Alfred and Arthur

How about some real poetry, eh? Here’s the end section of Tennyson’s Morte d’Arthur. Now, I am by no means an expert on poetry, but I have read my fair share. When Tennyson is good, it truly connects with me. Shivers up the spine, a shake of the head, glorious frustration, that sort of thing. A hint of a bolder (better?) world. A craving for that glimpse of the lost age, the Age of Heroes. How can a man possibly write like that? Envoy and ambassador from such an Age or merely a mortal gifted with some special sight?


…


Here ended Hall, and our last light, that long
Had wink’d and threaten’d darkness, flared and fell:
At which the Parson, sent to sleep with sound,
And waked with silence, grunted ‘Good!’ but we
Sat rapt: it was the tone with which he read –
Perhaps some modern touches here and there
Redeem’d it from the charge of nothingness –
Or else we loved the man, and prized his work;
I know not: but we sitting, as I said,
The cock crew loud; as at that time of year
The lusty bird takes every hour for dawn:
Then Francis, muttering, like a man ill-used
‘There now – that’s nothing!’ drew a little back
And drove his heel into the smoulder’d log,
That sent a blast of sparkles up the flue:
And so to bed; where yet in sleep I seem’d
To sail with Arthur under looming shores,
Point after point; till on to dawn, when dreams
Begin to feel the truth and stir of day,
To me, methought, who waited with a crowd,
There came a bark that, blowing forward, bore
King Arthur, like a modern gentleman
Of stateliest port; and all the people cried,
‘Arthur is come again: he cannot die.’
Then those that stood upon the hills behind
Repeated – ‘Come again, and thrice as fair;’
And, further inland, voices echo’d – ‘Come
With all good things, and war shall be no more.’
At this a hundred bells began to peal,
That with the sound I woke, and heard indeed
The clear church-bells ring in the Christmas-morn.