matthew bevis
Tennyson has frequently been cited as the formative influence on a late Victorian
hymningof empire, but the continuation of hisIdylls of the Kingleads to poems that
stage within themselves imperial anxieties as Arthur’s rule is subjected to searching
questions. Herbert Tucker has recently observed that ‘saddest of all Victorian epics,
theIdyllsin their gloomy analytic coherence shadow with equal plangency the losses
that empire exacts and the downfall that awaits it’.^64 This plangency can be sensed
in ‘The Last Tournament’ (1871), in which Arthur’s imperial project meets with an
imperious disobedience; the King insists that his knights do not seek revenge for a
mutinous uprising, but they disobey his orders. Looking to the East, the horrors of
the Indian Mutiny are recalled; only now it is the imperial state’s violence that is
given prominence:
[they] roared
And shouted and leapt down upon the fallen;
There trampled out his face from being known,
And sank his head in mire, and slimed themselves:
Nor heard the King for their own cries, but sprang
Through open doors, and swording right and left
Men, women, on their sodden faces, hurled
The tables over and the wines, and slew
Till all the rafters rang with woman-yells,
And all the pavement streamed with massacre:
Then, echoing yell with yell, they fired the tower,
Which half that autumn night, like the live North,
Red-pulsing up through Alioth and Alcor,
Made all above it, and a hundred meres
About it, as the water Moab saw
Come round by the East, and out beyond them flushed
The long low dune, and lazy-plunging sea.So all the ways were safe from shore to shore,
But in the heart of Arthur pain was lord.^65The sprawling first sentence insists on showing us what Victoria’s little wars might
involve. The breathless pace of the violence, accentuated by verbs at the end of
run-on lines (‘sprang’, ‘hurled’, ‘slew’, ‘saw’, ‘flushed’), is matched by its savagery.
Like the other verbs, we initially expect ‘slew’ to be transitive, but the grammatical
shock as we veer into the next line gives gruesome voice to the indiscriminate nature
of the killing. What we are asked to dwell on, though, is the monosyllabic drag
of the last two lines, isolated on the page, for it is here where imperial supremacy
counts the cost of the safety it creates. The callous efficiency of ‘So’ is almost parodic
(‘so they all lived happily ever after’), before the ‘But’ records a heartbeat that has
become distempered by the order it has established.
(^64) Herbert Tucker, ‘Epic’, inA Companion to Victorian Poetry, 32.
(^65) Tennyson, ‘The Last Tournament’, inPoems of Tennyson, iii. 521–2.