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Peter G. Epps19
th
-C Arthurian Long Verse (Independent Study)Critical EssayDr. James Barcus5/14/07
Dying by Verses:Lancelot’s Metrical Being-Towards-Death in Morris’s “King Arthur’s Tomb”
 William Morris may or may not be remembered as a readable, popular writer of long verse; certainly his experiments with Icelandic verse forms in English are of mixedquality. Morris was, however, an inveterate innovator and experimentalist, keenly awareof the possibilities of various verse-forms influencing the development of poeticnarratives. In “The Defence of Guenevere,” Morris works with a triad stanza form whichreflects, albeit distantly, the form of some of the oldest Arthurian works known, whilealso allowing for a breathless refrain and a tumbling, off-balance narrative voice whichmatches the desperation of the Queen on trial for her life. In “King Arthur’s Tomb,”Morris chooses a different form, the measured and familiar ballad stanza. In both thischosen meter and the language of Lancelot’s musings, Morris structures the time of thepoem around Lancelot’s approach to the Queen, both mentally and geographically; thisapproach is, moreover, synonymous with Lancelot’s approach to death.The Queen’s synonymy with death, for Lancelot, is figured in several ways fromthe first. The narrator invokes a familiar image of Lilith (often referred to in nineteenthcentury fictions as twining her hair around a lover’s throat or heart, to slay him) asLancelot rides across the waste land toward Arthur’s tomb and Guinevere, sayingThis he knew also; that some fingers twine,Not only in a man’s hair, even his heart,
 
EPPS -- 2(Making him good or bad, I mean,) but in his life,Skies, earth, men’s looks and deeds, all that has part,Not being ourselves, in that half-sleep, half-strife,(Strange sleep, strange strife,) that men call living (12-17)Lancelot’s life, then, is caught up with Guenevere’s “fingers” whose grip him, and whosegrip has come to embody and efface all the “strange” elements of life’s “half-sleep, half-strife”: the unheard call of being for a subject to “let be” all things. Lancelot’sinauthentic living, his alienation from himself and from the world, is figured andprojected upon the reader in the indefinite reference of “Not being ourselves”; the phrasehas meaning both as referring to the condition in which being in the grip of others
leadsto
and
 follows from
“Not being ourselves,” as well as the problematical condition of things thus grasped only in alienation, things whose primary determination lies in their“Not being ourselves.” In such a state, Lancelot’s meeting with Guinevere at Arthur’stomb is already determined as death: her acceptance of his love is conditioned upon hercontinued role in alienating him from all things, especially himself; even as her rejectionof him would mean the end of all things as he now, and apparently inescapably, perceivesthem.It is this indefiniteness of reference, the inexorability of Lancelot’s approach to asubjective death, which pervades the narration of Lancelot’s progress and the language of his musings. Lancelot’s only “glad” moments are in “new memories of her” (18-19),which is ironic not only because only in a dream—false memory—could “memories” be“new.” This irony, combined with the “half-sleep” in which Lancelot lives, locates
 
EPPS -- 3Lancelot on a radically subjectivized landscape: he makes speed by approachingGuenevere, whether mentally or physically, and slows or paces himself by any otherthought. It is not a true dreamscape, as presented in the poem; rather, it is the life of alienation as a dreamlike existence, in which the world is experienced in a mannerradically different from and incoherent with practical existence. Lancelot’s fixation onGuenevere, then, shortens his life; his perception of all else is erased from memory, asGuenevere comprises all but the jumbled and forgotten.Morris weaves in further indicators of this inarticulation of memory andprojection, the instinctive noise of being called to across a distance, with Lancelot’s firstwords:“Lo,Between the trees a large moon, the wind lowsNot loud, but as a cow begins to low,Wishing for strength to make the herdsman hear (18-22)By choosing the slightly odd and archaic “wind lows” in the place of the equally fitting“blows,” Morris creates a threnody of “Lo / lows / low” which underscores Lancelot’splight. The “cow begins to low,” hoping “to make the heardsman hear,” in much thesame way as Lancelot is being called to consciousness of his surroundings, his historyand his world, but in Lancelot’s mind this is lost in a jumble. Neither in syntax nor intheme does this opening moment of the musing amount to coherence; only the repetitionindicates the structure, here, in which the nonverbal utterance “Lo!” is juxtaposed withthe sound of a dying wind, and the cry of a cow lost or in discomfort (the most likely
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