ABSTRACT
ROBERT PATTISON, IN DISCUSSING THE TRADITIONAL ASPECTOF THE Idylls of the King, observes that the Idylls “have continuity withthe rest of Tennyson’s work: he drew on the tradition of his own poetry for the Idylls as freely as he drew upon the classics” (136). In the Idylls of the King the classical themes of Tennyson’s battle poems attain their culmination in a work of epic scope and greatness. Fundamental to the Idylls is the primary theme of the ancient epics: the difficulty of controlling heroic passion. “The King is the complete man,” Tennyson commented to William Allingham, “the Knights are the passions” (Ricks, The Poems of Tennyson 3.259). As Achilles, Odysseus, and Aeneas all fail in the end to restrain the vehemence of their explosive tempers, Tennyson’s Arthur fails in the concluding books of the Idylls to control the volatile passions of his Knights. Hallam Tennyson writes that “if Epic unity is looked for in the Idylls, we find it not in the wrath of an Achilles, nor in the wanderings of an Ulysses, but in the unending war of humanity in all ages,—the world-wide war of Sense and Soul…” (Memoir 2:130). The theme of “Sense at war with Soul” (“To the Queen” 37) is closer to “the wrath of an Achilles” than Hallam Tennyson’s comment would seem to indicate. Achilles’s wrath, both his wrath at Agamemnon that causes him to misuse his power by abstaining from battle, and his wrath at Hector that rages in uncontrolled violence, results from the inability of his soul, or reason, to regulate his passion. Arthur, as the “complete man,” is able, by virtue of his strength of soul, to harness his passions so that they benefit the kingdom. His subjects, so long as they are indeed subject to his ideal and example, are able to channel their fervor into chivalrous pursuits, but in the end their sensual fires run riot and destroy Arthur’s realm.
