Arthurian Miscellany: The Water Carriers, by Oscar Fay Ad...

This is a narrative poem written in Tennysonian blank verse that continues the Arthurian legend beyond the Battle of Camlann, following Sir Lavaine — a minor figure from Malory and Tennyson's *Idylls of the King* — as one of the last survivors of Arthur's court. The poem traces Lavaine's wound on the battlefield, his recovery with Sir Bedivere, his melancholy return to the ruined halls of Astolat, and his eventual resettlement in Cornwall, where he marries and raises two children. Its most striking conceit is a mythological origin story for the nursery rhyme "Jack and Jill": Lavaine's children, named Jack and Gillian, climb a hill to fetch spring water that they believe will cure their ailing father, and both die in a fall on the descent — directly enacting the rhyme quoted at the poem's opening. The work is elegiac in tone, dwelling on grief, dynastic extinction, and the fading of Arthurian glory into domestic obscurity, while the irony of the ending — the children die in a tender errand, and Lavaine follows them in death that same night — gives the familiar nursery rhyme a tragic, courtly ancestry. It reads as a deliberate literary exercise in the Victorian tradition of Arthurian continuation, self-consciously echoing Tennyson's diction and even quoting *The Passing of Arthur* directly.

Arthurian Miscellany: The Water Carriers, by Oscar Fay Ad...

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