Idylls of the King (1872)
Alfred Lord Tennyson (Penguin, 1996)

371 pp.  First reading.
Posted 5 April 2006.
 

A few years ago I began to dip my toes into the wide world of Arthurian legend. I started, sensibly enough, with Malory, then the anonymous authors of Gawain and the Green Knight and The Quest of the Holy Grail. It wasn't long after that I discovered that Tennyson had written this cycle of poems on Arthur and his knights, but not until now have I found the time to read them.  Idylls of the King is a collection of a dozen loosely related tales about the adventures of the knights of the Order of the Round Table, framed at the front and back by poems on Arthur's founding of his order and on his death, respectively. Apart from a few details, Tennyson has not tried to make original contributions to the Arthurian corpus, but simply puts his talent at the service of the tradition. This is not to say that they are unimaginative, for whereas the medieval stories tend to be heavy on plot and thin on atmospheric texture, Tennyson has space to fill out his poems with landscapes, sounds, dramatic conversations, and many telling details.

This collection is my first sustained exposure to Tennyson's poetry. I am not normally an enthusiast for blank verse, but I can see that it is well suited to these narrative poems. There are many fine sequences, a handful of which I have appended below. Yet when I step back and consider the entire cycle of poems, it is not Tennyson who draws my attention at all; it is Arthur. I am struck once again by the greatness of the Arthurian tradition. It is a cultural achievement, bequethed to us by the medieval imagination, for which I can only express thanks and admiration. Tennyson, I expect, felt the same, and has here done it admirable homage.

[The Arthurian ideal]
For when the Roman left us, and their law
Relaxed its hold upon us, and the ways
Were filled with rapine, here and there a deed
Of prowess done redressed a random wrong.
But I was first of all the kings who drew
The knighthood-errant of this realm and all
The realms together under me, their Head,
In that fair Order of my Table Round,
A glorious company, the flower of men,
To serve as model for the mighty world,
And be the fair beginning of a time.
I made them lay their hands in mine and swear
To reverence the King, as if he were
Their conscience, and their conscience as their King,
To break the heathen and uphold the Christ,
To ride abroad redressing human wrongs,
To speak no slander, no, nor listen to it,
To honour his own word as if his God's,
To lead sweet lives in purest chastity,
To love one maiden only, cleave to her,
And worship her by years of noble deeds,
Until they won her; for indeed I knew
Of no more subtle master under heaven
Than is the maiden passion for a maid,
Not only to keep down the base in man,
But teach high thought, and amiable words
And courtliness, and the desire of fame,
And love of truth, and all that makes a man.

[Arthur's hall]
  ...all the sacred mount of Camelot,
And all the dim rich city, roof by roof,
Tower after tower, spire beyond spire,
By grove, and garden-lawn, and rushing brook,
Climbs to the mighty hall that Merlin built.
And four great zones of sculpture, set betwixt
With many a mystic symbol, gird the hall:
And in the lowest beasts are slaying men,
And in the second men are slaying beasts,
And on the third are warriors, perfect men,
And on the fourth are men with growing wings,
And over all one statue in the mould
Of Arthur, made by Merlin, with a crown,
And peaked wings pointed to the Northern Star.
And eastward fronts the statue, and the crown
And both the wings are made of gold, and flame
At sunrise till the people in far fields,
Wasted so often by the heathen hordes,
Behold it, crying, "We have still a King."

[Lancelot pursues the Holy Grail]
And up into the sounding hall I past;
But nothing in the sounding hall I saw,
No bench nor table, painting on the wall
Or shield of knight; only the rounded moon
Through the tall oriel on the rolling sea.
But always in the quiet house I heard,
Clear as a lark, high o'er me as a lark,
A sweet voice singing in the topmost tower
To the eastward:  up I climbed a thousand steps
With pain:  as in a dream I seemed to climb
For ever:  at the last I reached a door,
A light was in the crannies, and I heard,
`Glory and joy and honour to our Lord
And to the Holy Vessel of the Grail.'
Then in my madness I essayed the door;
It gave; and through a stormy glare, a heat
As from a seventimes-heated furnace, I,
Blasted and burnt, and blinded as I was,
With such a fierceness that I swooned away--
O, yet methought I saw the Holy Grail,
All palled in crimson samite, and around
Great angels, awful shapes, and wings and eyes.
And but for all my madness and my sin,
And then my swooning, I had sworn I saw
That which I saw; but what I saw was veiled
And covered; and this Quest was not for me.

[The fog of war]
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.

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