Summary
This poem describes a gathering of four friends on Christmas
Eve: a parson (member of the clergy) named Holmes, a poet named
Everard Hall, their host Francis Allen (Frank), and the narrator.
After they finish gambling and dismiss the women who were in attendance,
they sit around the half-empty bowl of wine and discuss how Christmas
is no longer taken seriously as a religious holiday: “All the old
honor had from Christmas gone.” The narrator is exhausted and soon
“f[a]ll[s] in a doze.” While “half-asleep,” he listens to the parson
criticize the new science of geology and the internal divisions
within the church, which have contributed to “the general decay
of faith.”
When the poet awakes, he hears the parson lament that
there is nothing to depend on in modern times. The host, Francis
Allen, suggests that poetry might replace religion as the new source
of faith and inspiration. However, upon hearing Frank’s tribute
to him, the poet Hall remarks sarcastically that he looks for inspiration
to the bowl of wine! The narrator, now fully awake, responds that
they all remember Hall’s fondness for alcohol from their college
days. However, he added, they also remember his talent for writing
verse, and wonder “What came of that?” Before the poet can answer,
Frank relates that the poet burnt the twelve books of the epic he
had written about King Arthur because he thought that his poetry
had nothing new to say. Rushing to his own defense, Hall explains
that there was no point in writing poetry that was merely an echo of
old times; just as nature cannot restore extinct animals such as
the mastodon, the poet should not attempt verse in the classical
style that will merely read as “faint Homeric echoes.”
Frank informs his friends that he actually salvaged the
eleventh of the twelve books in the poet’s Arthurian epic, pulling
it from the fire before it could burn. The narrator requests that
the poet now read aloud from his book, because he remembers the
respect Hall enjoyed when they were freshmen in college. Hall reluctantly
agrees to share his work with his friends.
After Hall finishes reading, the last light flickers and
dies out—but the host and the narrator remain so enraptured by the
poet’s words that they cannot move. The narrator explains that he
is not sure whether “it was the tone in which he read” that made
Hall’s writing so powerful, or whether the success of his writing
can be attributed to “some modern touches here and there,” which
he added to the classical story. They sit until the cock crows,
heralding the arrival of Christmas. The narrator goes to bed and
dreams of Arthur: “And so to bed, where yet in sleep I seemed to
sail with Arthur.” He dreams of a boat carrying Arthur back to the present
like a modern gentleman as all the people gather around him to welcome
him as the harbinger of peace. Then, the narrator hears the sound
of “a hundred bells” and wakes to the church bells on Christmas Morning.
Form
This poem serves as a frame for the twelfth and final
book in Tennyson’s Idylls of the King: the first 51 lines precede
the idyll and then lines 324-354 follow
it. Its lines are in blank verse, which is a name for unrhymed iambic
pentameter. Blank verse, the most common form of counted unrhymed
lines, matches the cadences of spoken language more closely than
any other form (rather than free-form), and is thus appropriate
for a poem chronicling a conversation among four friends. (The entire Idylls
of the King, too, is written in blank verse.)
Commentary
In 1833,
Tennyson proposed to write a long epic about King Arthur, the legendary
British leader who resisted the Anglo-Saxon invaders of sixth-century
England. By 1838,
he had completed one of the twelve books, entitled “Morte d’Arthur,”
which chronicled the king’s death (“morte”). He published this single
book in 1842 within
the framework of this poem, “The Epic,” which consists of 51 lines
that precede “Morte d’Arthur” and thirty lines that follow it. “The
Epic” provides a modern context for the Arthurian story by casting
it as a manuscript read aloud by a poet to three of his friends
following their Christmas-Eve revelry. After Tennyson completed
all twelve books of Idylls of the King in 1869,
he discarded this framing poem and retitled “Morte d’Arthur” as
“The Passing of Arthur.”
