Idylls of the King and a New Selection of Poems

by Alfred Tennyson

  One of the most interesting things about “The Holy Grail” is Arthur’s reaction when he returns to court and discovers that his knights have had a vision of the Grail and have sworn to seek it out. Usually, the Grail Quest is seen as the culmination of the story, the high point in the history of the Round Table. Quite the contrary in the Idylls: when he learns what has happened, Arthur’s face darkens, and he says, “ ‘Had I been here, ye had not sworn this vow’ ” (l. 276). He demonstrates a sharp understanding of the limitations of his noble knights, and we see the inaccuracy of Guinevere’s description of him as “[a] moral child without the craft to rule” (l. 145). His is a very practical concern: while the knights are out on the quest, wrongs that need righting and chances of noble deeds will come and go unfulfilled, and most of the knights will not return. As far as Tennyson’s Arthur is concerned, the Grail Quest, far from being the height of chivalric adventure, is an unmitigated catastrophe.

  I have mentioned “Pelleas and Ettarre” already. Pelleas’ wish for a special maiden as “pure as Guinevere” (l. 42) must at this point in the story strike us as highly ironic; we know that he is in for bitter disappointment. After Pelleas wins the Tournament of Youth and names Ettarre his Queen of Beauty, she has no more use for this naive youngster. Gawain befriends him, then betrays him with Ettarre. When at last Pelleas hears the rumours about Lancelot and Guinevere, he wonders if any of the Round Table’s ideals hold true. The idyll ends with Guinevere discovering Pelleas’ fierce hatred of her, then exchanging a hard look with Lancelot; “and each foresaw the dolorous day to be” (l. 593). The very last line contains Modred’s thought that his time is “hard at hand” (l. 597).

  The direction of “The Last Tournament”—whi.ch the spectators came to call “[t]he Tournament of the Dead Innocence” (l. 136)—is clear from the beginning. Arthur is called away to battle the Red Knight (identified in Tennyson’s notes as Pelleas), and Lancelot, left to preside over the tournament, allows the rules to be broken without comment. Tristram, making almost his first appearance in the Idylls, wins the prize, but boorishly refuses to name a Queen of Beauty because Isolt is not present. We hear spectators saying explicitly, “ ‘The glory of our Round Table is no more’ ” (l. 212). Things are beginning to fall apart: the knights who have accompanied Arthur, angry at the Red Knight’s insults to him and the Round Table, ignore their king’s attempt to restrain them, massacre the Red Knight’s followers, and burn his tower. But most of the idyll is another lovers’ quarrel, this time between Tristram and Isolt. If the conversation between Lancelot and Guinevere was disillusioning, this one is sordid, and it ends with King Mark springing from hiding and murdering Tristram.

  “Guinevere,” the next to last idyll, is the most original, for in it Tennyson has departed most from his sources. As with Isolt in the previous idyll, he has taken a character elsewhere treated as a romantic ideal and focused sharply on her betrayal. Throughout the work, the gossip about these epitomes of chivalric love undermines the ideals to which the King has asked his knights to swear allegiance. Arthur is blunt about her guilt: “The children born of thee are sword and fire,/Red ruin, and the breaking up of laws” (ll. 422-23), he says. “[T]hou hast spoilt the purpose of my life” (l. 450). Guinevere begins a bitter repentance; now that she has lost him, the queen for the first time recognizes Arthur’s true value. Although her understanding comes too late for this world, it nevertheless represents her first step toward redemption.

  “The Passing of Arthur” is in many ways the most important idyll of the twelve. The final battle in the west with Modred is fought in the “death-white mist” (l. 95) at “the sunset bound of Lyonesse” (l. 81)—as far west as it is possible to go—and on “that day when the great light of heaven/Burn’d at his lowest in the rolling year,/On the waste sand by the waste sea”(ll. 91-92). Charged with returning Excalibur to the mere, Sir Bedivere faces and, at length, passes the final test of loyalty to Arthur. Although he mentions Merlin’s promise that he shall come again, it seems that Arthur himself doesn’t hold much stock in the prophecy. To Bedivere’s cry, “[W]hither shall I go?” (l. 395), Arthur answers,

  The old order changeth, yielding place to new,

  And God fulfils himself in many ways,

  Lest one good custom should corrupt the world.

  Comfort thyself; what comfort is in me?

  (ll. 408-11)

  Bedivere climbs as high as he can to watch as long as he can the barge that carries the King to Avilion, until it vanishes. The poem ends simply, but significantly: “And the new sun rose bringing tne new year” (l. 469).

  When he put his twelve poems together as the Idylls of the King, Tennyson made significant changes in the relationships among the characters. His Arthur, for example, is never bewitched by his sister Morgan le Fay. Whereas in Malory the doom of the Round Table and of Camelot is sealed at the moment of Modred’s conception by the bewitched Arthur and his sister Morgause, and that sin of incest looms over the whole story, in Tennyson the sins that are the undoing of Camelot and the Table are those of Lancelot, Tristram, Isolt, and all the others, but mostly that of Guinevere. Tristram says the failure of the Round Table began “[f]irst mainly thro’ that sullying of our Queen” (“The Last Tournament,” l. 677). Tennyson’s Christlike Arthur is able nevertheless to forgive Guinevere (“as Eternal God [f]orgives” [“Guinevere, ll. 541-42]) while she literally grovels at his feet, unable to look him in the face.

  Some readers, including especially A. C. Swinburne, were upset by the changes. Swinburne scorned the Idylls, taking note of the dedication to Queen Victoria’s beloved Prince Consort, as the “Morte d’Albert.” But Tennyson knew what he was doing in creating a less complex and saintlier Arthur—almost, as Jerome H. Buckley calls him, a supernatural figure—whose Round Table is “the model for the mighty world.” It is Tennyson’s version that provided the ideals for generations of Englishmen and -women, through the Boer War, World War I, and even though World War II. The power of this myth persisted into the 1960s and ’70s: the characters in John Le Carré’s George Smiley spy novels act out of a love for those chivalric ideals, and Le Carré’s stories gain some of their power by being set in a Camelot that has already fallen. We see its glory only in occasional flashbacks to the great days of World War II, much as Isolt, late in the Idylls, sees the glory that has been:“My God, the power

  Was once in vows when men believed the King!

  They lied not then who sware, and thro’ their vows

  The King prevailing made his realm”

  (“The Last Tournament,” ll. 463-65)

  Hallam Tennyson explains why his father made Arthur such an ideal: “My father felt strongly that only under the inspiration of ideals, with ‘his sword bathed in heaven,’ can a man combat the cynical indifference, the intellectual selfishness, the sloth of will, the utilitarian materialism of a transitional age.”12 As Buckley points out, the Idylls is neither realistic nor simple allegory, and “despite derivation from Malory and other medieval sources and despite parallels to Victorian culture, they create a world which never was, and is not now, and yet remains as an ideal beyond all the social betrayals that would destroy it. . . .”13

  After Tennyson, interest in the Arthurian legends exploded. Nineteenth-century works include Matthew Arnold’s “Tristram and Iseult,” William Morris’ several Arthurian poems (of which “The Defence of Guinevere” is the most famous), Swinburne’s Tristram of Lyonesse, and Mark Twain’s parody A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. Richard Wagner seized on Parsifal and Tristan and Isolde for two of his greatest operas. The most famous twentieth-century versions include T. H. White’s The Once and Future King, the stage and film musical Camelot, John Boorman’s film Excalibur, Marion Zimmer Bradley’s The Mists of Avalon (which focuses on the women in the legends), Hal Foster’s serial comic strip Prince Valiant (which continues Howard Pyle’s tradition of popularizing the legends for boys), and of course Monty Python and the Holy Grail. But perhaps t
he most important use of Arthurian materials in the twentieth century was T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, with its central motif of the wounded Fisher King, impotent to continue the cycle of death and rebirth that is essential to life until he is healed by the Grail. Without the Idylls of the King, this reinvigoration of the Arthurian legends might not have happened, and this epic may turn out to be Tennyson’s most popular and enduring legacy.

  —Glenn Everett

  IDYLLS OF THE KING

  IN TWELVE BOOKS

  Flos Regum Arthurus

  —JOSEPH OF EXETER

  DEDICATION

  THESE to His Memory—since he held them dear,

  Perchance as finding there unconsciously

  Some image of himself—I dedicate,

  I dedicate, I consecrate with tears—

  These Idylls.

  And indeed he seems to me

  Scarce other than my king’s ideal knight,

  “Who reverenced his conscience as his king;

  Whose glory was, redressing human wrong;

  Who spake no slander, no, nor listen’d to it;

  Who loved one only and who clave to her”—

  Her—over all whose realms to their last isle,

  Commingled with the gloom of imminent war,

  The shadow of his loss drew like eclipse,

  Darkening the world. We have lost him; he is gone.

  We know him now; all narrow jealousies

  Are silent, and we see him as he moved,

  How modest, kindly, all-accomplish’d, wise,

  With what sublime repression of himself,

  And in what limits, and how tenderly;

  Not swaying to this faction or to that;

  Not making his high place the lawless perch

  Of wing’d ambitions, nor a vantage-ground

  For pleasure; but thro’ all this tract of years

  Wearing the white flower of a blameless life,

  Before a thousand peering littlenesses,

  In that fierce light which beats upon a throne

  And blackens every blot; for where is he

  Who dares foreshadow for an only son

  A lovelier life, a more unstain’d, than his?

  Or how should England dreaming of his sons

  Hope more for these than some inheritance

  Of such a life, a heart, a mind as thine,

  Thou noble Father of her Kings to be,

  Laborious for her people and her poor—

  Voice in the rich dawn of an ampler day—

  Far-sighted summoner of War and Waste

  To fruitful strifes and rivalries of peace—

  Sweet nature gilded by the gracious gleam

  Of letters, dear to Science, dear to Art,

  Dear to thy land and ours, a Prince indeed,

  Beyond all titles, and a household name,

  Hereafter, thro’ all times, Albert the Good.

  Break not, O woman’s-heart, but still endure; Break not, for thou art royal, but endure, Remembering all the beauty of that star Which shone so close beside thee that ye made One light together, but has past and leaves The Crown a lonely splendor.

  May all love,

  His love, unseen but felt, o’ershadow thee,

  The love of all thy sons encompass thee,

  The love of all thy daughters cherish thee,

  The love of all thy people comfort thee,

  Till God’s love set thee at his side again!

  THE COMING OF ARTHUR

  LEODOGRAN, the king of Cameliard,

  Had one fair daughter, and none other child;

  And she was fairest of all flesh on earth,

  Guinevere, and in her his one delight.

  For many a petty king ere Arthur came

  Ruled in this isle and, ever waging war

  Each upon other, wasted all the land;

  And still from time to time the heathen host

  Swarm’d over-seas, and harried what was left.

  And so there grew great tracts of wilderness,

  Wherein the beast was ever more and more,

  But man was less and less, till Arthur came.

  For first Aurelius lived and fought and died,

  And after him King Uther fought and died,

  But either fail’d to make the kingdom one.

  And after these King Arthur for a space,

  And thro’ the puissance of his Table Round,

  Drew all their petty princedoms under him,

  Their King and head, and made a realm and reign’d.

  And thus the land of Cameliard was waste,

  Thick with wet woods, and many a beast therein,

  And none or few to scare or chase the beast;

  So that wild dog and wolf and boar and bear

  Came night and day, and rooted in the fields,

  And wallow’d in the gardens of the King.

  And ever and anon the wolf would steal

  The children and devour, but now and then,

  Her own brood lost or dead, lent her fierce teat

  To human sucklings; and the children, housed

  In her foul den, there at their meat would growl,

  And mock their foster-mother on four feet,

  Till, straighten’d, they grew up to wolf-like men,

  Worse than the wolves. And King Leodogran

  Groan’d for the Roman legions here again

  And Caesar’s eagle. Then his brother king,

  Urien, assail’d him; last a heathen horde,

  Reddening the sun with smoke and earth with blood,

  And on the spike that split the mother’s heart

  Spitting the child, brake on him, till, amazed,

  He knew not whither he should turn for aid.

  But—for he heard of Arthur newly crown’d, Tho’ not without an uproar made by those Who cried, “He is not Uther’s son”—the King Sent to him, saying, “Arise, and help us thou! For here between the man and beast we die.”

  And Arthur yet had done no deed of arms,

  But heard the call and came; and Guinevere

  Stood by the castle walls to watch him pass;

  But since he neither wore on helm or shield

  The golden symbol of his kinglihood,

  But rode a simple knight among his knights,

  And many of these in richer arms than he,

  She saw him not, or mark’d not, if she saw,

  One among many, tho’ his face was bare.

  But Arthur, looking downward as he past,

  Felt the light of her eyes into his life

  Smite on the sudden, yet rode on, and pitch’d

  His tents beside the forest. Then he drave

  The heathen; after, slew the beast, and fell’d

  The forest, letting in the sun, and made

  Broad pathways for the hunter and the knight,

  And so return’d.

  For while he linger’d there,

  A doubt that ever smoulder’d in the hearts

  Of those great lords and barons of his realm

  Flash’d forth and into war; for most of these,

  Colleaguing with a score of petty kings,

  Made head against him, crying: “Who is he

  That he should rule us? who hath proven him

  King Uther’s son? for lo! we look at him,

  And find nor face nor bearing, limbs nor voice,

  Are like to those of Uther whom we knew.

  This is the son of Gorloïs, not the King;

  This is the son of Anton, not the King.”

  And Arthur, passing thence to battle, felt

  Travail, and throes and agonies of the life,

  Desiring to be join’d with Guinevere,

  And thinking as he rode: “Her father said

  That there between the man and beast they die.

  Shall I not lift her from this land of beasts

  Up to my throne and side by side with me?

  What happiness to reign a lon
ely king,

  Vext—O ye stars that shudder over me,

  O earth that soundest hollow under me,

  Vext with waste dreams? for saving I be join’d

  To her that is the fairest under heaven,

  I seem as nothing in the mighty world,

  And cannot will my will nor work my work

  Wholly, nor make myself in mine own realm

  Victor and lord. But were I join’d with her,

  Then might we live together as one life,

  And reigning with one will in everything

  Have power on this dark land to lighten it,

  And power on this dead world to make it live.”

  Thereafter—as he speaks who tells the tale—

  When Arthur reach’d a field of battle bright

  With pitch’d pavilions of his foe, the world

  Was all so clear about him that he saw

  The smallest rock far on the faintest hill,

  And even in high day the morning star.

  So when the King had set his banner broad,

  At once from either side, with trumpet-blast,

  And shouts and clarions shrilling unto blood,

  The long-lanced battle let their horses run.

  And now the barons and the kings prevail’d,

  And now the King, as here and there that war

  Went swaying; but the Powers who walk the world

  Made lightnings and great thunders over him,

  And dazed all eyes, till Arthur by main might,

  And mightier of his hands with every blow,

  And leading all his knighthood threw the kings,

  Carádos, Urien, Cradlemont of Wales,

  Claudius, and Clariance of Northumberland,

  The King Brandagoras of Latangor,

  With Anguisant of Erin, Morganore,

  And Lot of Orkney. Then, before a voice

  As dreadful as the shout of one who sees