Done and (nowhere nearly) done

I just finished Idylls of the King, after starting sometime in late March (I'm a slow reader).

Didn't place an asterisk on it when I posted The Top Ten because I had already started reading it by then, and I was confident at the time I would finish within a week or two.

Going from Milton to Tennyson (in poetry terms) feels at first a little like going from Henry James to Harry Potter, but, the further I read, the more complex the poem became and the longer I lingered over the text.

The first book, "The Coming of Arthur," is largely a blank verse rewrite of the first book in Malory's Morte D'Arthur. I say "largely" with some trepidation, because Tennyson's version of Merlin's prophecy, as I recall, is nowhere in the first book of Malory's story, at least as written. There are some other elements that also I recall being different, and all these together make all the difference as the book progresses.

This is one very nuanced and textured tale, and its demands on the reader are sly but persistent. You can glide over reading this book, but you'll likely be missing a lot if you do.

Lord Al comes off as a little stuffy to a modern reader like me, but once you understand where he's coming from (Victorian High Culture) and the audience he is writing to (ditto), it should not be a transition you can't manage.

The only thing I found annoying was Tennyson's constant use of the word "past" as a verb. Not "past" as in "the past," but as in "he went somewhere." The King and Lancelot and Company all "pass" instead of "come" or "go", so that when you get to the last book, this becomes less a nuisance and more of a Major Theme. His spelling of the word is what kept throwing me: I'd have to re-read the line every time until I finally figured out what was going on.

The first book I found (at the public library) was published by the old Macmillan & Co. The notes were appropriate for a girl's school of this edition's pre-WWI era, as were its pocket size and prim (but nice) illustrations. Also perhaps appropriate for its time, the editor left out three Idylls -- those presumably deemed too naughty or too violent for debs of the day ("Balin and Balan," "Merlin and Vivien" and "Pelleas and Ettarre").

I read two of the omitted ones in a smelly and stained double-column compedium I also found at the library, then held off on reading anything else in Idylls till I at last scored a paperback copy at a major bookseller. Mine had a long casecutter nick on the back, so I guess that's why it was still there.

The nicked ppb was a Penguin Classic edition, and its notes were excellent.

Don't miss out on the Dedication and the epilogue ("To the Queen"). I read them only after I'd finished the main text -- both are essential for author's context, but, like me, you'll probably need the Penguin editor's notes to both.

Post-modernist, existentialist, collectivist, individualist -- doesn't matter. Despite Tennyson's readership being the "moneyed middle-class" of the British Empire in his time, there is room in this tower for every sincere lover of literature. If Idylls of the King doesn't belong in The Top Ten, nothing does.