Status Updates From Idylls of the King and a Se...

Brb gotta find the Holy Grail

Marking my page with a feather…. Magical.

Amazing Ulysses! But ethnocentric/racist Locksley Hall

True tho that even Ulysses starts w/misogyny as Ulysses king is vexd at his idleness+tied to an aged wife-he idle, she old. He desires to go back out to sea w/his shipmates; he’ll leave kingdom to oh so wonderful son, but wife Penelope, not even named, has no importance, personhood, rule, role, hope, or feature, (maybe so dear U will have no hindrance?)

I opened the book to read one poem and ended up reading and reading, still aloud.
The Lady of Shallot is too bound up w/the Anne Girl bc of the old miniseries from the 1990s but how can you not love it? It made me cry tho I don’t know quite why
And The Two Voices - despair and hope, depression and rejoicing, wondering in existence and life and time and perhaps reincarnation. Cried with “Rejoice!”
Must reread

The Poet has me a bit tangled. First time there =Wow! 2nd time though =Wow? Wait, maybe? Is that?

“The old order changeth, yielding place to new, And Gd fulfills himself in many ways,
Lest one good custom should corrupt the world….”
So Arthur leaves our world behind,And Tennyson closes his Idylls w/a note to the queen, his perspective reminded of English + Xtian superiority even as he takes Welsh legends + history mixed to make his hero tale, using his poet’s gift to show beauty but also shame the past

Ah Guinevere
I feel mixd bc she seems 1 of those semi-narc women who gloats, manipulates + must always be center of attention

But Tennyson’s writing of Arthur’s meeting w/ her + of course EVERYTHING is a woman’s fault, + by everything, we do mean everything - downfall of his empire thru her “sin”

All that Xtian empire bullsh*t he spits on the back of a woman bowed to the floor in front of him in shame

Tristram most but with Isolt.
Somehow I knew that end was coming and it didn’t seem painful even though I feel like it should have
I have 2 small flashes from Tristan & Iseult and they don’t include the ending
Somehow I found him unconvincing in all he “sware”
And unless the next tale tells, I find it unsurprising that we don’t know what happens to Isolt after 🙄

Youthful ideals betrayed, ah, Pelleas. I know that one

Quest for the holy grail told by Sir Percivale to Brother Ambrosius in a monastery

Arthur lamenting that so many of his knights caught the contagious fervor for a quest that wasn’t for most of them, “leaving human wrongs to right themselves”/leaving their calling for the sake of a vision

It feels odd that Tennyson - a poet - writes so passionately a story that argues against following vision/dream/passion

Quest for the holy grail told by Sir Percivale to Brother Ambrosius in a monastery

The grail is a cup of bright rose-red appearing on a silver beam - seems so odd as the images most often show it silver I thought (besides Indiana Jones in which it was wooden for the carpenter)

The lily maid
Who died for love

The description of Merlin’s melancholy, lines 187-194 (p131), and of Vivien’s tendency, lines 798-836 (p 147-148), seem incredibly deep seeing.

And the end came quickly after so much back and forth. O Merlin