How we cite our quotes: (Line)
Quote #10
[…] ‘My soul, we love but while we may;
And therefore is my love so large for thee;
Seeing it is not bounded save by love.’
(“The Last Tournament,” 696-698)
Tristram echoes Lancelot’s argument from the end of “Lancelot and Elaine” that “free love will not be bound.” He argues that his love for Isolt is a cut above the rest since it is not bound by a marriage vow. In saying that, Tristram calls into question the very institution of marriage with his speech. His conviction that “we love but while we may” speaks of his view of love as a fleeting feeling. By contrast, Arthur views love as an enduring bond—and one that's rooted in marriage and faithfulness.
Quote #11
[…] 'Mine own flesh,
Here looking down on thine, polluted, cries,
“I loathe thee;” yet not less, O Guinevere,
For I was ever virgin save for thee,
My love thro’ flesh hath wrought into my life
So far that my doom is, I love thee still.
Let no man dream but that I love thee still.’
(“Guinevere,” 551-556)
He may be horrified by what she's done, but still, our Artie loves his Gwen. The association of Guinevere with “flesh” begins at the very beginning of the poem when she is called “the fairest of all flesh on earth” (3). She may represent “sense” in the battle the poem explores between “sense with soul,” while Arthur represents the “soul.” Yet Arthur’s experience with Guinevere, in which love and flesh, or sense and soul, are intertwined, speaks to humans’ inability to separate the two. This is what causes Arthur’s fellowship to fail, as his knights’ uneasy balance between bodily desires and instincts (sense and flesh) and Arthur’s civilizing law (soul and love) collapses.
Quote #12
[…] ‘Ah my God,
What might I not have made of thy fair world,
had I but loved thy highest creature here?
It was my duty to have loved the highest;
It surely was my profit had I known;
It would have been my pleasure had I seen.
We needs must love the highest when we see it.’
(“Guinevere,” 649-655)
Guinevere now realizes that she should have loved the person worthiest of her love, Arthur, because he was God’s “highest creature.” Well, hindsight's 20-20, darlin'. Still, our heart's go out to Guinevere here. Like Ettarre, Guinevere worried that she could not equal the perfection of the person who loved her and was unwilling or unable to try. Her situation might symbolize the situation of the Christian soul before God, in which the Christian loses hope because of his perceived inadequacy before God’s perfection.