Explore "Idylls of the King" by Alfred Tennyson on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
The last tall son of Lot and Bellicent, / And tallest, Gareth, in a showerful spring / Stared at the spate. A slender-shafted Pine / Lost footing, fell, and so was whirled away. / "How he went down," said Gareth, "as a false knight / Or evil king before my lance if lance / Were mine to use-O senseless cataract, / Bearing all down in thy precipitancy- / And yet thou art but swollen with cold snows / And mine is living blood: thou dost His will, / The Maker's, and not knowest, and I that know, / Have strength and wit, in my good mother's hall / Linger with vacillating obedience, / Prisoned, and kept and coaxed and whistled to- / Since the good mother holds me still a child! / Good mother is bad mother unto me! / A worse were better; yet no worse would I.
Heaven yield her for it, but in me put force / To weary her ears with one continuous prayer, / Until she let me fly discaged to sweep / In ever-highering eagle-circles up / To the great Sun of Glory, and thence swoop / Down upon all things base, and dash them dead, / A knight of Arthur, working out his will, / To cleanse the world. Why, Gawain, when he came / With Modred hither in the summertime, / Asked me to tilt with him, the proven knight.