Idylls of the King by Alfred Lord Tennyson (best books to read for self development txt) 📕

my pleasure had I seen.

We needs must love the highest when we see it,

Not Lancelot, nor another.’

 

Here her hand

Grasped, made her vail her eyes: she looked and saw

The novice, weeping, suppliant, and said to her,

‘Yea, little maid, for am I not forgiven?’

Then glancing up beheld the holy nuns

All round her, weeping; and her heart was loosed

Within her, and she wept with these and said,

 

‘Ye know me then, that wicked one, who broke

The vast design and purpose of the King.

O shut me round with narrowing nunnery-walls,

Meek maidens, from the voices crying “shame.”

I must not scorn myself: he loves me still.

Let no one dream but that he loves me still.

So let me, if you do not shudder at me,

Nor shun to call me sister, dwell with you;

Wear black and white, and be a nun like you,

Fast with your fasts, not feasting with your feasts;

Grieve with your griefs, not grieving at your joys,

But not rejoicing; mingle with your rites;

Pray and be prayed for; lie before your shrines;

Do each low office of your holy house;

Walk your dim cloister, and distribute dole

To poor sick people, richer in His eyes

Who ransomed us, and haler too than I;

And treat their loathsome hurts and heal mine own;

And so wear out in almsdeed and in prayer

The sombre close of that voluptuous day,

Which wrought the ruin of my lord the King.’

 

She said: they took her to themselves; and she

Still hoping, fearing ‘is it yet too late?’

Dwelt with them, till in time their Abbess died.

Then she, for her good deeds and her pure life,

And for the power of ministration in her,

And likewise for the high rank she had borne,

Was chosen Abbess, there, an Abbess, lived

For three brief years, and there, an Abbess, past

To where beyond these voices there is peace.

 

The Passing of Arthur

 

That story which the bold Sir Bedivere,

First made and latest left of all the knights,

Told, when the man was no more than a voice

In the white winter of his age, to those

With whom he dwelt, new faces, other minds.

 

For on their march to westward, Bedivere,

Who slowly paced among the slumbering host,

Heard in his tent the moanings of the King:

 

‘I found Him in the shining of the stars,

I marked Him in the flowering of His fields,

But in His ways with men I find Him not.

I waged His wars, and now I pass and die.

O me! for why is all around us here

As if some lesser god had made the world,

But had not force to shape it as he would,

Till the High God behold it from beyond,

And enter it, and make it beautiful?

Or else as if the world were wholly fair,

But that these eyes of men are dense and dim,

And have not power to see it as it is:

Perchance, because we see not to the close;—

For I, being simple, thought to work His will,

And have but stricken with the sword in vain;

And all whereon I leaned in wife and friend

Is traitor to my peace, and all my realm

Reels back into the beast, and is no more.

My God, thou hast forgotten me in my death;

Nay—God my Christ—I pass but shall not die.’

 

Then, ere that last weird battle in the west,

There came on Arthur sleeping, Gawain killed

In Lancelot’s war, the ghost of Gawain blown

Along a wandering wind, and past his ear

Went shrilling, ‘Hollow, hollow all delight!

Hail, King! tomorrow thou shalt pass away.

Farewell! there is an isle of rest for thee.

And I am blown along a wandering wind,

And hollow, hollow, hollow all delight.’

And fainter onward, like wild birds that change

Their season in the night and wail their way

From cloud to cloud, down the long wind the dream

Shrilled; but in going mingled with dim cries

Far in the moonlit haze among the hills,

As of some lonely city sacked by night,

When all is lost, and wife and child with wail

Pass to new lords; and Arthur woke and called,

‘Who spake? A dream. O light upon the wind,

Thine, Gawain, was the voice—are these dim cries

Thine? or doth all that haunts the waste and wild

Mourn, knowing it will go along with me?’

 

This heard the bold Sir Bedivere and spake:

‘O me, my King, let pass whatever will,

Elves, and the harmless glamour of the field;

But in their stead thy name and glory cling

To all high places like a golden cloud

For ever: but as yet thou shalt not pass.

Light was Gawain in life, and light in death

Is Gawain, for the ghost is as the man;

And care not thou for dreams from him, but rise—

I hear the steps of Modred in the west,

And with him many of thy people, and knights

Once thine, whom thou hast loved, but grosser grown

Than heathen, spitting at their vows and thee.

Right well in heart they know thee for the King.

Arise, go forth and conquer as of old.’

 

Then spake King Arthur to Sir Bedivere:

‘Far other is this battle in the west

Whereto we move, than when we strove in youth,

And brake the petty kings, and fought with Rome,

Or thrust the heathen from the Roman wall,

And shook him through the north. Ill doom is mine

To war against my people and my knights.

The king who fights his people fights himself.

And they my knights, who loved me once, the stroke

That strikes them dead is as my death to me.

Yet let us hence, and find or feel a way

Through this blind haze, which ever since I saw

One lying in the dust at Almesbury,

Hath folded in the passes of the world.’

 

Then rose the King and moved his host by night,

And ever pushed Sir Modred, league by league,

Back to the sunset bound of Lyonnesse—

A land of old upheaven from the abyss

By fire, to sink into the abyss again;

Where fragments of forgotten peoples dwelt,

And the long mountains ended in a coast

Of ever-shifting sand, and far away

The phantom circle of a moaning sea.

There the pursuer could pursue no more,

And he that fled no further fly the King;

And there, that day when the great light of heaven

Burned at his lowest in the rolling year,

On the waste sand by the waste sea they closed.

Nor ever yet had Arthur fought a fight

Like this last, dim, weird battle of the west.

A deathwhite mist slept over sand and sea:

Whereof the chill, to him who breathed it, drew

Down with his blood, till all his heart was cold

With formless fear; and even on Arthur fell

Confusion, since he saw not whom he fought.

For friend and foe were shadows in the mist,

And friend slew friend not knowing whom he slew;

And some had visions out of golden youth,

And some beheld the faces of old ghosts

Look in upon the battle; and in the mist

Was many a noble deed, many a base,

And chance and craft and strength in single fights,

And ever and anon with host to host

Shocks, and the splintering spear, the hard mail hewn,

Shield-breakings, and the clash of brands, the crash

Of battleaxes on shattered helms, and shrieks

After the Christ, of those who falling down

Looked up for heaven, and only saw the mist;

And shouts of heathen and the traitor knights,

Oaths, insults, filth, and monstrous blasphemies,

Sweat, writhings, anguish, labouring of the lungs

In that close mist, and cryings for the light,

Moans of the dying, and voices of the dead.

 

Last, as by some one deathbed after wail

Of suffering, silence follows, or through death

Or deathlike swoon, thus over all that shore,

Save for some whisper of the seething seas,

A dead hush fell; but when the dolorous day

Grew drearier toward twilight falling, came

A bitter wind, clear from the North, and blew

The mist aside, and with that wind the tide

Rose, and the pale King glanced across the field

Of battle: but no man was moving there;

Nor any cry of Christian heard thereon,

Nor yet of heathen; only the wan wave

Brake in among dead faces, to and fro

Swaying the helpless hands, and up and down

Tumbling the hollow helmets of the fallen,

And shivered brands that once had fought with Rome,

And rolling far along the gloomy shores

The voice of days of old and days to be.

 

Then spake King Arthur to Sir Bedivere,

And whiter than the mist that all day long

Had held the field of battle was the King:

 

‘Hearest thou this great voice that shakes the world,

And wastes the narrow realm whereon we move,

And beats upon the faces of the dead,

My dead, as though they had not died for me?—

O Bedivere, for on my heart hath fallen

Confusion, till I know not what I am,

Nor whence I am, nor whether I be King.

Behold, I seem but King among the dead.’

 

Then spake the bold Sir Bedivere: ‘My King,

King everywhere! and so the dead have kings,

There also will I worship thee as King.

Yet still thy life is whole, and still I live

Who love thee; but who hates thee, he that brought

The heathen back among us, yonder stands,

Modred, unharmed, the traitor of thine house.’

 

Then spake the King: ‘My house hath been my doom.

But call not thou this traitor of my house

Who hath but dwelt beneath one roof with me.

My house are rather they who sware my vows,

Yea, even while they brake them, owned me King.

And well for thee, saying in my dark hour,

When all the purport of my throne hath failed,

That quick or dead thou holdest me for King.

King am I, whatsoever be their cry;

And one last act of kinghood shalt thou see

Yet, ere I pass.’ And uttering this the King

Made at the man: then Modred smote his liege

Hard on that helm which many a heathen sword

Had beaten thin; while Arthur at one blow,

Striking the last stroke with Excalibur,

Slew him, and all but slain himself, he fell.

 

So all day long the noise of battle rolled

Among the mountains by the winter sea;

Until King Arthur’s Table, man by man,

Had fallen in Lyonnesse about their lord,

King Arthur. Then, because his wound was deep,

The bold Sir Bedivere uplifted him,

And bore him to a chapel nigh the field,

A broken chancel with a broken cross,

That stood on a dark strait of barren land:

On one side lay the Ocean, and on one

Lay a great water, and the moon was full.

 

Then spake King Arthur to Sir Bedivere:

‘The sequel of today unsolders all

The goodliest fellowship of famous knights

Whereof this world holds record. Such a sleep

They sleep—the men I loved. I think that we

Shall never more, at any future time,

Delight our souls with talk of knightly deeds,

Walking about the gardens and the halls

Of Camelot, as in the days that were.

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,

I am so deeply smitten through the helm

That without help I cannot last till morn.

Thou therefore take my brand Excalibur,

Which was my pride: for thou rememberest how

In those old days, one summer noon, an arm

Rose up from out the