Tennyson’s Camelot: The Kingdom of Folly

TENNYSON'S CAMELOT: THE KINGDOM OF FOLLY R. B. WILKENFELD The determination of the sources of unity in a long poem is always difficult, but it is particularly vexing when, as in Tennyson's Idylls of the King, we are confronted with bibliographical data that reveal the intennittent, non-seriatim composition of the work. Perhaps because of the knowledge that Tennyson had originally planned a ''brief epic" of four books contrasting the "true" and the "false," and because of the original method of publication of the individual idylls, there has been considerable disagreement as to the essential seat of order in the poem. Some critics have taken over Tennyson's statements on the poem's design without comment or revision, while others have sought the secret of its structure in the yearly cycle of the seasons, in contrasting and complementary images and motifs, in contrasting and complementary characters, in the single, heroic figure of Arthur, in an "allegory in the distance," or in a combination of these suggestions.' However wide and various the critical discussions of its unifying forces, I think it may be generally agreed that the poem has a rhythmic structure of ebb and flow which in its external form corresponds to the poem's central subject, the rise and fall of a civilization, that the various idylls suspended between the "Coming" and the "Passing" of Arthur detail the swift decline of the Order from the glory and springtime gaiety of "Gareth and Lynette" to the nadir of the Order's fortunes in "The Last Tournament," and that although in "Guinevere" and "The Passing" the mood is sombre and elegiac, Tennyson develops some sense of a partial recovery from the profound despair and brute violence that mark the tenth idyll. In this essay I would like to explore a motif that runs through each of the idylls from "Gareth and Lynette" to "The Last Tournament," not in an effort to offer a formulaic ground-plan of the poem's total coherence , but rather to indicate just one of the sources of its complex verbal and dramatic deSign, a design that is fitted to reflect with clarity TennyVolume XXXVII, Number 3, April. 1968 282 R. B. WILKENFELD son's unremlttmg perception of the transience of even the highest civilized forms. Through the measured language and the alternated narrative of the first heroic idyll, "The Coming of Arthur," Tennyson provides a qualified catalogue of the constituents of a culture's history. Particular moments of glory and debasement will follow in the succeeding idylls. Here the monumental figures pass in array: Guinevere, Arthur, The Lady of the Lake, Lancelot, Merlin. With elegant ease and economy, Tennyson threads through the idyll a double notational strand. The elusive and mysterious properties of Arthurian power are undercut by their own unreality. Tennyson makes it clear that the fierce images of chaos will return fiercely in a red mist, that the violent, raging Resh Arthur subdues will be tom violently from his Own body, that the unity Arthur imposes will not remain stable, that even the greatest knight can draw petty princedoms under him, make a reahn, and reign only "for a space": "From the great deep to the great deep he goes." From the beginning it is clear that Arthur will be "time's fool." It is true that "the old order changeth, yielding place to new," but the "new," as Tennyson well understood, itself becomes the "old," and must, in time, yield its place, and there is no guarantee under the sun that each change from "old" to "new" signals an ascent to "higher things." The tone of "The Coming" is racked by the insistent phrase "for a space," and while Arthur may return with "that which drew from out the boundless deep" when his death-ship "turns again home," he leaves only One knight, Bedivere, the last of the first, a man "no more than a voice,jln the white winter of his age," as an emblematic reminder of that which has passed. "New faces" and "other minds" represent the new "order," and Bedivere in "The Passing" finds himself an alien in an alien land. The elegiac tone, then, is sounded at...