various states of decay. In another (fig. 14), far from the images o f an dealised
Galahad riding upon a medieval plain seeking the light of the Grail of many wartime
propagandists, Rackham focuses the young reader’s attention upon two very large
canons set to destroy the walls of the Tower of London. Artillery men, some clad in
armour, others not, scramble about the scene, preparing to fire the ‘Great Guns’. Both
images are pictures of the contemporary war, ostensibly set in the medieval world -
and very far from the chivalry o f the popular media and conservative, upper-middle
class poets. In another illustration, ‘How Mordred was Slain by Arthur, and How by
Him Arthur was Hurt to the Death’ (fig. 12), two knights stand upon a mound of
fallen iron-clad men and their horses. Arthur has driven a lance through his opponent,
Mordred, while Mordred is poised to bring down his raised sword upon his father’s
head. The earth, the sky and the knights’ armour is all a muddy, trench-like brown. As
with figures 13 and 14, Rackham’s painting is far more like the German use of the
medieval to synthesise the soldier with the materiel of contemporary warfare. His
depictions of battle entirely belie Pollard’s romanticism.
A similar break with the idealised chivalry of the wartime Galahad is apparent
in the work of Wilfred Owen. Although much of the medieval Matter of Britain had
been written in the wake of destructive civil war - the Historia, Morte Darthur and
the Alliterative Morte Arthure - it was to Tennyson that Owen and other writers
turned to in seeking to articulate their sense of the apocalypse.* Owen made frequent
allusions to Tennyson’s verse throughout his short poetic career. His pre-war work is
particularly reliant on allusions to and borrowings from the Victorian poet; yet in the
early years of the war Owen seems to have abandoned Tennyson as a viable cultural
figure.66 By 1917, however, Tennyson’s poetry must have seemed newly relevant to
* Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur’s Court (1889), written in the wake of the American
Civil War, with its industry-produced apolalyptic climax, seems to have been less influential in Britain
than in America.
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Owen as several works of this year contain allusions to the Victorian’s work,
including ‘Cramped in that funnelled hole’ (cf. ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’),
‘Wild with all Regrets’ (cf. ‘Tears Idle Tears’) and ‘Futility’ (cf. LVI, In
A7
Memoriam). Tennyson’s ‘Merlin and the Gleam’ was also much in Owen’s mind in
this year - quotations from it appearing in both his verse and correspondence.68
Owen’s most substantial Arthurian poem, however, is ‘Hospital Barge at Cerisy’, one
of only five of Owen’s poems to be published in his lifetime. It was composed late in
1917 while Owen was convalescing at Scarborough, where he had met Siegfried
Sassoon. He wrote the poem after a night spent reading Tennyson’s ‘The Passing of
Arthur’, though the genesis for the poem was in existence as early as May that year.*69
The poem begins as a Georgian reverie, filled with childlike rhymes and rhythms:
Budging the sluggard ripples of the Somme,
A barge round old Cerisy slowly slewed.
Softly her engines down the current screwed,
And chuckled softly with contented hum,
7
ft
Till fairy tinklings struck their croonings dumb.
Only the title and the significance of the river’s name indicate that this poem is set in
wartime. Typically of much of the best Georgian verse, the second stanza presents a
sharp tonal break from this reverie: its haunting elegiac quality and its sombre
awareness of the monstrosity of recent history:
One reading by that calm bank shaded eyes
To watch her lessening westward quietly.
Then, as she heaved the bend, her funnel screamed.
* A passage contained in a letter to his mother, Susan Owen, dated May 17, 1917, is remarkably similar
to Owen’s final poem: ‘I sailed in a steam-tug about 6 miles down the canal with another “inmate” [...]
the scenery was such as I never saw or dreamed of since I read the Fairie Queene [sic]. Just as in the
Winter when I woke up lying on the burning cold snow I fancied I must have died and been pitch-
forked into the Wrong Place, so, yesterday, it was not more difficult to imagine that my dusky barge
was winding in to Avalon, and the peace of Arthur, and where Lancelot heals him o f his grievous
wounds. But the Saxon is not broken, as we could very well hear last night’ (Collected Letters, 457).
Bar the mention of Lancelot (a mistake presumably corrected in Owen’s reading of ‘The Passing of
Arthur’), the resulting poem, written around six months later, barely alters from Owen’s image.
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And that long lamentation made him wise
How unto Avalon, in agony,
Kings passed into the dark barge which Merlin dreamed.71
The verse’s first line implies that the narrator had been reading Malory, or more likely
Tennyson’s ‘The Passing o f Arthur’. Whereas the language of the first verse is
essentially idyllic; the second stanza returns the reader to the war, to the casualties and
suffering of those on the hospital barge. The effect of the whole is to make the
mournful lines of ‘The Passing of Arthur’ seem much more relevant to the experience
of war than those poets and writers who had earlier invoked ‘Sir Galahad’:
Then they saw how there hove a dusky barge,
Dark as a funeral scarf from stem to stem,
Beneath them; and descending they were ware
That all the decks were dense with stately forms,
Black-stoled, clack-hooded, like a dream - by these
Three Queens with crowns of gold: and from them rose
A cry that shivered to the tingling stars,
And, as it were one voice, an agony
Of lamentation, like a wind that shrills
All night in a waste land, where no one comes,
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Or hath come, since the making of the world.
After the war, these same lines would be evoked by a poem which would articulate
the experience of those of the generation that survived the war - a poem that proved
to be far more influential than Owen’s ‘Hospital Barge’: Eliot’s The Waste Land.
The reverence shown by Owen for Tennyson was not, however, matched in
Benjamin Gilbert Brooks’s version of the Arthurian story. Brooks’s ‘Gamelot’ (1919,
composed 1917) is situated, like Rackham’s illustrations, somewhere between the
trenches and Logres: Gawain resembles a NCO or at least a sergeant major with his
‘clipped black moustache, short parrot nose,’ while Lancelot’s madness seems to have
been made analogous to ‘shell-shock’, his experience of the Grail quest reminding the
reader of familiar descriptions of trench warfare:
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