Tennyson, Virgil, and the Death of Christmas: Influence and the "Morte d'Arthur"

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Tennyson, Virgil, and the Death of Christmas: Influence and the "Morte d'Arthur"Author(s): Erik GraySource: Arion, Third Series, Vol. 6, No. 2 (Fall - Winter, 1998), pp. 98-113Published by: Trustees of Boston UniversityStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20140445 .

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Tennyson, Virgil, and the Death of Christmas:

Influence and the Morte d'Arthur

ERIK GRAY

T Xennyson'S Morte d'Arthur, which was later

incorporated almost verbatim into the final book of his Idylls of the King, appeared in 1842 with a blank-verse frame. The fifty

or so lines that introduce the tale and the thirty or so that suc

ceed it together make up "The Epic," which gives a fictional

account of the poem's composition. According to "The Epic," a

poet named Hall has written a twelve-book Arthurian epic

which he has then consigned to the flames as being out of date.

Only the eleventh book has been preserved, and this, which he is

eventually prevailed upon to read aloud at a Christmas-eve

party, is none other than the Morte d'Arthur itself.

The device of the frame, which allows the poet to comment

upon his own work from outside, is clearly defensive, but it is

not so clear exactly what the poet is defending against. Leigh

Hunt, understandably irked by the use of such a frame not once

but twice in the 1842 Poems, wrote in his review:

We suspect that these poems of Morte d'Arthur and

Godiva are among those which Mr. Tennyson thinks his

best, and is most anxious that others should regard as he

does; and therefore it is that he would affect to make trifles

of them .... There is a boyishness in this which we shall

be happy to see Mr. Tennyson, who is no longer a boy,

outgrow.1

Anxiety about reviews, to which (as Hunt knew) Tennyson was

acutely prone, is certainly one candidate for the anxiety revealed

in "The Epic." Or perhaps Tennyson was anxious to disguise the



Erik Gray 99

personal reference of the poem, which had its genesis in the

death of his own Arthur (Hallam)?although the name of the

fictional poet (Hall) counteracts the effectiveness of any such

intent. "The Epic," like the introductory lines to "Godiva," also

betrays an insecurity about the possible irrelevance of an ancient

English legend to modern times: "Perhaps some modern touches

here and there / Redeemed it from the charge of nothingness."2 But above all, the frame seems to reveal an anxiety of influence.

The immediate predecessor for the Morte is Malory, who pro

vided the title, the story, and even many of the details and

phrases. But neither Tennyson nor Hall feels the need to

acknowledge Malory: it has long been common practice for

poets to versify prose tales, and indebtedness for mere plot-line

is nothing to hide. Stylistic influence, on the other hand, poses a

far more serious threat: Hall says he burnt his poem because

"these twelve books of mine / Were faint Homeric echoes, noth

ing-worth" ("The Epic," 38-39). As Richard Jenkyns rightly

points out, such anxiety about poetic belatedness is closely

bound up with the other anxieties I have mentioned, especially fears about anachronism or irrelevance:

Life is now cosy and jolly, like the Christmas party, but not

the stuff of which epic is made; and in any case Homer has

left poets with nothing to say in that line. Tennyson is often

regarded, and justly, as one of the most Virgilian of English poets, but of Virgil nothing here is said; it is Homer who

casts the withering shadow over modern verse.3

Jenkyns's point is at once quite true and not quite true. Of Virgil

nothing is said in this passage; but is he therefore absent from

the scene? To imitate Homer is, by definition, to be like Homer; but to imitate Homer is to be Virgil. Of course there were imita

tors of Homer before Virgil, and there have been many since

whose imitations may be free from even the unconscious presence

of Homer's greatest successor and adapter. But Tennyson's poem

is suffused with Virgil: not only was it written (according to

"The Epic") with a consciousness of Homer as the most immedi

ate poetic predecessor, but it was (partly for that reason) con

demned by the poet to be burnt, and saved only by the



100 TENNYSON, VIRGIL, AND THE DEATH OF CHRISTMAS

interposition of his friends, like the Aeneid. The story itself,

moreover, centers on Sir Bedivere, the relic of a glorious race of

warriors now destroyed, who watches his king fall in battle; who

is instructed, "Make broad thy shoulders to receive my weight"

(164); who stands, in an echo of Virgil which Tennyson himself

pointed out, "This way and that dividing the swift mind" (60; cf.

Aeneid 4. 285).

And yet it would be inaccurate to equate the presence of Virgil

in the poem with the presence of Homer. Homer is an influence,

and perhaps, like all influence (in Bloom's terms), a source of

anxiety, a forefather who must be overcome. Virgil, on the other

hand, is present as a presiding spirit; to feel belated on account

of Virgil is almost redundant, because Virgil is preeminently the

poet of belatedness, of secondariness. I would suggest that the

relationship of the poet of Morte d'Arthur to Virgil is one not of

antagonism, but of welcome fellowship. Tennyson and Virgil are

brother-latecomers; and I wish to discuss their similarities by

way (expanding on a hint in "The Epic") of Christmas: they are

our two great Christmas-poets.

To understand the relation of Christmas to Virgil and Tenny

son, we might begin by turning again to Leigh Hunt. Hunt

wrote an article just before Christmas of 1817, bemoaning the

decline in Christmas spirit: "Christmas is a dreary business,

compared with what it used to be in old times"; so dreary, in

fact, that England itself is threatened: "The nation hardly

appears to be the same."4 Keats approved the premise of this

article, though not necessarily its political bent, calling it a "very

proper lamentation on the obsoletion of christmas Gambols &

pastimes: but . . . mixed up with so much egotism of that drivel

ling nature that pleasure is entirely lost."5 Keats was surely not

alone in considering the lamentation "very proper": who can not

attest from personal experience that Christmas used to be much

better than it is now? This is in fact the first thing that the char

acters in "The Epic" (one of whom is a clergyman) find to say about the holiday they are celebrating: "and there we held a

talk, / How all the old honour had from Christmas gone, / Or

gone, or dwindled down" (6-8). It is a universal complaint

among those who celebrate the holiday, and it can be confidently



Erik Gray ioi

predicted to continue: I am sorry to report that Christmas this

year will not be as good as in the past.

Of course nostalgia does not adhere only to Christmas; there

exist plenty of other annual events that are subject to similar

lamentations: birthdays, elections, the Oscars. But Christmas

differs from these in that the feeling of let-down and decline

from the past is an inherent part of the holiday. Unlike other hol

idays, Christmas celebrates not only an event, but its celebra

tion: the birth of the baby Jesus was immediately recognized by a favored few, who brought gifts and worshipped; and this is

what we call "the first Christmas." No other holiday is so con

cerned, not only with the event it commemorates, but with its

own first occurrence as a holiday: can we imagine a "first Good

Friday," a "first Assumption"? The former sounds blasphemous,

the latter sounds Euclidean. Only "the first Christmas" does not

sound like a logical contradiction, because it consisted at once of

an event and of the festivity surrounding that event.6 We know

all about the original festivity?how shepherds watched their

flocks by night, how three men journeyed from the East; and as

a result, we know just how far our own festivities fall short. The

typical complaint about Christmas may be unconscious of this

contrast: usually this year's Christmas is compared to those of

one's childhood, or (as in Hunt's article) to the merry Yuletides

of some unplaceable past. But the impulse to lament is rooted in

the fact that all Christmases from the year i onwards have been

inherently imitative.

Milton recognized this difficulty and addressed it in typically Miltonic fashion. His ode "On the Morning of Christ's

Nativity," in both its title and its opening line ("This is the

month, and this the happy morn"), maintains an ambiguity

whether it is written on Christmas, or supposed to be written on

the first Christmas. The poet takes advantage of our momentary

confusion to rush in and offer his gift before even the Magi have

a chance: "Oh run, prevent them with thy humble ode / . . . Have

thou the honour first, thy Lord to greet."7 We find here an early version of the tactic used in Paradise Lost to make all one's pre

decessors (Homer, for instance8) seem like latecomers. But

Milton does not by this "prevention" utterly erase the feelings of




disappointment and belatedness associated with Christmas;

rather, he displaces them. The long lament of departing pagan deities (167-235) preserves the feelings associated with latter-day Christmases?both the sense that a glorious past has been lost,

and the anxiety that today's celebration is redundant, taking

place in a space already occupied.

I do not mean to suggest that disappointment and belatedness

are the most important aspects of Christmas. Christmas is a hol

iday of exultation, of exaltation, and redemption; it continues to

be celebrated (in spite of all our grumblings) because it marks

the moment when transcendence over death and the sins of the

past first entered the world. But we misunderstand the holiday, and especially the poetry that concerns it, if we ignore its darker

side. So Milton reminds us, not only in his feeling treatment of

the gods of the past, but in his reminder that redemption has not

come quite yet:

But wisest fate says no,

This must not yet be so,

The babe lies yet in smiling infancy, That on the bitter cross

Must redeem our loss;

So both himself and us to glorify. (149-54)

The Nativity is not redemption, but a promise of redemption; and Milton's caution reminds us that we too, like the infant,

have a long way yet to go. Those who celebrate Christmas are

forced by the necessary insufficiency of their celebrations to

remember the fact that they are still in a state of betweenness:

the world has been redeemed, but it is still imperfect, and is

awaiting the final Judgment for its ultimate purification. Christ

mas is foremost a joyous holiday, because it assures the faithful

of eventual transcendence; but it is also melancholy because, in

the meantime, we must await the future, while admitting that

the glories of the past are gone.

Virgil is the poet of Christmas because he is the grand-master of betweenness. He has long been associated with the Nativity



Erik Gray 103

on account of his "Messianic" eclogue (the fourth), often read as

a prophecy of the birth of Christ. But the Aeneid outdoes the

fourth eclogue as a Christmas poem (if not as a Christian poem) because it contains the appropriate duality: not only a promise

of glory to come, but also a lament for glories that have passed.

For C. S. Lewis, Virgil's poem is the prime example of "Second

ary Epic," epic in which all the suffering and heroic endeavor

leads eventually to a world-changing event; the Aeneid is thus

proto-Christian. But Lewis also recognizes the other side of sec

ondary epic (and, by implication, of the promise of

redemption)?that we never quite get there. Aeneas, he writes,

is "a ghost of Troy until he becomes the father of Rome. All

through the poem we are turning that corner. It is this which

gives the reader of the Aeneid the sense of having lived through so much."9 At the opening of Book 1, Aeneas has a promise of

glory to sustain him, and at the close of Book 12, that is still all

that he has; the future may be glorious, but the present is not,

especially when compared (as it often is) to the past he has left

behind. Aeneas is not a tragic figure: his trials lead directly to

the founding of Rome, and the reader need only look out the

window to see the grandeur of Rome all around. But Aeneas has

no window; except for the occasional glimpse on a divine shield

or in the underworld, all he can see is the difference between his

present struggles and the great city he has left.

It is not surprising, then, that for every glance forward Aeneas

throws two glances back. The impression of being secondary, of

being a successor to what has already passed, is necessarily far

more tangible than the presentiment of being a forerunner to

some indefinite future. There are many senses in which Aeneas is

secondary. The first sense is very much on the surface: he was

the second-best warrior in his army (like Chaucer's Troilus or

Sophocles's Ajax?the latter a prominent victim of being sec

ond-best). He becomes leader only because Hector is dead, and

the people he leads are themselves remnants, the left-overs of the

Greeks (reliquias Danaum10). He tries repeatedly to build a sec

ond Troy, but without success, and knowing as well that a new




Ilium, even should he manage to construct one, would be a hol

low mockery, like Helenus's pitiful simulacrum of Troy's great

ness (simulacraque magnis Pergama [3.349-50]). Even Aeneas's

affair with Dido is belated. Dido desperately insists that her first

husband Sychaeus was her first and therefore only true love:

Hie meos, primus qui me sibi iunxit, amores

abstulit; Ule habeat secum servetque sepulcro.

He who first married me seized all my love; let him have it

all for himself, let him keep it in the tomb.

(4.28-29)

Aeneas does not compel the reader's pity the way Dido does, but

these two lines are nevertheless unspeakably poignant. They call

to mind yet again Aeneas's position?always second place.11

Aeneas comes after Hector, after Troy, after Sychaeus. But

most of all, he is post-Odyssean, an explorer who boldly goes

where another man has been before. It is therefore no stretch to

equate Aeneas's belatedness with Virgil's: Virgil in fact insists

upon the connection. Aeneas, like Odysseus, visits the island of

the Cyclops. But where Odysseus picked up so much glory, and

reaffirmed his identity and his great heritage, Aeneas picks up

only a scruffy, starved castaway named Achaemenides, and sees

the Cyclops, a colossal wreck, already conquered. Aeneas and

Virgil are latecomers, and both are perfectly aware of the fact.

But Virgilian secondariness is more complex than this.

Aeneas's difficulties spring not only from his newness (the fact

that he is not the first) but from his youth?the fact that the

time is not yet ripe. Aeneas carries the promise that Rome will

be greater than Troy (just as the Aeneid, some believe, is greater than the Odyssey); why then the grief? It is because the promised transcendence is in the future: the glorious old order has passed

away before the new is fit to take its place, for the simple reason

that it is impossible to build an order (or a city) that is already old. Virgilian nostalgia, then, does not contradict its own prem

ises; the lament for antiquity is appropriate for a world that, however hopeful, remains in suspense. The typically Virgilian



Erik Gray 105

moment of pathos is not the death of a young man?a

Patroclus, or even a Palinurus or Euryalus (these latter have

Homeric precedents)?but the death of Priam, of someone so

aged that he seems to have existed forever, and is consequently

irreplaceable.

Priam and Troy are thus powerful predecessors, not just

because they are (like all predecessors) prior, but because they are ancient. Aeneas has nothing solid with which to replace the

desolation that he sees all around him. Even Carthage can be

seen as an ancient ruin12: its topless towers (coeptae . . . turres

[4.86]) are in fact merely unfinished; but when seen in the light of Dido's funeral pyre (5.1-5), and especially in the light of the

third Punic war, they call to mind Troy and the destruction of

antiquity. Aeneas's painful position?constantly witnessing the

ruin of time-honored tradition while knowing that its replace ment, though greater, is far off in the future?links him to

Christmas. It is the very situation that Milton unexpectedly fore

grounds when he writes, "But wisest fate says no, / This must

not yet be so"; Bacchus is banished, but his replacement is yet a

Child. Aeneas exists between Troy and Rome, between Anchises

on his shoulders and Ascanius at his heels; so Christians exist

between the first Christmas and the Last Judgment. In such a

situation it is neither blasphemy nor despair to cast one's gaze

backwards: Aeneas does not deny the prophecies he has heard of

future glory when he laments the past. At the heart of the

Aeneid, as of Christmas, lies the promise of great things to

come, that will transcend the past; but we miss all the poignancy

if we do not recognize that the time is not yet, that a long period

of second-best must first be endured.

Tennyson was familiar with this untranscendent side of Virgil. In "To Virgil," he recognizes the Roman poet as melancholy, as

one "majestic in [his] sadness at the doubtful doom of human

kind" (12). This is the equivalent of Lewis's "All through the

poem we are turning that corner": Virgil is remembered as the

singer not only of "Ilion falling, Rome arising" (2), but of the

long, long time in between. Sir Bedivere is, in this sense, one of

Tennyson's most Virgilian creations, a remnant of a lost world

with nothing to comfort him but a vague promise. Vaguer,



I06 TENNYSON, VIRGIL, AND THE DEATH OF CHRISTMAS

indeed, than Aeneas's, since in Sir Bedivere's case Anchises and

Ascanius are compounded into the single figure of Arthur, the

once and future king. When Arthur's boat disappears beyond the verge, Bedivere knows even more surely than Aeneas that the

future can not be soon?can not be in his lifetime.

Yet at the same time, Merlin's promise that the kingdom will

be reborn with Arthur himself as king has a ring of Christian

promise to it that is (necessarily) lacking in the Aeneid. I have

already mentioned that "The Epic" is set on Christmas; in vari

ous ways both the frame and the Morte d'Arthur itself are

Christmas poems. "The Epic" illustrates both aspects of

Christmas, nostalgic despondency and joyous rebirth, in the

introductory and concluding sections respectively. For if hope wins out in the end, nevertheless for the bulk of "The Epic"

despondency prevails. The guests at the Christmas-party deplore

that "all the old honour [has] from Christmas gone" (7), and

their complaints are reinforced by narrative devices. The Christ

mas pastimes mentioned in the opening lines, for instance, are

described in a dismissively passive construction: "The game of

forfeits done?the girls all kissed / Beneath the sacred bush and

past away" (2-3). In the lines that follow, traditional Christmas

symbols appear in ironically inappropriate contexts. The narrator

recounts how, while ice-skating that afternoon, he "bumped the

ice into three several stars" (12); and in response to Hall's praise

of the wassail-bowl, he comments, "We knew your gift that way /

At college" (24-25). Thus "star" and "gift," emblems of the

Nativity, have been reduced to a matter of pratfalls and booze in

this company, in spite of their view of themselves as the last bas

tion of tradition. But the semantic field is partly redeemed when

the narrator brings up the question of another gift, Hall's gift of

verse; the poet is prevailed upon to read the Morte d'Arthur, and

the narrator says

I, though sleepy, like a horse

That hears the corn-bin open, pricked my ears.

(44-45)



Erik Gray 107

The simile not only prepares us for the epic style that is to fol

low but conjures up a Nativity scene: three men and one atten

tive animal, all marveling at the small wonderful object before

them.

The Christmas duality appears in the body of the poem more

subtly than in "The Epic," but just as pervasively. The sole men

tion of Christmas comes in Bedivere's lament:

Ah! My Lord Arthur, whither shall I go? Where shall I hide my forehead and my eyes?

For now I see the true old times are dead,

When every morning brought a noble chance,

And every chance brought out a noble knight. Such times have been not since the light that led

The holy Elders with the gift of myrrh. (227-33)

The question might be said, if one were inclined to be pious, to

contain its own answer, in its reference to the Christian redemp

tion. But this promise is offset by an ambiguity which makes

Bedivere's position, if anything, even more pitiable. The syntax

allows for the possibility that even the round table was a delu

sion?that not since the time of the Nativity have there existed

noble knights and noble chances. (The final sentence would be

less ambiguous if it said "Such times have had no equal since the

light. . . .") Thus Bedivere's reference, though it conjures up all

the hope of Christmas, conjures up likewise the sad rejoinder:

things have gotten worse since that first snowy night.

Arthur himself does not mention the Nativity, but he does

refer significantly to rebirth. In his first speech to Bedivere he

says

I perish by this people which I made,?

Though Merlin sware that I should come again To rule once more?but let what will be, be.

(22-24)

What is absolutely extraordinary about these lines is not that

Arthur reassures Bedivere of his returning, Christ-like, to rule

his kingdom, but that he recognizes the insufficiency of this



I08 TENNYSON, VIRGIL, AND THE DEATH OF CHRISTMAS

reassurance. In a moment of sublime magnanimity, Arthur

makes little of the coming redemption, knowing as he does that

it can be of only limited comfort in the present. The concluding

phrase, though it may escape our notice, in fact does double

work?much like "Peace, let it be!" in the final line of Tenny son's "Vastness." The latter, it has been pointed out, is ambigu

ous: "let it be" can serve as a performative utterance, a fiat that

gives body to what has just been said; or it can be a dismissal of

the rest of the poem.13 Arthur's "but let what will be, be" can be

seen as an untidier early version of the same words: it is at once

a prayer that Merlin's prophecy should come to pass, and a res

ignation to whatever fate may bring. For Bedivere it is primarily the latter?a dismissal of transcendent hopes in the knowledge that they have little bearing on the present. (Such an understand

ing of the words is reinforced for Bedivere by Arthur's use of the

archaic "sware," which sounds like the subjunctive: "[Even]

though Merlin [should] swear that I should come again.") The

sympathy thus shown to Bedivere is admirable, and readers of

the poem should take note. It is easy enough to blame Bedivere

for short-sightedness; and it is true that there are hints and

promises for the future from which he might have taken com

fort.14 But Arthur, without denying these promises, admits

Bedivere's natural impulse to turn away from them, and to give

himself up to looking back upon his loss.

The sympathy which Tennyson here grants to the bereaved

Bedivere he elsewhere claims for himself. Section ciii of In

Memoriam contains striking echoes of the Morte d'Arthur. Ten

nyson dreams that he sails off into eternity on a boat, that he is

attended by wailing maidens, and that he sees Hallam "thrice as

large as man" (as Bedivere seemed "larger than human" in the

mist). This section is immediately followed by two sections on

Christmas (the third and final Christmas of the poem); and it is

immediately preceded by three sections detailing the Tennyson

family's transplantation from their old home after the death of

their father?Tennyson himself playing the role of Aeneas lead

ing his people after the death of Priam. Thus we find in In

Memoriam the same cluster of associations, and we find the

same indulgence for looking back rather than forward. The



Erik Gray 109

poet's doubts about the future may be momentary; and he never

actually denies the possibility that his new life may eventually

surpass the old. But for the moment, all is too painfully new?

"We live within the stranger's land, / And strangely falls our

Christmas eve" (In Memoriam, 105.3-4) ?

an<3 Tennyson allows

himself the right simply to succumb to his present distress with

out guilt. He calls for a Christmas celebration with "neither

song, nor game, nor feast" (21), one which acknowledges that

Christmas this year contrasts sadly with the past.15

At the beginning of this essay I mentioned that such disap

pointment with the present state of things is closely bound up with fears of poetic belatedness, and it is with the latter that I

wish to conclude. Aeneas, bearer of a divine promise for the

future, nevertheless can not resist looking back with regret (it is

worth remembering in this context that Virgil's first extended

piece of narrative was the Orpheus and Eurydice episode at the

end of the Georgics); Virgil himself, arguably the single most

influential classical author, does the same, with his constant con

scious glances at Homer. Bedivere and Tennyson resemble

Aeneas and Virgil, but with the added complication that it is the

very belatedness of the latter that Tennyson finds himself repli

cating. What are we to make of the relationship between the two

poets in this case?

I do not believe that Tennyson engages in a Bloomian agon with Virgil in the Morte d'Arthur. Tennyson often does struggle with predecessors, and the Morte d'Arthur is no exception (as

the bleak landscape, reminiscent of Bloom's favorite example,

"Childe Roland," suggests). The poet announces his fear, for

instance, that he may be merely mouthing the style of Homer.

And although he does not announce it, we may safely assume

some anxiety about the possible influence of Milton?both the

Milton who sang of the passing of the old order in his Nativity

ode, and the one who wrote a twelve book blank-verse epic that

claimed to supersede chivalric epic.16 But Virgil's influence

appears to be a case apart.

This is not a point that can be strictly argued: someone look

ing for signs of influence-anxiety would have no difficulty




detecting defenses against Virgil as much as any other predeces

sor in the Morte d'Arthur. Indeed, Tennyson's treatment of Vir

gil in the poem could be seen as a textbook example of Bloom's

third revisionary ratio, kenosis, in which a later poet "seems to

humble himself as though he were ceasing to be a poet, but this

ebbing is so performed in relation to a precursor's poem-of-ebb

ing that the precursor is emptied out also."17 The very term

"kenosis" is taken from St. Paul's description of the Incarnation,

and so would be particularly applicable to a Christmas poem.

But the question comes down to a reader's instincts?whether a

reader feels that Tennyson, writing under the shock of the loss of

Hallam, and like Sir Bedivere (in an echo of Aeneid 1.305),

"Revolving many memories" (270), would have the power or the

inclination to oppose the memory of so sympathetic a precursor

as Virgil. When I read the poem, I can not help but feel that, whatever may have been his contests with Virgil in later epic

endeavors?notably the Idylls of the King?Tennyson here sim

ply resigns himself to his predecessor's influence.

Nor does this reveal a weakness in Tennyson (as he recog

nized when he continued to print the Morte as a separate poem

in his collected works, even after he had incorporated it into the

more clearly agonistic Idylls). When a poet of great promise is

overcome with nostalgia for an earlier poetry, he is in the same

position as the other promise-bearers I have mentioned?

Aeneas, Bedivere, and anyone who celebrates Christmas. To

admit to a feeling of loss is not to betray the precious gift of

redemption, but merely to recognize an inevitable limitation, as

Arthur generously recognizes for Bedivere. We can not

constantly be transcendent, victorious: most of life is spent in a

meantime, when the struggle is not yet won, but the past is

already lost. It is unreasonable to expect poets to engage in a

constant overcoming of their predecessors in each poem?as if

one should expect people to be filled with epiphanic fervor every Christmas. Troy is fallen; Camelot is fallen; the old poets have

left nothing new to do; and Christmas this year will be tawdry and dull. To admit all these things and to resign oneself, for

once, not to try to overcome them, is not weak; it is only

natural.



Erik Gray 111

Yet the view of poetry as a form predicated upon conflict, far

from being peculiar to Bloom, is nearly universal; criticism

demands that poetry engage in a constant process of subversion

and contradiction. Tennyson is peculiarly liable to such readings:

Tennyson's "divided mind" and "two voices"?concepts which

arose to counteract the post-Victorian disparagement of Tenny

son as a contented spokesman of ideology?have become criti

cal commonplaces.18 I am not inclined to disagree with either of

these views, in general: I believe that poetry requires tension, if

not conflict, and that Tennyson's poetry is indeed deeply

divided, ironic, and strenuous. But we must not allow general

tendencies to blind us to specific exceptions; sometimes a poet

simply retreats, and the retreat can be as meaningful and inspir

ing as any attack. To return one last time to my guiding motif?

the Incarnation was a powerful act of humility, a retreat (though

it might be called a tactical one). Tennyson, so often a pained

and embattled poet, likewise retreats from battle in the Morte

d'Arthur; he pauses, for once, from the struggle, and it is this

sense of suspension that gives the poem its strange and powerful

beauty.

NOTES

I wish to thank Robert Fagles, David Gray, and Abe Stoll for their comments

on this essay. i. From Hunt's review in the Church of England Quarterly Review for Oct.

1842, quoted in The Poems of Tennyson, ed. Christopher Ricks, 2nd ed. (Berke

ley 1987), 2, 172. 2. Morte d'Arthur, 278-9. All quotations from Tennyson refer to Ricks's edi

tion (note 1).

3. Richard Jenkyns, The Victorians and Ancient Greece (Cambridge, MA

1980), 32.

4. "Christmas and Other Old Merry-Makings Considered," Examiner, Dec.

21, 1817, 801; repr. in Leigh Hunt's Political and Occasional Essays, ed. L. H.

and C. W. Houtchens (New York 1962), 161, 162.

5. Letter to George and Tom Keats of 21-27 Dec. 1817, in Hyder E. Rollins,

ed., The Letters of John Keats (Cambridge, MA 1958), 1, 191.

6. We refer to "the first Thanksgiving," but this is not the same thing, since it

was an anniversary. "The first Thanksgiving" is the equivalent of a "first birth

day" or "first anniversary"; it was not itself an event, but a commemoration.

7. Lines 24, 26; all references are to Milton's Complete Shorter Poems, ed.

John Carey (London 1971).




8. Of the many examples of this device ("metalepsis"), the first and most

famous is the fall of Mulciber (PL 1.740-48), in which Milton imitates a similar

description from the first book of the Iliad, then locates his own version as hav

ing occurred "long before."

9. C. S. Lewis, A Preface to Paradise Lost (Oxford 1942), 35. 10. Aeneid 1.598. All references are to the edition of R. D. Williams (New

York 1972). 11. Both the one-dollar bill and the one-pound coin have quotes from Virgil

on them. But whereas the quotations on the former come from passages in the

poetry that speak of the glorious future (novus ordo saeclorum is adapted from

the fourth eclogue), the quote that appears on some versions of the pound coin,

decus et tutamen, derives from Aeneid 5.262, where it describes the armor that

Aeneas offers as second prize in a boat-race. This choice of motto indicates, I

think, not only a certain modesty, but a subtle appreciation of Virgil. 12. The antiquity of Carthage is suggested early on. The narrative of the

Aeneid begins, after the invocation, straightforwardly: Urbs antiqua fuit

(1.12). The urbs, we learn immediately after, is Carthage; but it is impossible to

know this before being told. The two cities mentioned so far have been Troy (1) and Rome (7), and the obvious inference would be that urbs refers to the former.

The phrase therefore seems to have a double sense: "There was a city of old" and

"There was an ancient (aged) city." The latter meaning, in which antiquus is

equivalent to vetus, is rare in prose, but acceptable in verse; see Lewis and Short,

antiquus 11, E, which gives numerous examples, including Virgil. Although this

second sense recedes when we find out that the city referred to is Carthage, it

does not disappear.

13. See Eric Griffiths, The Printed Voice of Victorian Poetry (Oxford 1989),

119.

14. Arthur himself is not always so forbearing, and grows angry at Bedivere's

refusal to relinquish the past (in the form of Excalibur). Herbert Tucker is thus

in good company when he charges that "In holding by the precious hilt as the

only way of holding off change and loss, Bedivere commits the idolater's sin of

forgetting that even idols, as physical objects, must submit to the universal

doom" (Tennyson and the Doom of Romanticism [Cambridge, MA 1988], 330). Tucker argues that the casting away of Excalibur marks a moment of cultural

transmission, and thus of epic origin; his argument is sensitive and convincing. It

is all the more surprising, therefore, that he is so hard on Bedivere, given that, by his own argument, the making of epic (for Arthur and Tennyson) necessarily entails the shattering of Bedivere's idyll.

15. Twentieth-century readers have occasionally found In Memoriam too con

ventionally pious. It might therefore be worth pointing out, first, that the poem's three Christmases are not at all religious occasions but mere secular markers, to

show the passage of time; and second, that they grow darker and darker even as

the poem grows in faith. Indeed, section cv seems to abolish Christmas celebra

tions altogether, only to replace them, almost blasphemously, with a commemo

ration of Hallam's birthday in section 107. A similar skepticism is detectable

even in the thirty lines that follow the Morte d'Arthur, the concluding section of

"The Epic." This passage has been dismissed by critics (notably Christopher

Ricks) for its pious dream-vision of King Arthur returned "like a modern gentle man"? presumably Prince Albert. But it is interesting that the vision of rebirth



Erik Gray 113

is not the narrator's immediate reaction to hearing the poem; first he sits "rapt" and confused, and then a strange thing happens:

The cock crew loud; as at that time of year The lusty bird takes every hour for dawn.

(282-83)

"So have I heard and do in part believe it," as Horatio skeptically remarks upon a sim

ilar occasion. I think that the same skepticism is invited here: the reader is not

intended to accept this outmoded superstition as true, but rather to remark upon the

fact that the narrator's immediate impulse is to look back to an antiquated tradition.

The hopeful dream that follows reads like a wishful afterthought, ironically undercut

by this initial bewildered credulousness. 16. See Paradise Lost 9.27-41.

17. Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence (Oxford 1973; repr. 1975), 14-15. 18. An excellent account of twentieth-century reactions, counter-reactions, and crit

ical myths about Tennyson is given in John D. Rosenberg, The Fall of Camelot (Cam

bridge, MA 1973), 5-12.



Documents

Tennyson, Virgil, and the Death of Christmas: Influence and the "Morte d'Arthur"