We Have Still A King
In The Idylls of The King, Alfred Lord Tennyson describes the four great zones of the sculpture, “set betwixt with mystic symbol, that girds the mighty hall which Merlin built for Arthur on the sacred mount of Camelot” (Idylls of the King, 212). In the lowest zone of the sculpture “beasts are slaying men, and in the second men are slaying beasts, and on the third are warriors, perfect men, and on the fourth are men with growing wings, and over all one statue in the mould of Arthur, made by Merlin, with a crown, and peak’d wings pointed to the Northern Star. And eastward fronts the statue, and the crown and both the wings are made of gold, and flame at sunrise till the people in far fields, wasted so often by the heathen hordes, behold it, crying, ‘We have still a King’” (Idylls of The King, 212).
Tennyson was criticized for infusing such moral purity into his Arthur, and some felt that Tennyson was being unduly preachy in his depiction of his Christ-like King. Tennyson’s son, however, defends his father’s painting of such an idealistic and holy picture of King Arthur. “My father,” argued Hallam Tennyson, “felt that only under the inspiration of ideals, with ‘his sword bathed in heaven,’ can a man combat the cynical indifference, the intellectual selfishness, the sloth of will, and the utilitarian materialism of a transitional age” (Tennyson, H., 130).
As we read The Idylls of the King in the coming weeks, I pray that the students will come to know and love Tennyson’s Christ-like king, and in so doing, better know and love Christ himself. As Tennyson reminds us in his poem, “Ulysses,” it is “not too late to seek a newer world.” A world where men “live pure, speak true, right wrong, and follow the King” (Idylls of the King, 39). As we seek this newer world, “It may be that the gulfs will wash us down or it may be we shall touch the Happy Isles, and see the great Achilles (or King Arthur), whom we knew” (“Ulysses”). Though the outcome of our earthly quest remains hidden from us as part God’s secret will by which he governs the universe and determines everything that happens, we, trusting God’s reveled will, “strive, seek, find, and do not yield,” knowing that “we have still a king” (“Ulysses” and Idylls, 212).
“When I saw him, I fell at his feet as though dead. But he laid his right hand on me, saying, ‘Fear not, I am the first and the last, and the living one. I died, and behold I am alive forevermore, and I have the keys of Death and Hades’” (Rev. 1:17-19).
Knowledge and Wisdom in Submission to God,
Chris M. Blackwell
- Tennyson, Alfred Lord. The Idylls of the King. Penguin Books, 2004.
- Tennyson, Alfred Lord. “Ulysses.” Everyman Library Pocket Poets, 1998.
- Tennyson, Hallam. Alfred Lord Tennyson: A Memoir. New York, 1905.
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