Chapter IX "THE PASSING OF ARTHUR"
FOUR hundred years after Malory wrote his book, another English
writer told the tales of Arthur anew. This was the poet Alfred,
Lord Tennyson. He told them in poetry.
Tennyson calls his poems the Idylls of the King. Idyll means a
short poem about some simple and beautiful subject. The king
that Tennyson sings of is the great King Arthur.
Tennyson takes his stories, some from The Mabinogion, some from
Malory, some from other books. He has told them in very
beautiful English, and it is the English such as we speak to-day.
He has smoothed away much that strikes us as rough and coarse in
the old stories, and his poems are as different from the old
stories as a polished diamond is different from the stone newly
brought out of the mine. Yet we miss something of strength and
vigor. The Arthur of the Idylls is not the Arthur of The
Mabinogion nor of Malory. Indeed, Tennyson makes him "almost too
good to be true": he is "Ideal manhood closed in real man,
rather than that gray king" of old.
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