For many a petty king ere Arthur came

Ruled in this isle, and ever waging war

Each upon the other, wasted all the land;

And still from time to time the heathen host

Swarm'd overseas, and harried what was left.

And so there grew great tracts of wilderness,

Wherein the beast was ever more and more,

But man was less and less, till Arthur came.

The excerpt above is from Tennyson's "The Coming of Arthur," which is a section from his book-length poem Idylls of the King. And because I'm imagining that I might be the only person in the world who is, at this moment, reading the poetry of Tennyson, I thought I'd share a scrap with you. At least now I can pretend that two of us are reading it.

The book that I am copying from is a small, musty volume containing only part of Idylls. The edition, copyrighted in 1903, opens with a stuffy pedagogical discussion by "Willis Boughton, Ph.D., Teacher of English in Erasmus Hall High School, New York City," and the flyleaf is marked with "Dorothy Traxler, Wyoming Seminary, Kingston, Penna." In other words, it's a schoolbook, from the long-ago days when Tennyson was a high school staple.

Tom found this copy last week in a free-for-the-taking box outside a junk shop in Southwest Harbor, Maine. Although I already own a complete Tennyson, I was loath to drop the book back into the stack of 1970s gardening manuals and unreadable British thrillers. After all, if I didn't take it home, who would? Nonetheless, in many ways it's a dislikable little tome, stodgy and smelly; and if I were a high school student, I wouldn't be a bit excited about being assigned to read Willis Boughton, Ph.D.'s, explanation of Tennyson's scansion techniques: "Note the solemn weirdness produced in this verse by the five successive accents and the emphasis produced in the following verses by the distribution of the accents." I can never remember the names of any of the metrical forms, and my eyes roll back into my head whenever someone starts talking about dactyls. I can hear dactyls perfectly, and I like to write them too. But I don't want to talk about them. (I'm not saying this is a good attitude to take toward prosody; I'm sure yours is far more intelligent.)

But back to Tennyson. What do you think of those lines I quoted? I like them quite a lot, which surprises me because I've had a chip on my shoulder about Tennyson ever since college, when a particularly smarmy professor used to recite passages from Idylls in a mellifluous southern accent, with the expectation that his female students would swoon in admiration. Those of us who did not find ourselves automatically swooning were taken aback by a more ambitious young scholar's calculated use of swooning to achieve high classroom status. Subsequently, this same teacher recommended that I not be allowed to concentrate in creative writing because I didn't have any talent, although as far as I know he had never read anything creative I'd ever written. So you can see that my feelings about Tennyson may have been colored by exterior circumstance.