“To e. FitzGerald”

Old Fitz, who from your suburb grange,    Where once I tarried for a while, Glance at the wheeling Orb of change,    And greet it with a kindly smile; Whom yet I see as there you sit    Beneath your sheltering garden-tree, And while your doves about you flit,    And plant on shoulder, hand and knee, Or on your head their rosy feet,    As if they knew your diet spares Whatever moved in that full sheet    Let down to Peter at his prayers; Who live on milk and meal and grass;    And once for ten long weeks I tried Your table of Pythagoras,    And seem’d at first ‘a thing enskied’ (As Shakespeare has it) airy-light    To float above the ways of men, Then fell from that half-spiritual height    Chill’d, till I tasted flesh again One night when earth was winter-black,    And all the heavens flash’d in frost; And on me, half-asleep, came back    That wholesome heat the blood had lost, And set me climbing icy capes    And glaciers, over which there roll’d To meet me long-arm’d vines with grapes    Of Eshcol hugeness; for the cold Without, and warmth within me, wrought    To mould the dream; but none can say That Lenten fare makes Lenten thought,    Who reads your golden Eastern lay, Than which I know no version done    In English more divinely well; A planet equal to the sun    Which cast it, that large infidel Your Omar; and your Omar drew    Full-handed plaudits from our best In modern letters, and from two,    Old friends outvaluing all the rest, Two voices heard on earth no more;    But we old friends are still alive, And I am nearing seventy-four,    While you have touch’d at seventy-five, And so I send a birthday line    Of greeting; and my son, who dipt In some forgotten book of mine    With sallow scraps of manuscript, And dating many a year ago,    Has hit on this, which you will take My Fitz, and welcome, as I know    Less for its own than for the sake Of one recalling gracious times,    When, in our younger London days, You found some merit in my rhymes,    And I more pleasure in your praise.

The Idylls of the King

The Idylls of the King is a sequence of poems by Alfred, Lord Tennyson which portrays the Coming of Arthur, the knights of the Round Table, Guinevere, the decline of Camelot and finally "The Passing of Arthur", the poem Tennyson wrote first, and which inspired the sequence. The episodic poems, are not an epic either in structure or tone, but take their elegaic sadness from the idylls of Theocritus: like the Alexandrian poems an idealized, distant, pastoral review of a lost time. When the poems were published as a set there was a dedication to one, unidentified at first, And indeed He seems to me

Scarce other than my king's ideal knight,

whom in the course of its development, the reader finds is the late Prince Albert: the Idylls of the King are often read as an allegory of the social conflicts and malaises of mid-Victorian England. There are twelve poems in the suite. For the first poem written, "Morte d'Arthur" Tennyson adapted the well-known title of Sir Thomas Malory's prose romance, which had fixed the imagery of Arthur in the English imagination. The downfall of Arthur lies, not in himself nor in his act of incest with his faery sister, but in the faithless Guinevere.