Victorian poetry and historicismLancelot: "When both our mouths went wandering in one way, / And
aching sorely, met among the leaves; / Our hands being left behind strained
far away" (I, 5). Such images are profoundly expressive of an industrial
economy built on the division of labor and the alienated modern conscious-
ness that, by a Marxist reading, is its inevitable product.
The refraction of the past through modern consciousness, then, took
many forms in the nineteenth century. Such imaginative appropriations are
invariably double-focused. Thus Tennyson's quarrying of Arthurian
legend, both early and late in his career, is mediated by a framing device
that underwrites the allegorical reverberations of the myth of the rise and
fall of a society for modern times. His early poem "Morte d'Arthur,"
probably composed in 1837-38, is later framed by "The Epic" (1842): an
introduction and conclusion to the poem whose title alludes to the poet's
plans, eventually abandoned, to write his own modern epic based on the
Arthurian legends. Instead, he was to produce a series of fragments in the
Romantic tradition, realizing that if he "meant to make his mark at all, it
must be by shortness." 47 Where Malory compiled his great work from a
range of heterogeneous sources, Tennyson dismantles the medieval corpus
that is his inspiration to provide a series of "idylls" - framed pictures
representing incidents from the narrative of Arthur's life, written over a
period of fifty-five years - that were eventually put together as Idylls of the
King (1859-85). The nationalistic legends of Arthur and his Round Table
were traditionally read as an allegory of the historic authority and virtue
of the British monarchy. This association with the Crown becomes clear in
Tennyson's sequence by the "Dedication" to Prince Albert and the closing
address "To the Queen." Although the poem explores important Victorian
preoccupations such as the dualism of the body and the soul, the symbolic
use of the Middle Ages - in particular the implied parallel between Arthur
and Albert ("He seems to me / Scarce other than my king's ideal knight"
[AT "Dedication," 5-6]) - is not altogether successful. In 1879 Gerard
Manley Hopkins commented privately: "'He shd. have called them
Charades from the Middle Ages (dedicated by permission to H.R.H.
etc)." 48
But Tennyson also wrote poetry that resonates like no other with a
profoundly moving sense of what historicism implies for an understanding
of the human predicament. His greatest work is haunted by another Arthur
- his beloved friend Arthur Hallam, whom he lost at a young age and
mourned thereafter as a poignant signifier of mortality. In the dramatic
monologue "Ulysses" (1842), begun in 1833 just a few days after Hallam's
untimely death, Tennyson draws on Homer's and Dante's accounts of
Ulysses's decision to undertake a final sea voyage as a way of articulating
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