by Harold Bloom
Floats up from those dim fields about the homes
Of happy men that have the power to die,
And grassy barrows of the happier dead.
Release me, and restore me to the ground;
Thou seëst all things, thou wilt see my grave:
Thou wilt renew thy beauty morn by morn;
I earth in earth forget these empty courts,
And thee returning on thy silver wheels.
At my old age, I sympathize with him, because I too am always cold, and my feet altogether wrinkled. Yet my sympathy stops just there. When I die, in another four or five years, I trust I will not have the stupid cruelty to tell my survivors: Thou wilt see my grave. As his monologue winds on in what will be perpetual cycle, Tithonus renders us grateful for his poetic power yet unable to accept his solipsistic agony. I have never understood the precise relation of this poem to Hallam’s death or Tennyson’s grief. Something vital is being repressed, and the force of that evasion gives the reader an uneasy splendor we experience simultaneously as pleasure and as pain. Though he went on to a reasonably happy marriage and fatherhood, Tennyson never loved anyone so much as Hallam, and I wonder whether that brilliant young critic understood how fierce Tennyson’s passion truly was. It is certain that Tennyson himself never could apprehend how deep and turbulent the repressed drive had been.
Alfred Tennyson,
Idylls of the King
IN TENNYSON, as in tradition, the purest of Arthur’s knights are Percivale and Galahad. Percivale’s ruinous quest for the Holy Grail is Tennyson’s equivalent of Browning’s Childe Roland, whose search for the Dark Tower deforms and breaks everything he gazes upon. The difference allies Tennyson to T. S. Eliot in The Waste Land:
Here is no water but only rock
Rock and no water and the sandy road
The road winding above among the mountains
Which are mountains of rock without water
If there were water we should stop and drink
Amongst the rock one cannot stop or think
Sweat is dry and feet are in the sand
If there were only water amongst the rock
Dead mountain mouth of carious teeth that cannot spit
Here one can neither stand nor lie nor sit
There is not even silence in the mountains
But dry sterile thunder without rain
There is not even solitude in the mountains
But red sullen faces sneer and snarl
From doors of mudcracked houses
Percivale, called “The Pure,” before his death tells his story to a fellow monk and traces his own downward path to wisdom:
‘And I was lifted up in heart, and thought
Of all my late-shown prowess in the lists,
How my strong lance had beaten down the knights,
So many and famous names; and never yet
Had heaven appeared so blue, nor earth so green,
For all my blood danced in me, and I knew
That I should light upon the Holy Grail.
‘Thereafter, the dark warning of our King,
That most of us would follow wandering fires,
Came like a driving gloom across my mind.
Then every evil word I had spoken once,
And every evil thought I had thought of old,
And every evil deed I ever did,
Awoke and cried, “This Quest is not for thee.”
And lifting up mine eyes, I found myself
Alone, and in a land of sand and thorns,
And I was thirsty even unto death;
And I, too, cried, “This Quest is not for thee.”
The pure quester, who does not seek only to fail, nevertheless reduces all things and persons to dust:
‘And on I rode, and when I thought my thirst
Would slay me, saw deep lawns, and then a brook,
With one sharp rapid, where the crisping white
Played ever back upon the sloping wave,
And took both ear and eye; and o’er the brook
Were apple-trees, and apples by the brook
Fallen, and on the lawns. “I will rest here,”
I said, “I am not worthy of the Quest;”
But even while I drank the brook, and ate
The goodly apples, all these things at once
Fell into dust, and I was left alone,
And thirsting, in a land of sand and thorns.
‘And then behold a woman at a door
Spinning; and fair the house whereby she sat,
And kind the woman’s eyes and innocent,
And all her bearing gracious; and she rose
Opening her arms to meet me, as who should say,
“Rest here;” but when I touch’d her, lo! she, too,
Fell into dust and nothing, and the house
Became no better than a broken shed,
And in it a dead babe; and also this
Fell into dust, and I was left alone.
‘And on I rode, and greater was my thirst.
Then flashed a yellow gleam across the world,
And where it smote the plowshare in the field,
The plowman left his plowing, and fell down
Before it; where it glittered on her pail,
The milkmaid left her milking, and fell down
Before it, and I knew not why, but thought
“The sun is rising,” though the sun had risen.
Then was I ware of one that on me moved
In golden armour with a crown of gold
About a casque all jewels; and his horse
In golden armour jewelled everywhere:
And on the splendour came, flashing me blind;
And seemed to me the Lord of all the world,
Being so huge. But when I thought he meant
To crush me, moving on me, lo! he, too,
Opened his arms to embrace me as he came,
And up I went and touched him, and he, too,
Fell into dust, and I was left alone
And wearying in a land of sand and thorns.
Where Percivale’s glance does not destroy, his touch devastates more fully. Tennyson cannot define his own fierce vision and would not have believed that he composed a parable of his own poetic consciousness so dangerously thwarted by the loss of Hallam that it burns through nature and through other selves. Like Browning’s Childe Roland, Percivale descends directly from the remorseless Poet of Shelley’s “Alastor.” Though Tennyson intended that Percivale represent an ascetic Catholic consciousness, the poet’s daemon usurped the quest and instead gave us a burning desire to reduce everything that is not purely a celebration of the self’s sublimity:
‘And I rode on and found a mighty hill,
And on the top, a city walled: the spires
Pricked with incredible pinnacles into heaven.
And by the gateway stirred a crowd; and these
Cried to me climbing, “Welcome, Percivale!
Thou mightiest and thou purest among men!”
And glad was I and clomb, but found at top
No man, nor any voice. And thence I past
Far through a ruinous city, and I saw
That man had once dwelt there; but there I found
Only one man of an exceeding age.
“Where is that goodly company,” said I,
“That so cried out upon me?” and he had
Scarce any voice to answer, and yet gasped,
“Whence and what art thou?” and even as he spoke
Fell into dust, and disappeared, and I
Was left alone once more, and cried in grief,
“Lo, if I find the Holy Grail itself
And touch it, it will crumble into dust.”
To say of the poetic spirit that its bright argosy sails only to obliterate by touching is a negative Romanticism carrying us back to the monitions of Shelley’s The Triumph of Life and Keats’s The Fall of Hyperion. Tennyson was at his strongest when not fully aware of what he was doing. Percivale gets away from him just as Ulysses does, but that was the Laureate’s glory. Elsewhere in the Idylls of the King, the seductive Vivien, who will destroy Merlin, breaks through Tennyson’s censor with a savage hymn to Eros:
But now the wholesome music of the wood
Was dumbed by one from out the hall of Mark,
A damsel-errant, warbling, as she rode
The woodland alleys, Vivien, with her Squire.
‘The fire of Heaven has killed the barren cold,
And kindled all the plain and all the wold.
The new leaf ever pushes off the old.
The fire of Heaven is not the flame of Hell.
‘Old priest, who mumble worship in your quire—
Old monk and nun, ye scorn the world’s desire,
Yet in your frosty cells ye feel the fire!
The fire of Heaven is not the flame of Hell.
‘The fire of Heaven is on the dusty ways.
The wayside blossoms open to the blaze.
The whole wood-world is one full peal of praise.
The fire of Heaven is not the flame of Hell.
‘The fire of Heaven is lord of all things good,
And starve not thou this fire within thy blood,
But follow Vivien through the fiery flood!
The fire of Heaven is not the flame of Hell!’
Then turning to her Squire ‘This fire of Heaven,
This old sun-worship, boy, will rise again,
And beat the cross to earth, and break the King
And all his Table.’
“The fire of Heaven is on the dusty ways.” Sunlight of lust reverses Percivale’s pure touch that leaves dust and ashes. For him the light lies dead in the dust. In Vivien’s vision, that means love dies, lust remains. Again the daemon fortunately has his way with Tennyson, whose repressive force could not exclude the power of the sun.
Alfred Tennyson, “Morte d’Arthur”
I WRITE THESE PARAGRAPHS on June 13, 2017, barely twenty-four hours back from six weeks’ hospitalization and rehabilitation after two serious operations. I am so deeply exhausted that I scarcely speak. For comfort, I have returned to Tennyson and, for reasons not wholly evident to me, to “Morte d’Arthur.”
The tradition is that this is a lament for Arthur Henry Hallam, but that seems to me misleading. Tennyson’s greatness is frequently daemonic. Hallam understood Tennyson’s conflict between a High Romantic sublime and a societal censor.
Had he lived, Hallam would have been a considerable literary critic. His passion was for Shelley and Keats rather than for Wordsworth. There are Keatsian echoes in “Morte d’Arthur,” but the voice is very much Tennyson’s own:
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 fallen in Lyonnesse about their Lord,
King Arthur: then, because his wound was deep,
The bold Sir Bedivere uplifted him,
Sir Bedivere, the last of all his knights,
And bore him to a chapel nigh the field,
A broken chancel with a broken cross,
That stood on a dark strait of barren land.
On one side lay the ocean, and on one
Lay a great water, and the moon was full.
Though there are Christian overtones, “Morte d’Arthur” might well be called a pagan religious poem: “A broken chancel with a broken cross.” That powerful line juxtaposes to the poem’s refrain: “Clothed in white samite, mystic, wonderful.” The myth of Arthur constitutes a large portion of what is called the Matter of Britain. Its destructive legend of the Holy Grail relies upon the various traditions in which Joseph of Arimathea purchases the corpse of Jesus from Pilate and eventually brings it to Glastonbury in Britain. Tennyson’s “Morte d’Arthur” does not directly invoke the Joseph of Arimathea stories, but they form a subtle under-song.
The dying Arthur commands Sir Bedivere to return the sword Excalibur to its mystic origins. Twice Bedivere disobeys, but then yields:
Then quickly rose Sir Bedivere, and ran,
And, leaping down the ridges lightly, plunged
Among the bulrush-beds, and clutch’d the sword,
And strongly wheel’d and threw it. The great brand
Made lightnings in the splendour of the moon,
And flashing round and round, and whirl’d in an arch,
Shot like a streamer of the northern morn,
Seen where the moving isles of winter shock
By night, with noises of the northern sea.
So flash’d and fell the brand Excalibur:
But ere he dipt the surface, rose an arm
Clothed in white samite, mystic, wonderful,
And caught him by the hilt, and brandish’d him
Three times, and drew him under in the mere.
And lightly went the other to the King.
Tennyson’s style rises to a crescendo when Bedivere bears the dying Arthur to his final voyage:
But, as he walk’d, King Arthur panted hard,
Like one that feels a nightmare on his bed
When all the house is mute. So sigh’d the King
Muttering and murmuring at his ear, ‘Quick, quick!
I fear it is too late, and I shall die.’
But the other swiftly strode from ridge to ridge,
Clothed with his breath, and looking, as he walk’d
Larger than human on the frozen hills.
He heard the deep behind him, and a cry
Before. His own thought drove him like a goad.
Dry clash’d his harness in the icy caves
And barren chasms, and all to left and right
The bare black cliff clang’d round him, as he based
His feet on juts of slippery crag that rang
Sharp-smitten with the dint of armed heels—
And on a sudden, lo! the level lake,
And the long glories of the winter moon.
Tennyson once remarked that he knew the quantity of every English word except for “scissors.” The splendor of this enhances his veracity. “Larger than human” is a fine touch and is exceeded by the dazzling symphony of sounds that bring together “clash’d,” “clang’d,” and “crag.” Three Queens come in a dark barge to carry the wounded hero to the island-valley of Avilion.
* * *
—
Bedivere moves us intensely when he laments the solitude with which he must enter a new world:
And the days darken round me, and the years,
Among new men, strange faces, other minds.
Arthur’s reply is poetry of the highest order:
The old order changeth, yielding place to new,
And God fulfils Himself in many ways,
Lest one good custom should corrupt the world.
I take what comfort I can from that eloquence. Certainly the final verse paragraph is more lament than celebration:
So said he, and the barge with oar and sail
Moved from the brink, like some full-breasted swan
That, fluting a wild carol ere her death,
Ruffles her pure cold plume, and takes th
e flood
With swarthy webs. Long stood Sir Bedivere
Revolving many memories, till the hull
Look’d one black dot against the verge of dawn,
And on the mere the wailing died away.
There are many glories in Idylls of the King, but nothing to match “Morte d’Arthur.” It shares the eminence of the great dramatic monologues “Ulysses,” “Tithonus,” and “Lucretius.”
Robert Browning,
“A Toccata of Galuppi’s”
“A TOCCATA OF GALUPPI’S” uncannily invokes the eighteenth-century Venetian composer Baldassare Galuppi, famous in his own era for his light operas and his toccatas, or “touch pieces,” for the clavichord. The fervent spirit and rapid movement of these toccatas challenges Browning’s skill at mingling different voices with their rival tones. The speaker of this dramatic monologue is not Browning but an unnamed Victorian scientist or philosopher who seeks some natural information that can be reconciled with the Christian belief in the immortality of the soul:
I
Oh Galuppi, Baldassaro, this is very sad to find!
I can hardly misconceive you; it would prove me deaf and blind;
But although I take your meaning, ’tis with such a heavy mind!
II
Here you come with your old music, and here’s all the good it brings.
What, they lived once thus at Venice where the merchants were the kings,
Where Saint Mark’s is, where the Doges used to wed the sea with rings?
III
Ay, because the sea’s the street there; and ’tis arched by…what you call
…Shylock’s bridge with houses on it, where they kept the carnival:
I was never out of England—it’s as if I saw it all.
IV
Did young people take their pleasure when the sea was warm in May?
Balls and masks begun at midnight, burning ever to mid-day,
When they made up fresh adventures for the morrow, do you say?
