Canto the First The Siege Perilous
How Galahad comes unlooked-for to Camelot at the feast of Pentecost; how the seat long feared, the Siege Perilous, receives him unharmed; and how his own name is found written there, in sign of the quest to come.
First read aloud in A Spell in the Library · Galahad and the Grail →
At Pentecost, when tongues of fire came down
and all the Table waited on the King,
a stranger entered, armed but for a crown
of his own stillness, and the hush did ring —
no herald and no banner went before,
no lineage was named, no battle won;
and yet the watching knights, who had seen war,
fell silent as before the rising sun.
There stood the empty seat they feared to name,
the Siege Perilous, that slew the proud;
and to that seat, as to his own, he came,
and sat, and was not slain. A breath; then loud
the thunder of the company’s amaze —
for on the seat, in letters bright as flame,
his name was written, where no name had stayed.
And then a light, that was not lamp nor day,
moved through the hall and would not be possessed,
and each man saw the thing he could not say,
and rose, and swore the quest, and was not blest
until he swore it — so the year began
that empties every seat and tries the best,
and measures out the kingdom, man by man.
Notes
The canto opens at Pentecost, the feast of the Spirit’s descent — the day on which, in the old romances, the Grail first appears to the Round Table. [ Placeholder gloss in Malcolm’s commentary voice. ]
The Siege Perilous is the seat at the Table fatal to any who is not the destined Grail-knight; Galahad alone may take it. The name appearing in flame echoes the Pentecostal tongues of fire above. [ placeholder ]
The passing light is the Grail’s first showing; the knights’ vow sets the whole quest — and the whole poem — in motion. [ placeholder ]