Glossing Tennyson: The Platypus Reads Part XCVI

   And answer made King Arthur, breathing hard:
'My end draws nigh; 'tis time that I were gone.
Make broad thy shoulders to receive my weight,
And bear me to the margin; yet I fear
My wound hath taken cold, and I shall die.'

Now that Bedivere has passed the test of obedience he can fulfill Arthur’s words: “For thou, the latest-left of all my knights,/In whom should meet the offices of all.” Bedivere has “upheld” Arthur from the beginning when he fought in the Twelve Battles and defended him against accusations before King Leodogran.  It is fitting that he should now uphold him in a literal fashion as well.  This scene is also interesting given its parallels with J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Return of the King” where Sam bares Frodo up the slopes of Mount Doom.  In addition, in each story we see an object of mystic power that must be cast away, into water or lava, in spite of its obvious attractions.

   So saying, from the pavement he half rose,
Slowly, with pain, reclining on his arm,
And looking wistfully with wide blue eyes
As in a picture. Him Sir Bedivere
Remorsefully regarded through his tears,
And would have spoken, but he found not words;
Then took with care, and kneeling on one knee,
O'er both his shoulders drew the languid hands,
And rising bore him through the place of tombs.

   But, as he walked, King Arthur panted hard,
Like one that feels a nightmare on his bed
When all the house is mute. So sighed the King,
Muttering and murmuring at his ear, 'Quick, quick!
I fear it is too late, and I shall die.'

Tennyson worried that he had made his Arthur so “perfect” as to appear more than human.  Tennyson’s son tells us that his father explicitly tried to guard against misinterpretation of character by inserting the declaimer that Arthur was “Ideal manhood closed in real man” into the epilog “To the Queen.”  Here also Tennyson makes sure to give us a humanized Arthur who has real weaknesses and knows the fear of death.  On the other hand, Arthur is already undergoing a kind of death, from flesh and blood person to arise again as the mythic “once and future king.”  It is significant that in an age of doubt that Tennyson envisions Arthur as what C.S. Lewis calls a “true myth.”  Arthur’s actions have mythic power and significance but they are still enacted by a real, flesh and blood figure.  Thus Tennyson portrays Arthur as most human at his most legendary moment.  In light of this, we should understand that Tennyson’s Arthur is a Christ-figure, but he is also a type of the ideal Christian who, though imperfect, still imitates Christ.

   But the other swiftly strode from ridge to ridge,
Clothed with his breath, and looking, as he walked,
Larger than human on the frozen hills.
He heard the deep behind him, and a cry
Before. His own thought drove him like a goad.
Dry clashed his harness in the icy caves
And barren chasms, and all to left and right
The bare black cliff clanged round him, as he based
His feet on juts of slippery crag that rang
Sharp-smitten with the dint of armed heels--
And on a sudden, lo! the level lake,
And the long glories of the winter moon.

Like Tolkien’s Sam Gamgee, Bedivere in serving the legendary King Arthur becomes for a moment a figure of legend himself.  The cold and bareness of the land are symbols of death. 

   Then saw they how there hove a dusky barge,
Dark as a funeral scarf from stem to stern,
Beneath them; and descending they were ware
That all the decks were dense with stately forms,
Black-stoled, black-hooded, like a dream--by these
Three Queens with crowns of gold: and from them rose
A cry that shivered to the tingling stars,
And, as it were one voice, an agony
Of lamentation, like a wind that shrills
All night in a waste land, where no one comes,
Or hath come, since the making of the world.

Again, we should note the parallel with the works of J.R.R. Tolkien.  Just as the grievously wounded Frodo cannot remain in Middle Earth once his great task is finished and must sail across the sea to a mystic island where he will find healing, so Arthur must pass over to Avilion.  Tennyson’s “black barge,” however, stands in contrast to Tolkien’s “white ship,” though both are an image of death (Tolkien makes this explicit by making his white ships in the form of swans, a bird associated with death).  The three queens are from “The Coming of Arthur” where it was foretold that they would help the king in his hour of need.  There the queens appear in three colors; green, blue, and red for the theological virtues of Faith, Hope, and Love.  Star imagery is important throughout “The Idylls of the King” and tends to follow the idea of “the music of the spheres” where God’s love causes the angelic intelligences within the crystalline spheres to move in orbit about his throne thus causing a music as the spheres rub against one another (like a wet finger on a filled crystal glass).  The three Queens cries “that shivered to the tingling stars” thus symbolize effectiveness of the three virtues in communicating with the heavenly realms.

   Then murmured Arthur, 'Place me in the barge.'
So to the barge they came. There those three Queens
Put forth their hands, and took the King, and wept.

Arthur, facing death, is committed into the keeping of the three virtues.  His our has passed, but as the apostle Paul testifies, Faith, Hope, and Love remain forever.

But she, that rose the tallest of them all
And fairest, laid his head upon her lap,
And loosed the shattered casque, and chafed his hands,

Paul tells us that the greatest of the three theological virtues is Love.  Elsewhere in the apostle’s writings, he identifies the helmet with salvation.  Even Arthur with all his purity and greatness cannot save himself and must ultimately rest in the Love of God.  The wounding of Arthur’s head may also be a reference to religious doubt.  Where the mind fails to bring assurance of salvation, Love may provide it.

And called him by his name, complaining loud,
And dropping bitter tears against a brow
Striped with dark blood: for all his face was white
And colourless, and like the withered moon
Smote by the fresh beam of the springing east;

Like the moon, Arthur is only a reflection of the divine light, not the Light itself.  However, this scene should put us in mind of another great image of Christ, the Pieta.  The tallest queen holds the bloodied body of Arthur in her arms much as Mary holds the body of Christ in Michelangelo’s famous sculpture.

And all his greaves and cuisses dashed with drops
Of onset; and the light and lustrous curls--
That made his forehead like a rising sun
High from the dais-throne--were parched with dust;
Or, clotted into points and hanging loose,
Mixed with the knightly growth that fringed his lips.
So like a shattered column lay the King;
Not like that Arthur who, with lance in rest,
From spur to plume a star of tournament,
Shot through the lists at Camelot, and charged
Before the eyes of ladies and of kings.

This is perhaps one of the saddest and most powerful passages in “The Idylls of the King.”  In reminding us of Arthur’s glorious beginning, Tennyson prepares us for the king’s farewell speech.