Arthuriana and Valentines

So today is kind of a special day. A day of romance and beauty and… Yeah, I detest Valentine’s day. But I did write a story… thingy… about Arthur. Romantic (a hell of a lot more so than bloody Valentine’s, anyway… OK, personal thing, I’ll stop). Yeah, if you notice this getting more and more poetic as things go on, it’s because of what I was listening to. Various songs from ‘Camelot’ (I think I’ve heard ‘If Ever I would Leave you’ at least ten times today, not to mention ‘What do the simple folk do’ and the rest) and the old UBS adds from 1997. I think it works, fairly, though. I don’t have much else to say, really, other than that this isn’t exactly my favourite style for the Arthurian stories, but I don’t think I’ve gone outside ‘reasonable interpretation’.

Oh, also, I don’t know Ozymandias very well. Sorry.

Hello. It’s not the most dramatic start to an epic, I know, but at least you’re not missing a wedding to be here. I am… pardon the folly of my age. I do not recall. I had one, once. In Tír na n-... Sean. Regardless, let us forget that place. It is gone now, and best forgotten. It is, as all other moments, a single drop, in an unending stream of time. But some of those drops… they sparkle. They sparkle.

I am sorry. But Arthur is, I think, as wise now than ever in his life he was… What? Oh, yes, I knew him. I fought for him, and while I knew him, I knew a light that could brighten eternity. A light which a thousand engineers could scarce have made greater. Yes, I knew Arthur, and too I knew Launcelot, greatest of the sinful men, the worker of miracles, father of beauty. The knight of infinite longing. And I knew Jennifer, who by her love destroyed an empire.  I knew Galahad, handsome, strong and pure, greatest of the sinless men. Beautiful Galahad, Heaven snatch’d, they say. The knight of faith whose dance was perfect.

I knew then and I loved them. And even as I loved them, I mourned them, whose span must end, and who may rest in that peaceful Heaven unto which I cannot go. It is a cruel joke of their Almighty that to try to follow them would be to be to lose all chance of joining them, but it is crueller still that I know it does not matter. I mourned that their legacies must fade, I mourned that even the proud spires of Camelot must someday crumble. And I resolved that their memories must live when they did not.

The curse of the immortal is the curse of timelessness, which is a twofold curse. For whilst there is light, one knows that it is but a flash, a sparkle on time’s river, which is gone before it is truly seen. And yet it is still too brief, the end still comes too soon. One cannot have joy, who is always preparing, and never prepared.

I am overemotional again. Pardon an old man, whose memories seem brighter than the world in which he finds himself. I did not see… I did not expect the Lady Jennifer’s betrayal. I did not expect the war that followed thence… Sorry, sorry… I cannot speak of this so easily without pain. It was so small a thing to destroy so great an empire, a nothing. Two men, arguing over two women, each wanting one, where was the cause for war? Aye, I speak of two, for two there were, two Jennifers, so like that one would believe them one woman born twice. That one would not credit that they were two until beholding them together. Was she not Heaven’s gift, that war might not come? Could not she have been enough, that Paradise should not be lost a second time.

Your look reproaches me. Perhaps you are right – you must remember that I am from a different age, and the wearing of time has calloused my soul. But she loved Lancelot, not Arthur, and her sister was of the opposite mind. All might have been with the one they loved but Arthur, and a king who will not give all – and more than all – for the least happiness of his least subject, is no king at all. Why could he not rise to that final perfection? Why must he have so swiftly have destroyed that which he built? They might have grown to love each other – he had not known his first bride long before they were married, could not love again have sprung – far better and more faithful than before?

It is a human desire to make things simple, to build a narrative of history, of which something better might have been made. I am human, and so my fault in this is, I think, understandable. Yes, understandable, perhaps. But not forgivable. I am harsh, and I am false. Jennifer was not her sister, nor her sister her – and though the Lady Jennifer herself might not have known her face from her sister’s, still it was the sister, I think, to me the more beautiful. To replace with one the other would be the way of caution. It would be to let what one might lose to stand above the perfection one might gain. Had he done such a thing, it would have been, for him and Camelot, a death far more than they have ever suffered – a far greater death than they shall ever know. For Camelot’s light was not the light of foolish wisdom only, who says what cannot be. But also of courage, joy and hope, of undaunted bravery and unwavering faith. They saw their doom, yes, but saw it not, for it was not doom they saw. They sought beyond the reach of man – and reached thus beyond what any have, before or since. Even to certain death, they would not yield, and but for a single mouse, they would not have fallen.

Nor can I truly blame Sir Launcelot or the Lady Jennifer for their love. They were the truest lovers I have ever known, who saw their tragedy would come, and would not yield to it. Nor can I say that she was untrue, for she would do anything for her love but betray it – and she loved only Launcelot alone, save for one man, and he was Arthur.

Melodramatic ramblings, of course. Pathetic words, and ill-used, too weak to show my feelings, and too strong to tell a tale. And yet, they are true words, as far as they can be true, and I can tell them no other way.

And so, there only remains a single thing to tell today – why I continue thus, living in old glories, while this world goes on to better things. And here I must speak of the place which is not my home, and yet which I am cursed to be the child of. A man came once, and his speech was strange. He told me of the outside, and how he had grown old. And yet, he said, he would not yield, would not allow that which had taken his strength to bow him. He said though he could not move the world, as once he did, still he would seek a new horizon, to go beyond the sunset, until at last the undiscovered country snatched him. He told me of the great mountain he had seen, and of all the other wonders. He was no poet, and spoke not with such beauty. Yet he moved me more than any Oisin.

And then, in travels in Egypt – I have not all my live hidden upon isles - I saw a wonder he had not. For I saw two pillars, greater than the greatest tree, that were the legs of a statue which once stood there.  Nearby there lay the head. And when upon the pedestal I read the words, it seemed to me to have a terrible pride to it.

I am not the man (he was not Odysseus, allow some license to the poet’s pen). I have not such strength or pride. Yet still I hold myself to this – while my hands are weak, my feet heavy, and my spirit close to broken, still shall I hold aloft some shadow of that beacon I one knew, in memory of those who once were of better stuff than I. They shall not be another Ozymandias – I shall carry what I can of them, and lift it as high as one as mean as I can manage, until the very end.

Not long now.

Bonus love poem:

Can I among the snowy branches see

The thing which none who are not mad can know,

Beloved’s face, which looketh back at me,

And bringeth forth from frost a warmer glow,

That turns to me and gives me what was lost,

For whom I would the whole wide world condemn,

And think that it had been too small a cost,

To see those eyes more bright than any gem?

Alas! ‘tis not divine beloved I see there,

And all my joy has from me sudden fled,

Now that the wood is of such beauty bare,

It is become all empty, cold and dead.

And I might give myself unto despair,

Save further on I see beloved there.

   

I call it ‘Why it’s a really bad idea to attempt to extract any kind of biographical elements from an author’s poetry'.