Who doesn’t love Alfred Tennyson? Gerard Manley Hopkins said of him that, “His opinions too are not original, often not independent even, and they sink into vulgarity: … But for all this he is a glorious poet and all he does is chryselephantine.”

Points to you if you know what chryselephantine means. I don’t. Anyway, I have been reading Tennyson’s Idylls of the King lately, and enjoying it (or should I say them?) including the un-original parts. If you are on the lookout for rhetorical devices, this set of poems about King Arthur and his knights is a great place find them.

In the section about Geraint and Enid, I particularly noticed polysyndeton. It’s everywhere! Here are two examples:

So for long hours sat Enid by her lord

There in the naked hall, propping his head,

And chafing his pale hands, and calling to him,

Till at last he waken’d from his swoon,

And found his own dear bride propping his head,

And chafing his faint hands, and calling to him;

And felt the warm tears falling on his face,

And said to his own heart, “She weeps for me;”

And yet lay still, and feign’d himself as dead,

That he might prove her to the uttermost,

And say to his own heart, “She weeps for me.”

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And then there flutter’d in,

Half-bold, half-frightened, with dilated eyes,

A tribe of women, dress’d in many hues,

And mingled with the spearmen; And Earl Doorm

Struck with a knife’s haft hard against the board.

And call’d for flesh and wine to feed his spears.

And men brought in whole hogs and quarter beeves,

And all the hall was dim with steam of flesh.

And none spake word, but all sat down at once,

And ate with tumult in the naked hall,

Feeding like horses when you hear them feed.

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Tennyson uses this construction a lot, in this tale as well as the others. It pulls us forward through the narrative, and helps him to sustain long phrases. It’s like a long unbroken camera shot in a movie. But also, I think he does it because he is a devoted slave to that tyrant king Iambic Pentameter. The “and”s fill out the rhyme scheme perfectly.

Even within these two short samples I’ve quoted, there are lots of other devices, too. The first passage uses parallelism—there are two lines that repeat previous lines almost exactly. In the second passage the bad guy, Earl Doorm, calls for flesh and wine to feed his “spears,” meaning his fighting men. This is a classic metonymy.  The last line in that passage, “Feeding like horses when you hear them feed,” is a simile. It’s also an epanalepsis, meaning that the line is book-ended by one word.

That’s all for today. There are so many fun devices in the Idylls, though, that I might post some more in a few days.

–Meagan