Idylls of the King, published between 1856 and 1885, is a cycle of twelve narrative poems by the English poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson which retells the legend of King Arthur, his knights, his love for Guinevere and her tragic betrayal of him, and the rise and fall of Arthur's kingdom. The whole work recounts Arthur's attempt and failure to lift up mankind and create a perfect kingdom, from his coming to power to his death at the hands of the traitor Mordred. Individual poems detail the deeds of various knights, including Lancelot, Geraint, Galahad, and Balin and Balan, and also Merlin and the Lady of the Lake.
The colossal octopus: a drawing by malacologist Pierre Dénys de Montfort (1801) (based on descriptions by French sailors).
"The poem draws its images from the Norse legend of a gigantic sea-monster that supposedly preyed upon shipping off the coast of Norway (and was probably founded on the observation of an enormous cuttle-fish or squid), first described by Bishop Pontoppidan in A History of Norway (1752). It was said to be capable of dragging down to the sea-bottom even the largest ships because, when submerging, it created a powerful whirlpool, known as the Skagarag."
Stretch'd like a promontory . . . ."
The word in Hebrew means "that which gathers itself together in folds"; the creature has been variously associated with the crocodile (Job 41:1), a conventional sea-serpent (Isaiah 27:1), and a whale (Psalms 104: 26, as in the 1662 Church of England Book of Common Prayer).
Tennyson wrote “In Memoriam” after he learned that his beloved friend Arthur Henry Hallam had died suddenly and unexpectedly of a fever at the age of 22. Hallam was not only the poet’s closest friend and confidante, but also the fiance of his sister. After learning of Hallam’s death, Tennyson was overwhelmed with doubts about the meaning of life and the significance of man’s existence. He composed the short poems that comprise “In Memoriam” over the course of seventeen years (1833-1849) with no intention of weaving them together, though he ultimately published them as a single lengthy poem in 1850.
This lengthy work describes Tennyson’s memories of the time he spent with Hallam, including their Cambridge days, when Hallam would read poetry aloud to his friends: thus Tennyson writes, “O bliss, when all in circle drawn / About him, heart and ear were fed / To hear him, as he lay and read / The Tuscan poets on the lawn!” Tennyson grapples with the tremendous grief he feels after the loss of such a dear friend, concluding famously that “ ’Tis better to have loved and lost / Than never to have loved at all.
The speaker sings of the baseless and inexplicable tears that rise in his heart and pour forth from his eyes when he looks out on the fields in autumn and thinks of the past.
This stanza’s image of the boat sailing to and from the underworld recalls Virgil’s image of the boatman Charon, who ferries the dead to Hades.
In the third stanza, ... in the image of a man on his deathbed who is awake for his very last morning. ...To a person hearing the birds’ song and knowing he will never hear it again, the twittering will be imbued with an unprecedented significance—the dying man will hear certain melancholy tones for the first time, although, strangely and paradoxically, it is his last.
The final stanza ... The poet’s climactic exclamation in the final line thus represents a culmination of the images developed in the previous stanzas.
They say his heart is breaking, motherwhat is that to me?
For I'm to be Queen o' the May, mother, I'm to be Queen o' theMay.
BY HENRY VAN DYKE, D.D., LL.D.
emails from his descendants and images.