J.  Furnivell

BOOKS TO READ

Stories of King Arthur’s Knights, by Mary Macgregor.  Stories from Morte d’Arthur, by C. L. Thomson.  Morte d’Arthur, Globe Edition.

Chapter IX “THE PASSING OF ARTHUR”

Four hundred years after Malory wrote his book, another English writer told the tales of Arthur anew.  This was the poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson.  He told them in poetry.

Tennyson calls his poems the Idylls of the King.  Idyll means a short poem about some simple and beautiful subject.  The king that Tennyson sings of is the great King Arthur.

Tennyson takes his stories, some from The Mabinogion, some from Malory, some from other books.  He has told them in very beautiful English, and it is the English such as we speak to-day.  He has smoothed away much that strikes us as rough and coarse in the old stories, and his poems are as different from the old stories as a polished diamond is different from the stone newly brought out of the mine.  Yet we miss something of strength and vigor.  The Arthur of the Idylls is not the Arthur of The Mabinogion nor of Malory.  Indeed, Tennyson makes him “almost too good to be true”:  he is “Ideal manhood closed in real man, rather than that gray king” of old.

And now I will give you part of the last of the Arthur poems, The Passing of Arthur, so that you may read it along with Layamon’s account of the hero’s death, and see for yourselves the difference between the two.  The Passing of Arthur is written in blank verse, that is verse which does not rhyme, and which depends like the old English verse on the accent.  Yet they are not alike.

    “So all day long the noise of battle roll’d
    Among the mountains by the winter sea;
    Until King Arthur’s Table, man by man,
    Had fall’n 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 by a broken cross,
    That stood in 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 the King bids Sir Bedivere take his sword Excalibur,

“And fling him far into the middle mere: 
Watch what thou seest, and lightly bring me word.”

Sir Bedivere takes the sword, and,

            “From the ruin’d 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
    By zigzag paths, and juts of pointed rock,
    Came on the shining levels of the lake.”

But when Sir Bedivere drew Excalibur and saw the jewels of the hilt shine in the wintry moonlight, he could not find it in his heart to cast anything so beautiful and precious from him.  So, hiding it among the reeds by the water’s edge, he returned to his master.