Winter gave way to spring. It was already the month of May, when every loving heart begins to blossom. Just as the trees and flowers bud and burst forth, so do lovers now bloom. They recall moments of passion and tenderness from the past, and they prepare themselves for a renewal of gentleness and affection. So does the green spring erase the white blasts of winter. We walk in the garden of May.
—Sir Thomas Malory, The Death of King Arthur (A retelling by Peter Ackroyd)
We’re 49 installments into TBS and “We walk in the garden of May” is one of my favorites. It’s exactly the sort of gem this feature was created to highlight and preserve. This Beautiful Sentence is rarely only one sentence because if you can pluck out only one sentence and still retain the beauty, you don’t have a beautiful sentence, you have an aphorism. There are millions of those spread all over the internet.
“We walk in the garden of May” is pretty on its own, but look at how Malory builds up to it. The real beauty of that single sentence depends on the ones that come before it. They are the stairs up to the temple and it is the statue at the top. Its beauty reflects back down those stairs, too: try reading the paragraph without the last sentence. They strengthen each other.
In the larger context, this paragraph stands out even more because it is so unlike what came before it. This is fairly late in the book (page 250 of 316), and up to now, Malory has written almost like a sportswriter, with a rather sparse style that sticks to recounting the adventures of the Knights of the Round Table. Here, out of the blue, he suddenly lapses into a rhapsody that would make Howard Cosell proud. I’m no Arthurian scholar (I’m just a guy who likes a good story), but it feels like it was either written years after the other sections or wasn’t even written by the same person.
Whatever the case, enjoy your walk.
Last week: Sepp Herberger gives the ultimate sports theory.
Next week: Voltaire gives us a ratio.
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