The
Idylls
is Tennyson's longest and most objective poem, designed as an oblique commentary on the temper of modern society, rather than a probing self-analysis like
In Memoriam
. In effect, as completed in twelve books, it stands as the epic of a perilously poised imperial culture with the constant threat of "tempest in the distance," a foreboding of some last great "battle in the West," and an almost Spenglerian sense of imminent decline. But it deals less in epic realism than in the matter of romance, allegory, and symbolism. As its epilogue "To the Queen" suggests, it is meant as a tale ''New-old, and shadowing Sense at war with Soul." The controlling conflict, then, resembles that of "The Palace of Art," but the resolution now is dark and ominous; Arthur represents Soul, and his ideal Camelot is ultimately destroyed by Sense, or selfish sensuality, which in final fact governs the conduct of his court, including that of the stalwart Lancelot and the beautiful, sad Guinevere. Although given to gnomic utterance, Arthur is not a nineteenth-century poet, surely not Wordsworth (except in Tennyson's calculus of greatness), and the other characters, though more recognizably human than the King, have no clear Victorian referents. Yet their deportment and moral responses apparently engage the poet-narrator's troubled modern judgment, sometimes his latent sympathy with Sense, and often his deepest personal fears.
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Early in
In Memoriam
the elegist holds it "half a sin" to declare his inmost grief in words, for words, he believes, "half-reveal / And half-conceal the Soul within." In his many monologues, however, Tennyson welcomed the mediation of ambivalent language as a means of expressing, hiding, and reassigning his private feelings. Some of these pieces, to be surelike the satiric "St. Simeon Stylites" or the exercises in Northern dialectseem as objective as Browning's greatest poems, involving, as they do, a sharply drawn individualized protagonist quite unlike the composing poet, a distinct setting, and an implied auditor. But others, especially those on Greek themes, distance and reshape moods which Tennyson will neither admit nor deny as wholly his own.
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Each of these is intended as a reading less of character than of emotionregret or resolvesuch as the poet may have felt at the time of composition, but set now in the remote context of ancient legend. "Tiresias" may register Tennyson's political forebodings, and "Demeter and Persephone" his religious aspiration, but an old mythology protectively clothes the sentiments of each, which would hardly, he said, have been so acceptable "in modern garb." "Tithonus" may be taken as a
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