Tennyson and Rosenthal’s Elaine: The Possibility of Death

For the Tennyson scholar Christopher Ricks, Tennyson’s poetry is of the penultimate. How does painting recreate Tennyson’s vision of the penultimate? In 1871, Toby Rosenthal was asked by the San Francisco patron Tiburcio Parrott to create a painting from Tennyson’s Lancelot and Elaine, a section of the poet’s late series Idylls of the King. The larger story is simple: essentially, the young Elaine commits suicide over her crush on Lancelot. But Parrott picked a section of the poem describing Elaine on her funeral boat. Though Elain is dead, the painting follows Tennyson’s description of the moment of death as revelation; steered by a “dumb old servitor,” Elaine appears “lovely, for she did not seem as dead, / but half asleep, and lay as tho’ she smiled.” This paper uses Rosenthal’s Elaine to think through Tennyson’s conception of mythical death as a site of penultimate becoming by comparing Lancelot and Elaine to Tennyson’s similar early poem Mariana.