Introductory Note
Lowell was in his thirtieth year when he wrote and published _The
Vision of Sir Launfal_. It appeared when he had just dashed off his
_Fable for Critics_, and when he was in the thick of the anti-slavery
fight, writing poetry and prose for _The Anti-Slavery Standard_, and
sending out his witty _Biglow Papers_. He had married four years
before, and was living in the homestead at Elmwood, walking in the
country about, and full of eagerness at the prospect which lay before
him. In a letter to his friend Charles F. Briggs, written in December,
1848, he says: "Last night ... I walked to Watertown over the snow,
with the new moon before me and a sky exactly like that in Page's
evening landscape. Orion was rising behind me, and, as I stood on the
hill just before you enter the village, the stillness of the fields
around me was delicious, broken only by the tinkle of a little brook
which runs too swiftly for Frost to catch it. My picture of the brook
in _Sir Launfal_ was drawn from it. But why do I send you this
description,--like the bones of a chicken I had picked? Simply because
I was so happy as I stood there, and felt so sure of doing something
that would justify my friends. But why do I not say that I have done
something? I believe that I have done better than the world knows yet;
but the past seems so little compared with the future.... I am the
first poet who has endeavored to express the American Idea, and I
shall be popular by and by."
It is not very likely that Lowell was thinking of _Sir Launfal_ when
he wrote this last sentence, yet it is not straining language too far
to say that when he took up an Arthurian story he had a different
attitude toward the whole cycle of legends from that of Tennyson, who
had lately been reviving the legends for the pleasure of
English-reading people. The exuberance of the poet as he carols of
June in the prelude to Part First is an expression of the joyous
spring which was in the veins of the young American, glad in the sense
of freedom and hope. As Tennyson threw into his retelling of Arthurian
romance a moral sense, so Lowell, also a moralist in his poetic
apprehension, made a parable of his tale, and, in the broadest
interpretation of democracy, sang of the leveling of all ranks in a
common divine humanity. There is a subterranean passage connecting the
_Biglow Papers_ with _Sir Launfal_; it is the holy zeal which attacks
slavery issuing in this fable of a beautiful charity, Christ in the
guise of a beggar.
The invention is a very simple one, and appears to have been suggested
by Tennyson's _Sir Galahad_, though Lowell had no doubt read Sir
Thomas Malory's _Morte d'Arthur_. The following is the note which
accompanied _The Vision_ when first published in 1848, and retained by
Lowell in all subsequent editions:--
"According to the mythology of the Romancers, the San Greal,
or Holy Grail, was the cup out of which Jesus Christ partook
of the last supper with his disciples. It was brought into
England by Joseph of Arimathea, and remained there, an
object of pilgrimage and adoration, for many years in the
keeping of his lineal descendants. It was incumbent upon
those who had charge of it to be chaste in thought, word,
and deed; but, one of the keepers having broken this
condition, the Holy Grail disappeared. From that time it was
a favorite enterprise of the Knights of Arthur's court to go
in search of it. Sir Galahad was at last successful in
finding it, as may be read in the seventeenth book of the
Romance of King Arthur. Tennyson has made Sir Galahad the
subject of one of the most exquisite of his poems.
"The plot (if I may give that name to anything so slight) of
the following poem is my own, and, to serve its purposes, I
have enlarged the circle of competition in search of the
miraculous cup in such a manner as to include not only other
persons than the heroes of the Round Table, but also a
period of time subsequent to the date of King Arthur's
reign."