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poignantly tragic and, above all, idyllic - which were essentially the qualities o f the
Tennysonian paradigm. As the dramatists brought the Idylls to new forms, the authors
who reworked Tristram, Launfal, Parsifal and others were merely appropriating a
wider set of narratives into the Tennysonian tradition.
Of the imitative writers little needs to be said. They were poets who wished to
reproduce the effects o f the Idylls and the early lyrics, but who rarely possessed the
talents to do so. Often these largely-forgotten poets reworked Tennyson’s verses into
nominally new forms - sometimes repeating the same lines in more or less the same
context. One example is Alfred Austin, the poet, novelist, critic and journalist of
extreme conservative bias, who succeeded Tennyson as Poet Laureate in 1896. Two
years later he produced an eulogy for his predecessor: ‘The Passing of Merlin’.*
Austin’s tribute begins with an epigraph from ‘Merlin and the Gleam’ (1889),
Tennyson’s last Arthurian poem, and establishes the Merlin-Tennyson association in
the third stanza:
Merlin has gone, Merlin who followed the Gleam,
And made us follow it; the flying tale
Of the Last Tournament, the Holy Grail,
And Arthur’s Passing, till the Enchanter’s dream
Dwells with us still awake, no visionary theme.
Austin’s grief at Tennyson’s passing was alleviated, however, by the thought that
though the previous Poet Laureate was dead, ‘never hath England lacked a voice to
sing / Her fairness and her fame, nor will she now’.124
* Austin was not always an admirer o f Tennyson’s work, and his transition from hostile critic to
devotee is illustrative of the latter’s rise to pre-eminence in the Victorian cultural world. He had written
in 1870 that ‘Mr Tennyson is not a great poet, unquestionably not a poet of the first rank, all but
unquestionably not a poet o f the second rank and probably - though no contemporary perhaps can
settle that - not even at the head of poets of the third rank, among whom he must ultimately take his
place.’ (Austin, Poetry o f the Period, 4).
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Austin seems to have intended that one of these replacement patriotic voices
would be his own. And considering some of the poem’s stanzas, contemporary
readers may have believed that Tennyson had not so much died, but - like Merlin -
had entered a long period of dotage, in which he endlessly repeats his earlier verse. To
conclude his eulogy, Austin could find no better lines than Tennyson’s ‘The Passing
of Arthur’, though repeated with lesser effect:
A wailing cometh from the shores that veil
Avilion’s island valley; on the mere,
Looms through the mist and wet winds weeping blear
A dusky barge, which, without oar or sail,
Fades to the far-off fields where falls not snow nor hail. [...]
And there He will be comforted; but we
Must watch, like Bedivere, the dwindling light
That slowly shrouds Him darkling from our sight.
From the great deep to the great deep hath He
Passed, and, if now He knows, is mute eternally.125
Indeed, such is the effect of Austin’s collage of quotation that the whole thing appears
as an unintended pastiche. Austin, it appears, was in earnest; his rehashing of
Tennyson’s lines was, perhaps, intended to signal Austin’s mastery of Tennysonian
verse.
Of course, not all o f Tennyson-derived poetry was as lamentable as this. The
Welsh poet T. Gwynn Jones based his great poem ‘ Ymadawiad Arthur’ (‘The Passing
of Arthur’) on the same verses which Austin mauled in his eulogy to the great
Victorian poet. But, whereas Austin lessened the effect of Tennyson’s verse when he
imitated it in ‘The Passing of Merlin’, Jones transformed the final Idyll into a new
literary edifice - one o f the finest Cymraeg poems of the twentieth century. So
successful was Jones’s ‘Ymadawiad Arthur’ that it sparked a literary revival in Wales,
which resulted in some o f the finest Cymraeg poetry to be produced since the
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fifteenth-century verse of Dafydd ap Gwilym. As discussed in chapter four, in taking
Tennyson’s ‘The Passing o f Arthur’ as his source, Jones appropriated what was, at the
time, a predominantly English narrative and transformed it into a Welsh symbol of
national renewal - Jones’s awdl concluding, not with Arthur telling Bedivere to
‘[cjomfort thyself; what comfort is in me?’, but with the king’s promise to return to
his people and to bring them ‘anadl einioesy GenedV (‘the breath o f the nation’).126 It
proved a compelling promise for a generation of Welsh poets.
Another tum-of-the-century poet who continued to develop the Tennysonian
version of the Arthurian story was the Scottish John Davidson. His ‘Last Ballad’
(1899) is the first post-Tennyson work to focus exclusively on Lancelot.* In this poem
Davidson took Lancelot away from the court into the wastelands of Arthur’s kingdom,
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where he tries to escape his ‘noxious love’ for the queen.
As in Tennyson’s Idylls,
‘The Last Ballad’ is filled with the apocalyptic images of social destruction caused by
individuals’ failure to harness private desires in order to serve the state. One of the
best modem Scottish retellings of Arthur (further discussed in chapter four), ‘The Last
Ballad’ proved influential on later versions of the story, particularly on T.S. Eliot’s
The Waste Land (1922; see chapter three). Davidson’s poem was also the first
published Arthurian work to make serious use of the ballad form since the sixteenth
century and probably inspired a number of subsequent ballad treatments on both sides
of the Atlantic, including those by G.K. Chesterton and Sidney Fowler Wright.128
One of the best known of these later ballads is John Masefield’s ‘The Ballad
of Sir Bors’ (1913), a grim soliloquy spoken during Bors’s quest for the Grail. Clearly
derived from Tennyson’s ‘Sir Galahad’ (1842), this ballad was Masefield’s first
published Arthurian work. Like Tennyson’s, Masefield’s poem is set during the quest
* That Lancelot remained in the background of most retellings of the Arthurian narrative in the
nineteenth century testifies to the dominance of Tennyson’s over Malory’s version o f the story.
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