silence follows, or through death

  Or deathlike swoon, thus over all that shore,

  Save for some whisper of the seething seas,

  A dead hush fell; but when the dolorous day

  Grew drearier toward twilight falling, came

  A bitter wind, clear from the North, and blew

  The mist aside, and with that wind the tide

  Rose, and the pale King glanced across the field

  Of battle: but no man was moving there;

  Nor any cry of Christian heard thereon,

  Nor yet of heathen; only the wan wave

  Brake in among dead faces, to and fro

  Swaying the helpless hands, and up and down

  Tumbling the hollow helmets of the fallen,

  And shivered brands that once had fought with Rome,

  And rolling far along the gloomy shores

  The voice of days of old and days to be.

  Then spake King Arthur to Sir Bedivere,

  And whiter than the mist that all day long

  Had held the field of battle was the King:

  ‘Hearest thou this great voice that shakes the world,

  And wastes the narrow realm whereon we move,

  And beats upon the faces of the dead,

  My dead, as though they had not died for me? —

  O Bedivere, for on my heart hath fallen

  Confusion, till I know not what I am,

  Nor whence I am, nor whether I be King.

  Behold, I seem but King among the dead.’

  Then spake the bold Sir Bedivere: ‘My King,

  King everywhere! and so the dead have kings,

  There also will I worship thee as King.

  Yet still thy life is whole, and still I live

  Who love thee; but who hates thee, he that brought

  The heathen back among us, yonder stands,

  Modred, unharmed, the traitor of thine house.’

  Then spake the King: ‘My house hath been my doom.

  But call not thou this traitor of my house

  Who hath but dwelt beneath one roof with me.

  My house are rather they who sware my vows,

  Yea, even while they brake them, owned me King.

  And well for thee, saying in my dark hour,

  When all the purport of my throne hath failed,

  That quick or dead thou holdest me for King.

  King am I, whatsoever be their cry;
<
br />   And one last act of kinghood shalt thou see

  Yet, ere I pass.’ And uttering this the King

  Made at the man: then Modred smote his liege

  Hard on that helm which many a heathen sword

  Had beaten thin; while Arthur at one blow,

  Striking the last stroke with Excalibur,

  Slew him, and all but slain himself, he fell.

  So all day long the noise of battle rolled

  Among the mountains by the winter sea;

  Until King Arthur’s Table, man by man,

  Had fallen in Lyonnesse about their lord,

  King Arthur. Then, because his wound was deep,

  The bold Sir Bedivere uplifted him,

  And bore him to a chapel nigh the field,

  A broken chancel with a broken cross,

  That stood on a dark strait of barren land:

  On one side lay the Ocean, and on one

  Lay a great water, and the moon was full.

  Then spake King Arthur to Sir Bedivere:

  ‘The sequel of today unsolders all

  The goodliest fellowship of famous knights

  Whereof this world holds record. Such a sleep

  They sleep — the men I loved. I think that we

  Shall never more, at any future time,

  Delight our souls with talk of knightly deeds,

  Walking about the gardens and the halls

  Of Camelot, as in the days that were.

  I perish by this people which I made, —

  Though Merlin sware that I should come again

  To rule once more; but, let what will be, be,

  I am so deeply smitten through the helm

  That without help I cannot last till morn.

  Thou therefore take my brand Excalibur,

  Which was my pride: for thou rememberest how

  In those old days, one summer noon, an arm

  Rose up from out the bosom of the lake,

  Clothed in white samite, mystic, wonderful,

  Holding the sword — and how I rowed across

  And took it, and have worn it, like a king;

  And, wheresoever I am sung or told

  In aftertime, this also shall be known:

  But now delay not: take Excalibur,

  And fling him far into the middle mere:

  Watch what thou seest, and lightly bring me word.’

  To him replied the bold Sir Bedivere:

  ‘It is not meet, Sir King, to leave thee thus,

  Aidless, alone, and smitten through the helm —

  A little thing may harm a wounded man;

  Yet I thy hest will all perform at full,

  Watch what I see, and lightly bring thee word.’

  So saying, from the ruined shrine he stept,

  And in the moon athwart the place of tombs,

  Where lay the mighty bones of ancient men,

  Old knights, and over them the sea-wind sang

  Shrill, chill, with flakes of foam. He, stepping down