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 shiver'd to the tingling stars,* And, as it were one voice, an agony Of lamentation, like a wind, that shrills * In some over-fastidious moods, one might be inclined to charge A cry that shivered to the tingling stars, with a touch of that exaggeration which belongs to the " spasmodic school;" but the cry comes from a company of spirits, amid mountains whose natural power of echo is heightened by the silence of night, the clearness of the winter air, and the hardening effect of frost. Such a cry at such a time, and in such a place, would thrill from rock to rock, from summit to summit, till it seemed to pierce the sky in a hurtling storm of multitudinous arrowy sounds, and die away in infinitely distant pulsations among the stars. In the following lines, where the agony of lamentation is compared to A wind that shrills All night in a waste land, where no one comes, Or hath come, since the making of the world,— the passage italicised may seem at first to add nothing to the force of the comparison, as the shrillness of the wind would not be greater in an uninhabited place than anywhere else in open ground. But the mournfulness of the feeling a man would experience in such a place, from the sense of utter isolation and sterility, is blended with the naturally sad wail of the wind over a wide waste, and the addition thus becomes no mere completion of a thought of which only part is wanted for the illustration— though that were allowable enough, according to ordinary poetic usage,—but gives a heightening of sentiment without which the illustration itself would be incomplete and less impressive.— Brimley. All night in a waste land, where no one comes, Then murmur'd Arthur, "Place me in the barge," And to the barge they came. Queens There those three Put forth their hands, and took the King, and wept. But she, that rose the tallest of them all And fairest, laid his head upon her lap, And loosed the shatter'd casque, and chafed his hands, And dropping bitter tears against his brow Smote by the fresh beam of the springing east; That made his forehead like a rising sun High from the däis-throne—were parch'd with dust: Mix'd with the knightly growth that fringed his lips. * Greaves, armour for the legs. † Cuisses, armour for the thighs. Onset, the cause for the result, by metonymy. The passage in which Arthur is described as dying in the arms of the mourning Queen, is a fine instance of a poetical use .t Then loudly cried the bold Sir Bedivere, And slowly answered Arthur from the barge: "The old order changeth, yielding place to new, And God fulfils himself in many ways, of simile and figure. The moon fading in the early morning, the dazzling brightness of the rising sun, the shattered column, the glancing flight of a shooting star, bring before the mind not only the dying King, pale and bleeding, but the contrast between his present weakness and the glory and triumphs of his chival rous and brilliant life. In a few lines his whole story is told: it is not merely a dying warrior who lies before us, but the strength, the state, the splendour, and enjoyment of his past life, flash before the imagination, and deepen the sadness and humiliation of his defeat and death.. Brimley. Tennyson, in his Palace of Art, makes the dying Arthur, attended by the queens, one of the scenes represented on the arras with which the rooms of the palace were hung: "Mythic Uther's deeply-wounded son In some fair space of sloping greens Lay, dozing in the vale of Avalon, And watch'd by weeping queens."-Editor. Lest one good custom should corrupt the world. I have lived my life, and that which I have done Pray for my soul. More things are wrought by prayer Than this world dreams of. Wherefore, let thy voice If, knowing God, they lift not hands of prayer Where falls not hail, or rain, or any snow, So said he, and the barge with oar and sail Moved from the brink, like some full-breasted swan That, fluting a wild carol ere her death, Ruffles her pure cold plume, and takes the flood With swarthy webs. Long stood Sir Bedivere Look'd one black dot against the verge of dawn, Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red, Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed * This poem was conceived and chiefly written in a wood that skirts the Arno, near Florence, and on a day when that tempestuous wind, whose temperature is at once mild and animating, was collecting the vapours which pour down the autumnal rains. They began, as I foresaw, at sunset, with a violent tempest of hail and rain, attended by that magnificent thunder and lightning peculiar to the Cisalpine regions. The phenomenon alluded to at the conclusion of the third stanza is well known to naturalists. The vegetation at the bottom of the sea, of rivers, and of lakes, sympathizes with that of the land in the change of seasons, and is consequently influenced the winds which announce it. |