Idylls of the King, Alfred Lord Tennyson [the reading strategies book TXT] 📗

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And marvelling what it was: on whom the boy,

Across the silent seeded meadow-grass

Borne, clashed: and Lancelot, saying, ‘What name hast thou

That ridest here so blindly and so hard?’

‘No name, no name,’ he shouted, ‘a scourge am I

To lash the treasons of the Table Round.’

‘Yea, but thy name?’ ‘I have many names,’ he cried:

‘I am wrath and shame and hate and evil fame,

And like a poisonous wind I pass to blast

And blaze the crime of Lancelot and the Queen.’

‘First over me,’ said Lancelot, ‘shalt thou pass.’

‘Fight therefore,’ yelled the youth, and either knight

Drew back a space, and when they closed, at once

The weary steed of Pelleas floundering flung

His rider, who called out from the dark field,

‘Thou art as false as Hell: slay me: I have no sword.’

Then Lancelot, ‘Yea, between thy lips—and sharp;

But here I will disedge it by thy death.’

‘Slay then,’ he shrieked, ‘my will is to be slain,’

And Lancelot, with his heel upon the fallen,

Rolling his eyes, a moment stood, then spake:

‘Rise, weakling; I am Lancelot; say thy say.’

 

And Lancelot slowly rode his warhorse back

To Camelot, and Sir Pelleas in brief while

Caught his unbroken limbs from the dark field,

And followed to the city. It chanced that both

Brake into hall together, worn and pale.

There with her knights and dames was Guinevere.

Full wonderingly she gazed on Lancelot

So soon returned, and then on Pelleas, him

Who had not greeted her, but cast himself

Down on a bench, hard-breathing. ‘Have ye fought?’

She asked of Lancelot. ‘Ay, my Queen,’ he said.

‘And hast thou overthrown him?’ ‘Ay, my Queen.’

Then she, turning to Pelleas, ‘O young knight,

Hath the great heart of knighthood in thee failed

So far thou canst not bide, unfrowardly,

A fall from him?’ Then, for he answered not,

‘Or hast thou other griefs? If I, the Queen,

May help them, loose thy tongue, and let me know.’

But Pelleas lifted up an eye so fierce

She quailed; and he, hissing ‘I have no sword,’

Sprang from the door into the dark. The Queen

Looked hard upon her lover, he on her;

And each foresaw the dolorous day to be:

And all talk died, as in a grove all song

Beneath the shadow of some bird of prey;

Then a long silence came upon the hall,

And Modred thought, ‘The time is hard at hand.’

 

The Last Tournament

 

Dagonet, the fool, whom Gawain in his mood

Had made mock-knight of Arthur’s Table Round,

At Camelot, high above the yellowing woods,

Danced like a withered leaf before the hall.

And toward him from the hall, with harp in hand,

And from the crown thereof a carcanet

Of ruby swaying to and fro, the prize

Of Tristram in the jousts of yesterday,

Came Tristram, saying, ‘Why skip ye so, Sir Fool?’

 

For Arthur and Sir Lancelot riding once

Far down beneath a winding wall of rock

Heard a child wail. A stump of oak half-dead,

From roots like some black coil of carven snakes,

Clutched at the crag, and started through mid air

Bearing an eagle’s nest: and through the tree

Rushed ever a rainy wind, and through the wind

Pierced ever a child’s cry: and crag and tree

Scaling, Sir Lancelot from the perilous nest,

This ruby necklace thrice around her neck,

And all unscarred from beak or talon, brought

A maiden babe; which Arthur pitying took,

Then gave it to his Queen to rear: the Queen

But coldly acquiescing, in her white arms

Received, and after loved it tenderly,

And named it Nestling; so forgot herself

A moment, and her cares; till that young life

Being smitten in mid heaven with mortal cold

Past from her; and in time the carcanet

Vext her with plaintive memories of the child:

So she, delivering it to Arthur, said,

‘Take thou the jewels of this dead innocence,

And make them, an thou wilt, a tourney-prize.’

 

To whom the King, ‘Peace to thine eagle-borne

Dead nestling, and this honour after death,

Following thy will! but, O my Queen, I muse

Why ye not wear on arm, or neck, or zone

Those diamonds that I rescued from the tarn,

And Lancelot won, methought, for thee to wear.’

 

‘Would rather you had let them fall,’ she cried,

‘Plunge and be lost—ill-fated as they were,

A bitterness to me!—ye look amazed,

Not knowing they were lost as soon as given—

Slid from my hands, when I was leaning out

Above the river—that unhappy child

Past in her barge: but rosier luck will go

With these rich jewels, seeing that they came

Not from the skeleton of a brother-slayer,

But the sweet body of a maiden babe.

Perchance—who knows?—the purest of thy knights

May win them for the purest of my maids.’

 

She ended, and the cry of a great jousts

With trumpet-blowings ran on all the ways

From Camelot in among the faded fields

To furthest towers; and everywhere the knights

Armed for a day of glory before the King.

 

But on the hither side of that loud morn

Into the hall staggered, his visage ribbed

From ear to ear with dogwhip-weals, his nose

Bridge-broken, one eye out, and one hand off,

And one with shattered fingers dangling lame,

A churl, to whom indignantly the King,

 

‘My churl, for whom Christ died, what evil beast

Hath drawn his claws athwart thy face? or fiend?

Man was it who marred heaven’s image in thee thus?’

 

Then, sputtering through the hedge of splintered teeth,

Yet strangers to the tongue, and with blunt stump

Pitch-blackened sawing the air, said the maimed churl,

 

‘He took them and he drave them to his tower—

Some hold he was a table-knight of thine—

A hundred goodly ones—the Red Knight, he—

Lord, I was tending swine, and the Red Knight

Brake in upon me and drave them to his tower;

And when I called upon thy name as one

That doest right by gentle and by churl,

Maimed me and mauled, and would outright have slain,

Save that he sware me to a message, saying,

“Tell thou the King and all his liars, that I

Have founded my Round Table in the North,

And whatsoever his own knights have sworn

My knights have sworn the counter to it—and say

My tower is full of harlots, like his court,

But mine are worthier, seeing they profess

To be none other than themselves—and say

My knights are all adulterers like his own,

But mine are truer, seeing they profess

To be none other; and say his hour is come,

The heathen are upon him, his long lance

Broken, and his Excalibur a straw.”’

 

Then Arthur turned to Kay the seneschal,

‘Take thou my churl, and tend him curiously

Like a king’s heir, till all his hurts be whole.

The heathen—but that ever-climbing wave,

Hurled back again so often in empty foam,

Hath lain for years at rest—and renegades,

Thieves, bandits, leavings of confusion, whom

The wholesome realm is purged of otherwhere,

Friends, through your manhood and your fealty,—now

Make their last head like Satan in the North.

My younger knights, new-made, in whom your flower

Waits to be solid fruit of golden deeds,

Move with me toward their quelling, which achieved,

The loneliest ways are safe from shore to shore.

But thou, Sir Lancelot, sitting in my place

Enchaired tomorrow, arbitrate the field;

For wherefore shouldst thou care to mingle with it,

Only to yield my Queen her own again?

Speak, Lancelot, thou art silent: is it well?’

 

Thereto Sir Lancelot answered, ‘It is well:

Yet better if the King abide, and leave

The leading of his younger knights to me.

Else, for the King has willed it, it is well.’

 

Then Arthur rose and Lancelot followed him,

And while they stood without the doors, the King

Turned to him saying, ‘Is it then so well?

Or mine the blame that oft I seem as he

Of whom was written, “A sound is in his ears”?

The foot that loiters, bidden go,—the glance

That only seems half-loyal to command,—

A manner somewhat fallen from reverence—

Or have I dreamed the bearing of our knights

Tells of a manhood ever less and lower?

Or whence the fear lest this my realm, upreared,

By noble deeds at one with noble vows,

From flat confusion and brute violences,

Reel back into the beast, and be no more?’

 

He spoke, and taking all his younger knights,

Down the slope city rode, and sharply turned

North by the gate. In her high bower the Queen,

Working a tapestry, lifted up her head,

Watched her lord pass, and knew not that she sighed.

Then ran across her memory the strange rhyme

Of bygone Merlin, ‘Where is he who knows?

From the great deep to the great deep he goes.’

 

But when the morning of a tournament,

By these in earnest those in mockery called

The Tournament of the Dead Innocence,

Brake with a wet wind blowing, Lancelot,

Round whose sick head all night, like birds of prey,

The words of Arthur flying shrieked, arose,

And down a streetway hung with folds of pure

White samite, and by fountains running wine,

Where children sat in white with cups of gold,

Moved to the lists, and there, with slow sad steps

Ascending, filled his double-dragoned chair.

 

He glanced and saw the stately galleries,

Dame, damsel, each through worship of their Queen

White-robed in honour of the stainless child,

And some with scattered jewels, like a bank

Of maiden snow mingled with sparks of fire.

He looked but once, and vailed his eyes again.

 

The sudden trumpet sounded as in a dream

To ears but half-awaked, then one low roll

Of Autumn thunder, and the jousts began:

And ever the wind blew, and yellowing leaf

And gloom and gleam, and shower and shorn plume

Went down it. Sighing weariedly, as one

Who sits and gazes on a faded fire,

When all the goodlier guests are past away,

Sat their great umpire, looking o’er the lists.

He saw the laws that ruled the tournament

Broken, but spake not; once, a knight cast down

Before his throne of arbitration cursed

The dead babe and the follies of the King;

And once the laces of a helmet cracked,

And showed him, like a vermin in its hole,

Modred, a narrow face: anon he heard

The voice that billowed round the barriers roar

An ocean-sounding welcome to one knight,

But newly-entered, taller than the rest,

And armoured all in forest green, whereon

There tript a hundred tiny silver deer,

And wearing but a holly-spray for crest,

With ever-scattering berries, and on shield

A spear, a harp, a bugle—Tristram—late

From overseas in Brittany returned,

And marriage with a princess of that realm,

Isolt the White—Sir Tristram of the Woods—

Whom Lancelot knew, had held sometime with pain

His own against him, and now yearned to shake

The burthen off his heart in one full shock

With Tristram even to death: his strong hands gript

And dinted the gilt dragons right and left,

Until he groaned for wrath—so many of those,

That ware their ladies’ colours on the casque,

Drew from before Sir Tristram to the bounds,

And there with gibes and flickering mockeries

Stood, while he muttered, ‘Craven crests! O shame!

What faith have these in whom they sware to love?

The glory of our Round Table is no more.’

 

So Tristram won, and Lancelot gave, the gems,

Not speaking other word than ‘Hast thou won?

Art thou the purest, brother? See, the hand

Wherewith thou takest this, is red!’ to whom

Tristram, half plagued by Lancelot’s languorous mood,

Made answer, ‘Ay, but wherefore toss me this

Like a dry bone cast to some hungry hound?

Lest be thy fair