All in All - A Special Saturday Scrutinization

All in All

Alfred Lord Tennyson

In Love, if Love be Love, if Love be ours,

Faith and unfaith can ne'er be equal powers:

Unfaith in aught is want of faith in all.

It is the little rift within the lute,

That by and by will make the music mute,

And ever widening slowly silence all.

The little rift within the lover's lute,

Or little pitted speck in garner'd fruit,

That rotting inward slowly moulders all.

It is not worth the keeping: let it go:

But shall it? answer, darling, anser no.

And trust me not at all or all in all.

- from Merlin and Vivien

All in All is a section within Merlin and Vivien, which in turn is a part of Tennyson's cycle retelling the legend of King Arthur and those themes related to the subject, Idylls of the King. A cycle, in literature, is really just a simple term for a collection of plays, poems, songs, or other writings recorded by one author and connected through their focus on the same set of characters or ideas.

Given how well known the tales of Arthur and his court are, I shall not bore anyone with excessive background details regarding the characters and situations. I will just say that Vivien, paramour to King Mark of Cornwall, was on quite the mission against Arthur. After insinuating herself into Guinevere's good graces through the use of pity and her falsely emphatic slandering of Mark, Vivien quickly found that while many would lend an ear to her libelous gossip on the relationship between the Queen and Lancelot it did nothing in gaining her the confidence of King Pendragon the younger. Merlin was another story. A tired, old man will only put up with so much whining before simply succumbing to an ardent woman.

Here we come to poem above, in which Vivien is pleading with Merlin to trust her with a secret which would give her power to leave him, in essence, dead to all but her.

Admittedly, the meaning of this poem is fairly straight forward. I do hope, though, that as you read that you will at least take care to pay attention to the symbolism used in the second and third stanzas. While blatant, taking note of these rhetorical devices and understanding their purposes and why they work to those purposes is a key step in becoming a more knowing and generally capable reader of poetry.

((If you have any further questions, would like to make a suggestion for a future poem/topic of discussion, or would like a deeper analysis of this poem, please inform me by leaving a comment below. I will address any and all comments in the order they are received, as quickly as I can.))