Idylls of the King
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The Idylls of the King is a sequence of poems by Alfred, Lord Tennyson which portrays the Coming of Arthur, the knights of the Round Table, Guinevere, the decline of Camelot and finally "The Passing of Arthur", the poem Tennyson wrote first, and which inspired the sequence. The episodic poems, are not an epic either in structure or tone, but take their elegaic sadness from the idylls of Theocritus: like the Alexandrian poems an idealized, distant, pastoral review of a lost time. When the poems were published as a set there was a dedication to one, unidentified at first,
- And indeed He seems to me
- Scarce other than my king's ideal knight,
whom in the course of its development, the reader finds is the late Prince Albert: the Idylls of the King are often read as an allegory of the social conflicts and malaises of mid-Victorian England.
There are twelve poems in the suite. For the first poem written, "Morte d'Arthur" Tennyson adapted the well-known title of Sir Thomas Malory's prose romance, which had fixed the imagery of Arthur in the English imagination. The downfall of Arthur lies, not in himself nor in his act of incest with his faery sister, but in the faithless Guinevere.
External link
- Victorian Web: (http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/tennyson/idylls/litrel.html)Tennyson's Idylls of the King : Literary Relations, Sources, Influence, Analogues, Comparisons
External links
- WikiQuote selections from Idylls of the King (http://quote.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idylls_of_the_King)
- Full text of Idylls of the King (http://www.gutenberg.net/etext/610) from Project Gutenberg