Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Introduction
IDYLLS OF THE KING - IN TWELVE BOOKS
DEDICATION
THE COMING OF ARTHUR
THE ROUND TABLE
THE PASSING OF ARTHUR
A SELECTION OF POEMS - CHOSEN BY OSCAR WILLIAMS
THE KRAKEN
CHORIC SONG
BREAK, BREAK, BREAK
THE TWO VOICES
ULYSSES
TITHONUS
OF OLD SAT FREEDOM ON THE HEIGHTS
ST. AGNES’ EVE
LOCKSLEY HALL
Four Songs from THE PRINCESS: A MEDLEY THE SPLENDOR FALLS
TEARS, IDLE TEARS
ASK ME NO MORE
NOW SLEEPS THE CRIMSON PETAL
THE EAGLE (FRAGMENT)
From IN MEMORIAM A. H. H. - OBIIT MDCCCXXXIII
AGAIN THE FEAST
THE DAISY WRITTEN AT EDINBURGH
From MAUD: A MONODRAMA
FLOWER IN THE CRANNIED WALL
TO VIRGIL - WRITTEN AT THE REQUEST OF THE MANTUANS FOR THE NINETEENTH CENTENARY ...
CROSSING THE BAR
Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809-92) began writing at an early age, and in 1828, he matriculated at Cambridge. Poems, Chiefly Lyrical (1830) revealed Tennyson’s swiftly maturing talent, which was augmented by his friendship with Edward FitzGerald and A. H. Hallam. In 1830, the poet and Hallam volunteered for the army of a Spanish antimonarchist; and Poems (1832) was derived largely from experience gained on the Continent. Cast down by Hallam’s death the following year, Tennyson continued to write, but didn’t publish; finally Poems, Two Volumes (1842) appeared, earning the admiration of Carlyle and Dickens. The year 1850 witnessed the publication of In Memoriam, his marriage to Emily Sarah Sellwood, and his appointment as Poet Laureate, succeeding Wordsworth. The gravity with which he took his office was reflected in many poems on state occasions. While Poet Laureate, he produced his acknowledged masterpieces: Maud (1855), Ballads and Other Poems (1880), Locksley Hall Sixty Years After (1886), and scattered sections of what would eventually become his epic, Idylls of the King (1859-85).
Glenn Everett, Ph.D., has taught at George Washington, Brown, Temple University, and The University of Tennessee at Martin, and is now at Stonehill College in Easton, MA. He has written on Browning, Tennyson, John Le Carré, Yeats, and Rossetti and is a contributor to George P. Landow’s Victorian Web (www.victorianweb.org). Cofounder of the VICTORIA discussion group, he has created Web sites for the Northeast Victorian Studies Association (www.nvsa.org) and the Browning multimedia project (http://faculty.stonehill.edu/geverett/rb/rb.htm).
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INTRODUCTION
Sometimes the more influential a writer is in his own lifetime, the stronger the reaction against him in the next generation. Certainly this was true of Alfred, Lord Tennyson. Even at the height of his greatest popularity in the 1850s and ’60s, some younger poets and critics began to rebel against his commanding Victorian presence. The reaction increased in the post-Victorian era; but by the middle of the twentieth century, something of a revival occurred. Enough time has now passed that we can begin to acknowledge him as a master of a broad range of poetic forms and as the author of some of the finest poems, both lyric and dramatic, in the language. His poems are striking in their imagery and in the sonority of their language. Though we may argue about their meaning, some of Tennyson’s lines are simply unforgettable: no one who has heard even a halfway-decent reader deliver “Ulysses” is likely to forget the closing lines, nor the opening lines of “Tithonus” or “The Lady of Shalott.”
This book makes available the whole of The Idylls of the King, in its final form. It also contains some of Tennyson’s most famous and popular shorter poems, as well as selections from another long work, In Memoriam. Several of the poems are based on earlier works of literature, legend, or art: “Mari ana” on Shakespeare, “The Lotos-Eaters,” “Ulysses,” and “Ti thonus” on Homer or on classical myth. Tennyson’s frequent method is to present a character at a defining or dramatic moment. Although Tennyson and his contemporary Robert Browning both created single-speaker poems in the early 1830s, Tennyson never became identified with the dramatic monologue, as did Browning, because he was not as interested in the dynamics of character revelation. Whereas Browning refined his technique in a series of dramatic monologues, such as “The Bishop Orders His Tomb” and “My Last Duchess,” Tennyson moved from the dramatic mode (“Ulysses”) to the narrative (“The Lady of Shalott”) to the lyric (“Mariana” and “Tears, Idle Tears”). Nor was he as insistent as Browning that his speakers were not to be identified with the poet; in fact, many of Tennyson’s speakers are artists, like the Lady of Shalott, or storytellers, like Ulysses. Poems such as “The Poet” and “The Palace of Art” deal directly with the problems of the artist. Furthermore, instances in his personal life often created the materials for poetry: many of the poems written after the death of his close friend Arthur Hallam in 1833 represent ways of dealing with that loss—“Ulysses” and “Tithonus” by means of a speaker, and “The Two Voices” and In Memoriam more directly.
The tales of King Arthur, Guinevere, Lancelot, the Knights of the Round Table and their quest for the Holy Grail persist throughout the tradition of English literature, and each generation emphasizes different things within them, either Arthur’s youth, or his relationship with Merlin, or the women in the legends. Tennyson’s hero is Arthur the King, betrayed by knights, friends, and family who cannot live up to the ideals he has set.
Tennyson read Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte d’Arthur as a boy and fell in love with the legends. He was fascinated with the tales, and he wrote about them all his life. His 1842 Poems included three that he had written over th
e previous dozen years: “Sir Launcelot and Queen Guinevere,” “Sir Galahad,” and the “Morte d’Arthur.” “Sir Galahad” is best known for its opening lines:My good blade carves the casques of men,
My tough lance thrusteth sure,
My strength is as the strength of ten,
Because my heart is pure.
The “Morte d’Arthur” was to be the part of the “whole great poem” about Arthur that Tennyson had been planning to write since he sketched it out when he was twenty-four.
It may seem curious that many of the English tales, unlike the French, German, Welsh, and Celtic, are titled “The Death of Arthur.” But English writers have a special problem: to explain how this golden age of British chivalry disappeared. Thus in the English versions of the stories, the death of Arthur and the end of the Round Table are the central facts that must be explicated. For Tennyson, writing at the very noon of Victoria’s Empire, the problem was compounded: not only must he explain how this earlier English Eden vanished; he had also to deal with the possibility that Britain, which was then the world’s superpower, might wane and fade just as Camelot had withered. The sense of doom and foreboding that permeates the Idylls gives it its power, and the unspoken parallel between Arthur’s realm and contemporary Britain is the source of the resonance that it had in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
More than once Tennyson called the legends of King Arthur and the Round Table “the greatest of all poetical subjects,” 1 and although generations of readers have agreed, contemporary critics did not, at first. Tennyson said that John Sterling’s review of the “Morte d’Arthur” in the September 1842 Quarterly Review kept him from doing more with the legends for many years.2 (Critics in those days delighted in the harshness of their reviews—the Quarterly Review was known as the “hang, draw, and quarterly”—and Tennyson was exceptionally sensitive to criticism. After the reception of his 1832 Poems, he published nothing for another ten years.) Actually, the reviews of the 1842 Poems were mostly favorable; characteristically, Tennyson focused on one of the few unfavorable mentions.
There was a resurgence of interest in Arthur and in things medieval in the 1800s. Early in the century, Sir Walter Scott’s works were enormously popular: in 1820, five stage versions of Ivanhoe were running concurrently.3 Scott’s popularity led to such things as the Eglinton Tournament of 1839, at which an estimated hundred thousand spectators watched authentic jousting and pageantry. (Each of the twelve knights was fully equipped with arms and armour, and all of their servants, every one of the two thousand guests at the ball, and many of the spectators dressed in period costume.)4 Publishers began to reprint Malory’s Morte d’Arthur; after many decades during which it had been hard to find, several editions came out during the first half of the nineteenth century. In art, the Pre-Raphaelite painters seized on medieval themes early in their association, and in 1857, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Morris, and Edward Burne-Jones were commissioned to paint Arthurian frescoes on the walls of the Oxford University Debating Union. Some of the increased popularity can be attributed to Tennyson himself: “The Lady of Shalott” inspired countless paintings, William Holman Hunt’s stunning version being perhaps the most famous. In Memoriam (1850) had firmly established Tennyson’s critical reputation, and he had also in that same year been named Poet Laureate; so when he finally did bring out the first version of the Idylls of the King, in 1859, he “hit the taste of both his public and his critics.” In the first week ten thousand copies sold.5
Tennyson had long been collecting and reading source materials, and by 1857 had written Enid and Nimuë: the True and the False (“Nimuë” later became “Vivien”). Enid and Nimuë was actually set in type and six copies were printed, but a chance remark by an acquaintance, who said that the poem would “corrupt the young,” led Tennyson to delay publication until 1859.6 The first Idylls of the King included only four tales: “Enid,” “Vivien,” “Elaine,” and “Guinevere.” The year 1869 saw the addition of “The Coming of Arthur,” “The Holy Grail,” “Pelleas and Ettarre,” and “The Passing of Arthur” (revised from his earlier “Morte d’Arthur”). In 1871 he added “The Last Tournament,” and in 1872, “Gareth and Lynette.” The whole twelve-book Idylls did not appear until 1885, when he added “Balin and Balan” and divided the long story of Geraint and his wife into “The Marriage of Geraint” and “Geraint and Enid.”
The way in which Tennyson juggled the individual idylls is reminiscent of what he had done with the many lyrics that he combined in 1850 into In Memoriam. Although he knew that he was working with powerful materials, he was uncertain how to combine them. As he added idylls, he grouped and regrouped them, tinkering with the overall narrative thrust. He also struggled with the very idea of writing “The Holy Grail,” which seemed to him “playing with sacred things.” And yet in 1868 when he did turn to the story it came fairly quickly, and eventually he felt that it contained some of the best blank verse he had written.7
Much as he revered Malory, he sought other sources for the tales as well: “The Lady of Shalott” (1832) is indebted more to the Italian tale “Donna di Scalotta” than to Malory’s story of Elaine of Astolat. Another favorite of Tennyson’s was Lady Charlotte Guest’s translation of the Welsh version of the tales, the Mabinogion (1849), from which he took the story of Geraint (Erec, in Welsh) and Enid. His own notes and his son Hallam’s memoir mention as sources Geoffrey of Monmouth’s twelfth-century collection of the legends, Malory, Layamon’s Brut, the Mabinogion, old French romances (including those of Chrétien de Troyes), Celtic folklore, and his own imagination. Hallam Tennyson said that his father “founded his epic” on those works: “He has made the legends his own, restored the idealism, and infused into them a spirit of modern thought and an ethical significance. . . .”8
To turn to the poems themselves: they begin with a dedication to Albert, Queen Victoria’s Prince Consort and beloved husband, who had died only a few months before their second printing in 1862. The comparison to Arthur’s “ideal knight” seems somewhat extravagant, but Tennyson and the Prince were on friendly terms. Reportedly, the Queen and the Prince had visited the poet when he was ill one summer in Esher;9 and the Prince dropped in unannounced one day in May 1856 while the Tennysons were in the process of moving into their new house in Farringford, on the Isle of Wight—throwing the household into something of an uproar. 10 So in dedicating the poem to the Prince, Tennyson was moved by more than just his duties as Poet Laureate.
The first idyll, “The Coming of Arthur,” is one of the shortest. Tennyson introduces an Arthur consistent with Malory’s. Note the song (“Blow, trumpet”) near the end, and the last five lines of the idyll, which give a somber tone even to this poem about the “May” of Arthur’s reign.
The next poem, “Gareth and Lynette,” bears comparison with “Pelleas and Ettarre,” the ninth idyll. The plots are similar—both poems concern a young knight seeking fame and the hand of his lady—but the contrast in the personalities of the ladies indicates with some precision how the ideals of Camelot are faring at these different points in the development of the epic.
The plot of the next two, the “Geraint” stories, involves the kind of misunderstanding that can lead either to farce or to tragedy: Geraint and Enid are so much in love that people begin to whisper that Geraint has become uxorious, paying too much attention to his wife and neglecting his kingly and knightly duties. Enid, distressed at this gossip, wonders whether she can sit quietly by while it goes on. She has not yet said anything about the rumors to him; should she? “Oh me,” she mutters to herself, “I fear that I am no true wife!” (“The Marriage of Geraint,” l. 108) Geraint awakes just in time to hear the very end of her utterance. After a long flashback about their courtship and betrothal, we see Geraint putting his wife to a series of tests. Since we are still early in the sequence, this ordeal ends happily—not happily ever after, but in “[a] happy life with a fair death” (“Geraint and Enid,” l. 967): Geraint dies fighting for Arth
ur against “the heathen of the Northern Sea” (“Geraint and Enid,” l. 968).
Tennyson added “Balin and Balan,” according to his son Hallam, as a further introduction to “Merlin and Vivien.”11 The story of the two brothers comes from Malory, but Tennyson’s description of Balin’s savage madness surely owes something to his own father’s black moods of violent and abusive paranoia. This is the turning point in the epic; the rest of the idylls will describe the decline of Camelot and the gradual failure of the ideals of the Round Table.
That decline is not obvious in “Merlin and Vivien,” which, in keeping with the legends, seems to be mostly about Viven’s beguiling of Merlin. In this version, however, she has very little redeeming social value. Perhaps the most telling lines are in the passage where she repeats the rumors circulating around the court about the love lives of several knights and ladies, coming at last to Lancelot and Guinevere.
We finally see these two great lovers in “Lancelot and Elaine,” but not at their most romantic: they are quarreling about appearances. Though Guinevere has great beauty, she has little nobility. She has rejected Arthur in favor of Lancelot because “[h]e is all fault who hath no fault at all./ For who loves me must have a touch of earth” (ll. 132-33) The poem leads up carefully to the last few pages, where Guinevere’s jealousy of Elaine (“Elaine the fair, Elaine the lovable,/Elaine, the lily maid of Astolat” [ll. 1-2]) causes her to throw out the window and into the moat the nine dia monds “[w]orth half her realm” (l. 72) that nearly cost Lancelot his life to win for her. They are reconciled when Elaine’s purity and Lancelot’s chivalry become evident; but there is not much joy left in this love.
Idylls of the King and a New Selection of Poems Page 1