Idylls of the King
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The Idylls of the King is a sequence of poems by Alfred, Lord Tennyson that expresses the legend of King Arthur in terms of the psychology and concerns of nineteenth-century England. Based on Sir Thomas Malory's previous account of the legend, it treats the origin of King Arthur, his conquest over the Saxons, the origin of Excaliber, Merlin, the Lady of the Lake, the knights of the Round Table such as Balin, Pelleas, Galahad, Perceval, Bors, and Gareth, the affair between Lancelot and Guinevere, the decline of Camelot and finally "The Passing of Arthur", the poem Tennyson wrote first as Mort d'Arthur, and which inspired the sequence. The dramatic narratives, are not an epic either in structure or tone, but take their elegaic sadness from the idylls of Theocritus: like the Alexandrian poems an idealized, distant, pastoral review of a lost time. When the poems were published as a set there was a dedication to one, unidentified at first,
- And indeed He seems to me
- Scarce other than my king's ideal knight,
whom in the course of its development, the reader finds is the late Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha: the Idylls of the King are often read as an allegory of the social conflicts and malaises of mid-Victorian era United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland.
There are twelve poems in the suite. For the first poem written, "Morte d'Arthur" Tennyson adapted the well-known title of Sir Thomas Malory's prose romance, which had fixed the imagery of Arthur in the English imagination. The downfall of Arthur lies in the adultury of Queen Guinevere and Lancelot, and this signals the inevitable decay and fall of Arthur's kingdom.