Selections from Wordsworth and Tennyson

by William Wordsworth; Baron Alfred Tennyson Tennyson

MORTE D'ARTHUR

THE ARTHURIAN LEGEND. Throughout the mediaeval period three great cycles of stories commanded the imagination of the poets. Of these cycles one, the tale of Troy in its curious mediaeval guise, attested the potent spell of antique legend.[1] The two other great cycles were of later origin, and centred around the commanding historical figures of Charlemagne, and the phantom glory of the legendary Arthur.

[1]The extraordinary interest in the half legendary career of Alexander the Great must be noticed here, as also the profound respect amounting to veneration for the Roman poet, Vergil.

The origin of the Arthurian story is involved in obscurity. The crudest form of the myth has doubtless a core of historic truth, and represents him as a mighty Celtic warrior, who works havoc among the heathen Saxon invaders. Accretions naturally are added, and a miraculous origin and a mysterious death throw a superstitious halo around the hero. When the brilliant personality of Lancelot breaks into the tale, and the legend of the Holy Grail is superadded, the theme exercised an irresistible fascination upon the imagination of mediaeval Europe.

The vicissitudes of the Celtic inhabitants of Britain are as romantic as any of which history holds record. After the departure of the Roman invaders from the island, the native population swiftly reasserted itself. The Picts of Caledonia and the Scots of Ireland were their natural foes, but conflict with these enemies served only to stimulate the national life. But actual disaster threatened them when in the fifth and sixth centuries the heathen Angles and Saxons bore down in devastating hordes upon the land. It is at this critical period in the national history that Arthur must have lived. How long or how valiant the resistance was we cannot know. That it was vain is certain. A large body of Britons fled from annihilation across the channel, and founded in the region of Armurica in France, a new Brittany. Meanwhile, in the older Britain, the foe pressed hard upon their fellow-countrymen, and drove them into the western limits of the island, into the fastnesses of Wales, and the rocky parts of Cornwall. Here, and in Northern France, proud in their defeat and tenacious of the instincts of their race, they lived and still live, in the imaginative memories of the past. For them the future held little store of earthly gain, and yet they made the whole world their debtor.

Even in the courts of the conqueror Saxon their strange and beautiful poetry won favour, and in a later century the Norman kings and barons welcomed eagerly the wandering minstrels from Brittany and Wales. But it was not from these scattered sources that Celtic traditions became a European possession, as a brief statement of literary history will clearly show.

The first recorded mention of Arthur's name occurs in a brief and anonymous History of the Britons, written in Latin in the tenth century, and attributed to Nennius. This history is curiously amplified in the twelfth century by Geoffrey of Monmouth, first in a story dealing with the prophecies of Merlin, and later in a History of the Kings of Britain. This book, with its brilliant description of the court of Arthur, gave the legend a widespread popularity. It was four times within the same century translated into French verse, the most famous of these renderings being the version of Wace, called Le Brut, which makes some addition to Geoffrey's original, gathered from Breton sources. In the same century, too, Chrétien de Troyes, the foremost of Arthurian poets, composed his famous cycle of poems.

Of all these manifold sources Tennyson was confessedly ignorant. Where the details are not of his own invention, his Idylls of the King rest entirely upon Malory's Morte d'Arthur, which Caxton printed in 1485, supplemented in the case of Enid and Geraint, and The Marriage of Geraint by a translation of the Welsh Mabinogion by Lady Charlotte Guest.

THE STORY OF THE IDYLLS.—It is well to remember the events that led up to Arthur's death. Guinevere's guilty love for Lancelot had been discovered and revealed by Arthur's nephew, the traitor Modred. The Queen fled the court and sought refuge with the nuns of Almesbury. Lancelot fled to his castle in the north, where the King in vain besieged him. Meanwhile Modred had stirred up a revolt, and leaguing himself with the Saxon invaders, had usurped Arthur's throne. On his march southward to resist his nephew, Arthur halts at the nunnery of Almesbury, and in the Guinevere idyll the moving story of their last farewell is told. Then the King advanced to meet Modred. The description of that "last weird battle in the west" is given in The Passing of Arthur, and leads up to the impressive line with which our present poem opens. Towards the close of that fateful day, there 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
Broke in among dead faces, to and fro
Swaying the helpless hands, and up and down
Tumbling the hollow helmets of the fallen,
And shiver'd brands that once had fought with Rome,
And rolling far along the gloomy shores
The voice of days of old and days to be.

The King speaks despairingly to Bedivere, who answering, swears to him undying allegiance, and points to the traitor, Modred, who still stands unharmed:

Thereupon:—

the King
Made at the man: then Modred smote his liege
Hard on the 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.

4. LYONNESSE. The geography of the Idylls of the King is designedly vague. The region of Lyonnesse was supposed to be adjacent to Cornwall, and the sea now covers it. The Scilly Islands are held to have been the western limit of this fabulous country.

6. THE BOLD SIR BEDIVERE. The epithet "bold" is used repeatedly in this vaguely descriptive fashion with Sir Bedivere's name. Cf. lines 39, 69, 115, 151, 226. The use of "permanent epithets" in narrative poetry has been consecrated by the example of Homer, who constantly employs such expressions as "the swift-footed Achilles," "wide-ruling Agamemnon," etc.

Bedivere is described in The Coming of Arthur as follows:—

For bold in heart and act and word was he
Whenever slander breathed against the King.

12. A GREAT WATER. This expression has occasioned much unnecessary comment on the score of its alleged artificiality. There might be a gain in definiteness in substituting "lake," or "river," as the case might be, but there would be a corresponding loss in poetry and in meaning at this particular place. "Had 'a great lake' been substituted for it, the phrase would have needed to be translated by the mind into water of a certain shape and size, before the picture was realized by the imagination." (Brimley.) It would have, consequently, been more precise, but "less poetic and pictorial."

If further justification for the expression were needed it might be stated that "water" stands for lake in certain parts of England, e.g. "Dewentwater," etc.; and, what is of more importance, that Malory uses "water" in the same sense: "The king . . . . saw afore him in a great water a little ship." Morte d'Arthur iv. 6.

21. OF CAMELOT. Arthur's capital, as noted in The Lady of Shalott. In speaking of the allegorical meaning of The Idylls of the King, Tennyson states that "Camelot, for instance, a city of shadowy palaces, is everywhere symbolical of the gradual growth of human beliefs and institutions, and of the spiritual development of man." Always bear in mind that Tennyson has also said: "There is no single fact or incident in the Idylls, however seemingly mystical, which cannot be explained without any mystery or allegory whatever."

22. I PERISH—MADE. In The Coming of Arthur this thought is amplified:

For first Aurelius lived and fought and died,
And after him King Uther fought and died,
But either failed 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 reigned.

And in The Passing of Arthur we read:

Ill doom is mine
To war against my people and my knights.
The king who fights his people fights himself.

23. THO' MERLINE SWARE—AGAIN. Merlin was the great wizard of Arthur's court. In the allegorical view of the poem he typifies the intellect, or, in Tennyson's words: "the sceptical understanding."

This prophecy concerning Arthur is again referred to in The Coming of
Arthur:

And Merlin in our time
Hath spoken also, not in jest, and sworn,
Though men may wound him, that he will not die,
But pass and come again.

This belief is common to all the Arthurian sources. Compare, for example, Wace's Brut: "Arthur, if the story lies not, was mortally wounded in the body: he had himself borne to Avalon to heal his wounds. There he is still; the Britons await him, as they say and understand . . . The prophet spoke truth, and one can doubt, and always will doubt whether he is dead or living." Dr. Sykes writes that, "The sleep of Arthur associates the British story with the similar stories of Charlemagne and Frederick Barbarossa of Germany, Brian in Ireland, Boabdil el Chico in Spain, etc."

27. EXCALIBUR. Arthur's magical sword. It is described in The Coming of Arthur, ll. 295 f., as:

the sword
That rose from out the bosom of the lake,
And Arthur rowed across and took it—rich
With jewels, elfin Urim, on the hilt,
Bewildering heart and eye—the blade so bright
That men are blinded by it—on one side,
Graven in the oldest tongue of all this world,
"Take me," but turn the blade and ye shall see,
And written in the speech ye speak yourself,
"Cast me away."

It has been variously held that Excalibur typifies temporal authority, or spiritual power. The casting away of the sword, therefore, represents the inevitable change in which human things are involved, and even faith itself. Compare Morte d'Arthur, ll. 240-241.

Magical weapons and enchanted armour are a portion of the equipment of almost all the great legendary heroes. Their swords and their horses usually bear distinctive names. Roland's sword was Durandal, and Charlemagne's was Joyeuse.

37. FLING HIM. The sword is viewed as possessing life.

THE MIDDLE MERE. Compare a similar classical construction in Oenone, l. 10, topmost Gargarus.

53-55. THE WINTER MOON—HILT. The frosty air made the moonlight more than usually brilliant.

60. THIS WAY—MIND. An echo of Vergil's line, Aeneid, VIII. 20. Atque animum nunc huc celerem, nunc dividit illuc. "And he divides his swift mind now this way, now that."

63. MANY-KNOTTED WATER FLAGS. Dr. Sykes has a careful note on this expression (Select Poems of Tennyson; Gage & Co.). "The epithet many-knotted is difficult to explain. The possible explanations would refer the description to (1) the root-stock of the flag, which shows additional bulbs from year to year; (2) the joints in the flower stalks, of which some half-dozen may be found on each stalk; (3) the large seed-pods that terminate in stalks, a very noticeable feature when the plant is sere; (4) the various bunches or knots of iris in a bed of the plants, so that the whole phrase suggests a thickly matted bed of flags. I favour the last interpretation, though Tennyson's fondness of technical accuracy in his references makes the second more than possible."

70-71. I HEARD—CRAG. It is interesting to read Chapter V., Book XXI. of Malory in connection with Tennyson's version of the story. He is throughout true to the spirit of the original. A propos of lines 70-71, we find in Malory: "What saw thou, there?" said the King. "Sir," he said, "I saw nothing but the waters wap and the waves wan." Tennyson, in these two lines, gives us a consummate example of creative imitation.

84. COUNTING THE DEWY PEBBLES. This aptly describes the absorption of his mind.

85 f. and 56-58 supra. Compare the description of Excalibur, and of Bedivere's hesitancy, in Malory's book. "So Sir Bedivere departed, and by the way he beheld that noble sword, that the pommel and haft were all of precious stones, and then he said to himself, 'If I throw this rich sword in the water, thereof shall never come good, but harm and loss.' And then Sir Bedivere hid Excalibur under a tree."

104. THE LONELY MAIDEN OF THE LAKE. The "Lady of the Lake" was present at the crowning of Arthur. In the Coming of Arthur she is described as dwelling—

Down in a deep; calm, whatsoever storms
May shake the world, and when the surface rolls
Hath power to walk the waters like our Lord.

Arthur's first meeting with her is described in Malory:— "So they rode till they came to a lake, the which was a fair water and broad, and in the midst of the lake Arthur was ware of an arm clothed in white samite, that held a fair sword in that hand. 'Lo,' said Merlin, 'yonder is that sword that I spake of.' With that they saw a damsel going upon the lake; 'What damsel is that?' said Arthur. 'That is the Lady of the Lake,' said Merlin; 'and within that lake is a rock, and therein is as fair a place as any upon earth, and richly beseen.'"

In Gareth and Lynette the Lady of the Lake is mystically figured forth upon the great gate of Camelot.

105-106. NINE YEARS—HILLS. Hallam, Lord Tennyson, in the Memoir, quotes Fitzgerald's short account of a row on Lake Windermere with the poet; "'Resting on our oars one calm day on Windermere, whither we had gone for a week from dear Spedding's (Mirehouse), at the end of May, 1835; resting on our oars, and looking into the lake quite unruffled and clear, Alfred quoted from the lines he had lately read us from the MS. of Morte d'Arthur about the lonely lady of the lake and Excalibur:

"Nine years she wrought it, sitting in the deeps,
Under the hidden bases of the hills.

"—Not bad, that. Fitz, is it?

"This kind of remark he would make when rendering his own or others' poetry when he came to lines that he particularly admired from no vanity but from a pure feeling of artistic pleasure." (Vol. I. pp. 152-153).

112. Note the slowness of the movement expressed in the rhythm of this line, and compare with it line 168. Contrast the swiftness and energy expressed in ll. 133-136.

121. AUTHORITY—KING. This line has been described as Shakespearian. Its strength is derived from the force of the metaphorical personification. The boldness of the poetical construction is carried into the metaphor in the next line.

129. FOR A MAN. Because a man.

132. AND SLAY THEE WITH MY HANDS. Compare Malory: "And but if thou do now as I bid thee, if ever I may see thee, I shall slay thee with mine own hands, for thou wouldest for my rich sword see me dead." In Rowe and Webb's edition it is suggested that 'with my hands' is added for one of two reasons,—either "because he had now no sword; or more probably, these words are introduced in imitation of Homer's habit of mentioning specific details: cf. 'he went taking long steps with his feet.'" This explanation is ingenious, but unnecessary in view of the quotation from Malory. The note proceeds: "Notice the touch of human personality in the king's sharp anger; otherwise Arthur is generally represented by Tennyson as a rather colourless being, and as almost 'too good for human nature's daily food.'"

133-142. Brimley in his valuable essay on Tennyson, analyses this poem in some detail. Of this passage he writes: "A series of brilliant effects is hit off in these two words, 'made lightnings.' 'Whirl'd in an arch,' is a splendid instance of sound answering to sense, which the older critics made so much of; the additional syllable which breaks the measure, and necessitates an increased rapidity of utterance, seeming to express to the ear the rush of the sword up its parabolic curve. And with what lavish richness of presentative power is the boreal aurora, the collision, the crash, and the thunder of the meeting icebergs, brought before the eye. An inferior artist would have shouted through a page, and emptied a whole pallet of colour, without any result but interrupting his narrative, where Tennyson in three lines strikingly illustrates the fact he has to tell,—associates it impressively with one of Nature's grandest phenomena, and gives a complete picture of this phenomenon besides." The whole essay deserves to be carefully read.

143. DIPT THE SURFACE. A poetical construction.

157. Note the personification of the sword.

182-183. CLOTHED—HILLS. His breath made a vapour in the frosty air through which his figure loomed of more than human size. Tennyson gives us the same effect in Guinevere, 597:

The moving vapour rolling round the King,
Who seem'd the phantom of a Giant in it,
Enwound him fold by fold.

But the classical example is found in Wordsworth's description of the mountain shepherd in The Prelude, Book VIII.

When up the lonely brooks on rainy days
Angling I went, or trod the trackless hills
By mists bewildered, suddenly mine eyes
Have glanced upon him distant a few steps,
In size a giant, stalking through thick fog,
His sheep like Greenland bears, or as he stepped
Beyond the boundary line of some hill-shadow,
His form hath flashed upon me, glorified
By the deep radiance of the setting sun,

191-192. AND ON A SUDDEN—MOON. "Do we not," writes Brimley, "seem to burst from the narrow steep path down the ravine, whose tall precipitous sides hide the sky and the broad landscape from sight, and come out in a moment upon—

"the level lake, And the long glories of the winter moon!"

193. HOVE=hove in sight.

The closing scene in this drama is impressively described by Malory. "So Sir Bedivere came again to the King, and told him what he saw. 'Alas,' said the King, 'help me hence, for I dread me I have tarried over long.' Then Sir Bedivere took the King upon his back, and so went with him to that water side. And when they were at the water side, even fast by the bank hoved a little barge, with many fair ladies in it, and among them all was a queen, and all they had black hoods, and all they wept and shrieked when they saw King Arthur. 'Now, put me into the barge,' said the King: and so they did softly. And there received him three queens with great mourning, and so they set him down, and in one of their laps King Arthur laid his head; and then that queen said; 'Ah, dear brother, why have ye tarried so long from me? Alas, this wound on your head hath caught overmuch cold.' And so then they rowed from the land; and Sir Bedivere beheld ail those ladies go from him. Then Sir Bedivere cried; 'Ah, my Lord Arthur, what shall become of me now ye so from me, and leave me here alone among mine enemies?' 'Comfort thyself,' said the King:, 'and do as well as thou mayest, for in me is no trust for to trust in. For I will into the vale of Avilion, to heal me of my grievous wound. And if thou hear never more of me, pray for my soul.' But ever the queens and the ladies wept and shrieked, that it was pity to hear. And, as soon as Sir Bedivere had lost the sight of the barge, he wept and wailed, and so took the forest, and so he went all that night. . . . . ."

It is interesting to note how the poet suggests here and there the phrasing of his original, but even more interesting to note his amplifications. It may be doubted whether Tennyson has here surpassed his original. For its touching simplicity he has substituted a dignified grandeur, and has involved plain statements in gorgeous rhetoric, as in his passage upon the efficacy of prayer. The unadorned original had said only "pray for my soul."

198. THREE QUEENS WITH CROWNS OF GOLD. "That one was King Arthur's sister, Morgan le Fay; the other was the Queen of Northgales (Wales); the third was the Lady of the lake." Malory.

215-216. DASH'D WITH DROPS—OF ONSET. Words are sometimes poetical from their precision, and sometimes, as here, they suggest without definite reference. The meaning is "dashed with drops of blood" from the onset or encounter.

2t6-220. Arthur is again described in The Last Tournament.

That victor of the Pagan throned in hall,
His hair, a sun that rayed from off a brow
Like hillsnow high in heaven, the steel-blue eyes,
The golden beard that cloth'd his lips with light.

228. MY FOREHEAD AND MY EYES. Compare the note to line 132. Here the specific terms are used according to the epical manner instead of the general term "face."

232-233. Compare the Gospel of Matthew ii. 11.

240-242. These often-quoted lines have been already referred to above. Their very intellectuality is alien to the spirit of the original. In Tennyson's conception they afford the central meaning of the poem, and also of the completed Idylls. We must bow to the will of God who brings all things in their due season. Good customs too deeply rooted are like clear waters grown stagnant.

254-255. FOR SO—GOD. The idea that the earth is bound by a gold chain to heaven is comparatively common in literature from Homer downwards. Archdeacon Hare has a passage in his sermon on Self-Sacrifice which doubtless was familiar to Tennyson: "This is the golden chain of love, whereby the whole creation is bound to the throne of the Creator."

257-258. IF INDEED I GO—DOUBT. There is no reason to suppose that these lines indicate Tennyson's personal misgivings on the subject of immortality.

259. THE ISLAND VALLEY OF AVILION. Mr. Rhys in his Studies in the
Arthurian Legend combats the old idea that Avalon (Avilion) meant the
"Island of Apples" (Welsh aval, apple). The name implies the Island of
King Avalon, a Celtic divinity, who presided among the dead.

The valley of Avalon was supposed to be near Glastonbury, in
Somersetshire, where Joseph of Arimathea first landed with the Holy Grail.

67 ff. There is an evident symbolical meaning in this dream. Indeed Tennyson always appears to use dreams for purposes of symbol. The lines are an application of the expression; "The old order changeth," etc. The parson's lamentation expressed in line 18, "Upon the general decay of faith," is also directly answered by the assertion that the modern Arthur will arise in modern times. There is a certain grotesqueness in the likening of King Arthur to "a modern gentleman of stateliest port." But Tennyson never wanders far from conditions of his own time. As Mr. Stopford Brooke writes; "Arthur, as the modern gentleman, as the modern ruler of men, such a ruler as one of our Indian heroes on the frontier, is the main thing in Tennyson's mind, and his conception of such a man contains his ethical lesson to his countrymen."