Idylls Of The King Quotes

Though much is taken, much abides; and though We are not now that strength which in old days Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are; One equal temper of heroic hearts, Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

Pray for my soul. More things are wrought by prayer Than this world dreams of: Wherefore, let thy voice, Rise like a fountain for me night and day.

In the Spring a young man's fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love.

This madness has come on us for our sins.

I fain would follow love, if that could be; I needs must follow death, who calls for me; Call and I follow, I follow! let me die.

We have The Idylls of the King in English class this term. I like some things in them, but I detest Tennyson's Arthur. If I had been Guinevere I'd have boxed his ears - but I wouldn't have been unfaithful to him for Lancelot, who was just as odious in a different way. As for Geraint, if I had been Enid I'd have bitten him. These 'patient Griseldas' deserve all they get.

While he gazed The beauty of her flesh abashed the boy, As though it were the beauty of her soul: For as the base man, judging of the good, Puts his own baseness in him by default Of will and nature, so did Pelleas lend All the young beauty of his own soul to hers

And Gareth bowed himself with all obedience to the King, and wrought All kind of service with a noble ease That graced the lowliest act in doing it.

I know not if I know what true love is, But if I know, then, if I love not him, I know there is none other I can love

In her right hand the lily, in her left The letter--all her bright hair streaming down-- And all the coverlid was cloth of gold Drawn to her waist, and she herself in white All but her face, and that clear-featured face Was lovely, for she did not seem as dead, But fast asleep, and lay as though she smiled.

fairy changeling lay the mage;

And I, the last, go forth companionless, And the days darken round me, and the years, Among new men, strange faces, other minds.

Arthur spake, 'Behold, for these have sworn   To wage my wars, and worship me their King;   The old order changeth, yielding place to new;   And we that fight for our fair father Christ,

Ah my God, what might I not have made of thy fair world, had I but loved thy highest creature here? It was my duty to have loved the highest: It surely was my profit had I known: It would have been my pleasure had I seen. We needs must love the highest when we see it, Not Lancelot, nor another.

One rose, a rose to gather by and by,   One rose, a rose, to gather and to wear,   No rose but one—what other rose had I?   One rose, my rose; a rose that will not die,

scarlet, and the pearls; and all the knights,

No diamonds! for God's love, a little air!

But there was heard among the holy hymns A voice as of the waters, for she dwells Down in a deep‐ calm, whatsoever storms may shake the world

after all had eaten, then Geraint,   For now the wine made summer in his veins,   Let his eye rove in following, or rest   On Enid at her lowly handmaid-work,

Tell thou the King and all his liars, that I Have founded my Round Table in the North, And whatsoever his own knights have sworn My knights have sworn the counter to it -- and say My tower is full of harlots, like his court, But mine are worthier, seeing thy profess To be none other than themselves -- and say My knights are all adulterers like his own, But mine are truer, seeing they profess To be none other; and say his hour is come, The heathen are upon him, his long lance Broken, and his Excalibur a straw.

Alex thought of the passage the Bridegroom had quoted from Idylls of the King, the sinister weight of the words. If she remembered right, that passage was about Geraint’s romance with Enid, a man driven mad by jealousy though his wife had remained faithful. It didn’t exactly inspire confidence. Rather die than doubt.

And while he waited in the castle court, The voice of Enid, Yniol's daughter, rang Clear through the open casement of the hall, Singing; and as the sweet voice of a bird, Heard by the lander in a lonely isle, Moves him to think what kind of bird it is That sings so delicately clear, and make Conjecture of the plumage and the form; So the sweet voice of Enid moved Geraint; And made him like a man abroad at morn When first the liquid note beloved of men Comes flying over many a windy wave To Britain, and in April suddenly Breaks from a coppice gemmed with green and red, And he suspends his converse with a friend, Or it may be the labour of his hands, To think or say, 'There is the nightingale;' So fared it with Geraint, who thought and said, 'Here, by God's grace, is the one voice for me.

Out of the smoke, at once I leap from Satan's foot to Peter's knee Gareth and Lynette

Ye think the rustic cackle of your bourg The murmur of the world! The Marriage of Geraint

Then said the monk, 'Poor men, when yule is cold,

And when she gained her castle, upsprang the bridge,   Down rang the grate of iron through the groove,   And he was left alone in open field.

bushless downs,

holpen

Wroth

Sir Lancelot and his charger, and a spear

And even the Holy Quest, and all but her;

rathe

squire!

chief of knights:

And Dagonet answered, 'Ay, and when the land   Was freed, and the Queen false, ye set yourself   To babble about him, all to show your wit

wont,

kith and kin,

King, duke, earl,   Count, baron

lineaments.

tost

And thither wending there that night they bode.

Sir Lavaine did well and worshipfully;   He bore a knight

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

cuirass

gilded parapet

Not such his wont,

Bare, as a wild wave in the wide North-sea,

The vow that binds too strictly snaps itself. - Tristram to Queen Isolt, The Last Tournament

The thrall in person may be free in soul. Gareth and Lynette

As Love, if Love be perfect, casts out fear, So Hate, if Hate be perfect, casts out fear. - Merlin and Vivian

And so there grew great tracts of wilderness, Wherin the beast was ever more and more, But man was less and less, till Arthur came.

Rapt in this fancy of his Table Round, And swearing men to vows impossible, To make them like himself: but, friend, to me He is all fault who hath no fault at all: For who loves me must have a touch of earth;

As a result of Malory’s plangent and often elaborate prose, the song of Arthur has never ended. Le Morte d’Arthur inspired both Milton and Dryden with dreams of Arthurian epic, and in the nineteenth century Tennyson revived the themes of Malory in Idylls of the King. William Morris wrote The Defence of Guenevere , and Algernon Swinburne composed Tristram of Liones. The Round Table was reconstituted in the libraries of nineteenth-century England.

What happiness to reign a lonely king, Vext — O ye stars that shudder over me, O earth that soundest hollow under me, Vext with waste dreams? for saving I be joined To her that is the fairest under heaven, I seem as nothing in the mighty world, And cannot will my will, nor work my work Wholly, nor make myself in mine own realm Victor and lord. But were I joined with her, Then might we live together as one life, And reigning with one will in everything Have power on this dark land to lighten it, And power on this dead world to make it live.

O purblind race of miserable men, How many among us at this very hour Do forge a life-long trouble for ourselves, By taking true for false, or false for true; Here, thro' the feeble twilight of this world Groping, how many, until we pass and reach That other, where we see as we are seen. Geraint and Enid

I myself beheld the King Charge at the head of all his Table Round, And all his legions crying Christ and him, And break them; and I saw him, after, stand High on a heap of slain, from spur to plume Red as the rising sun with heathen blood, And seeing me, with a great voice he cried, "They are broken, they are broken!" for the King, However mild he seems at home, nor cares For triumph in our mimic wars, the jousts— For if his own knight cast him down, he laughs Saying, his knights are better men than he— Yet in this heathen war the fire of God Fills him: I never saw his like: there lives No greater leader.

They served their use, their time; for every knight   Believed himself a greater than himself,   And every follower eyed him as a God;   Till he, being lifted up beyond himself,   Did mightier deeds than elsewise he had done,   And so the realm was made; but then their vows—   First mainly through that sullying of our Queen—   Began to gall the knighthood, asking whence   Had Arthur right to bind them to himself?

Turn, Fortune, turn thy wheel and lower the proud; Turn thy wild wheel thro' sunshine, storm and cloud; Thy wheel and thee we neither love nor hate. Turn, Fortune, turn thy wheel with smile or frown; With that wild wheel we go not up or down; Our hoard is little, but our hearts are great. Smile and we smile, the lords of many lands; Frown and we smile, the lords of our own hands; For man is man and master of his fate. Turn, turn thy wheel above the staring crowd; Thy wheel and thou are shadows in the cloud; Thy wheel and thee we neither love nor hate. - "Enid's Song", The Marriage of Geraint

Generally, three approaches to the law codes of the ancient Near East are adduced. Some scholars see them as idyllic collections of judicial problems and solutions. Others see them as thematic guides meant to serve judges, as juridical training texts. Yet others see them as the king’s statements of self-justification to posterity or to the gods concerning the just character of his reign.9 Whether these putative “laws” indeed served a statutory purpose or, as is more commonly accepted, were statements of juridical philosophy, we may legitimately see them as reflections of wider systems of thought and ideology. When we read a particular “law,” it does not stand on its own, available for immediate interpretation, but must be understood as just one element of the culture in which it is embedded.10 Turning

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?   Alfred Lord Tennyson: Idylls of the King      

The idyll of individual independence was for the opponents of economic reform the most fearsome of prospects. For Turgot’s principal adversary in the Lit de Justice, the advocate-general Antoine-Louis Séguier, to abolish regulations would be to “abandon the certainty of the present for an uncertain future.” It would be to threaten both commerce and the way people think about themselves: “Every manufacturer, every artisan, every worker will regard himself as an isolated being, dependent on himself alone, and free to wander in all the discrepancies of an often disordered imagination; all subordination will be destroyed.” “This sort of freedom is nothing other than a true independence,” Séguier said, and “independence is a vice in the political constitution”; “this freedom would soon transform itself into license . . . this principle of wealth would become a principle of destruction, a source of disorder.”79 As J.-E.-M. Portalis, Napoleon’s minister of religion, wrote in a eulogy to Séguier, the period of Turgot’s reforms was an epoch in which traders had “a great idea of their independence and their strength,” and in which “industry was great, but disquiet was greater still.” “The spirit of discussion and criticism” had “incredible effects,” and “there was nothing constant except the perpetual change in everything.”80 In the Lit de Justice, the last poignant words were the king’s: “My intention is in no way to confound the conditions of men; I wish to reign only by justice and laws.”81

All seizures of power, no matter how ‘strong or well-meaning’ the seizers, will go the same way. That’s what power does. Meanwhile, at exactly the same time as the publication of The Lord of the Rings William Golding was bringing out his fables, Lord of the Flies (1954), and The Inheritors (1955), the meaning of which Golding conveniently summarized for commentators in a later essay, ‘Fable’, in his collection The Hot Gates: I must say that anyone who passed through those years [of World War II] without understanding that man produces evil as a bee produces honey, must have been blind or wrong in the head. (Hot Gates, p. 87) So the English choirboys, marooned on an idyllic desert island, invent murder and human sacrifice and create the ‘lord of the flies’ himself, Beelzebub; in The Inheritors our ancestors, Cro-Magnon men, exterminate the gentle and friendly Neanderthals and create an entirely false legend of ogres and cannibals to justify their actions. A very similar if more complex argument was put forward, one might add, by the other great fantasy of the 1950s, T.H. White’s The Once and Future King, a work which began like Tolkien’s with a children’s book, The Sword in the Stone (1937), but took even longer than Tolkien’s to reach termination, appearing as a whole (though still unfinished) in 1958. White’s points are too many and too self-doubting to summarize readily, but there is at least no doubt that White saw in humanity a basic urge to destruction, expressed in a work written like The Lord of the Rings, nationibus in diro bello certantibus, ‘while the nations were striving in fearful war’. Orwell, Golding, White (and several other post-war authors of fantasy and fable): the thought that they expressed in their highly different ways was that people could never be trusted, least of all if they expressed a wish for the betterment of humanity. The major disillusionment of the twentieth century has been over political good intentions, which have led only to gulags and killing fields. That is why what Gandalf says has rung true to virtually everyone who reads it – though it is, I repeat, yet one more anachronism in Middle-earth, and the greatest of them, an entirely modern conviction.

Several of the poems are based on earlier works of literature, legend, or art: “Mari ana” on Shakespeare, “The Lotos-Eaters,” “Ulysses,” and “Ti thonus” on Homer or on classical myth.

Yes, they were evil times, but in my long lifetime I have come to see that the times have always been evil, and the idyllic old days of nobility and virtue never really occurred, but are only the fantasies of poets and moralists.

hundred pounds a night. She had looked up the prices. She walked into a hyperbolic oriental extravaganza. Her bag had arrived before her. She walked in, uneasily, the wood panelling on the walls set off the scarlet fabrics. The king-size bed was lower than normal and a Ming stone carving stood in the room. She kept away, well away. She stepped out into the private walled garden with an oriental style water feature. The day was dry with a crisp chill in the air. The place was idyllic. It had a charm all its own. The sort of place she would love to bring Oliver.