The Columbia History of British Poetry (122 page)

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Page 497
visually deconstructs her, he is caught by her "great eyes" which "gaze out very mournfully," but not at him. The Lady's eyes mirror her inaccessibility to her admirer; she remains enshrined and distant. To Morris, as to Gabriel Rossetti, reciprocal gaze marks the occasional moments of union and communication between lovers. (See, for example, the personal lyric "January" in
The Earthly Paradise
.)
Yet in the
Defence
volume Morris's own gaze is intense to the point of scoptophilia. Poem after poem is filled with sharply visualized scenes of sex, blood, and death. Jehane, threatened by the sadistic Godmar with a witchcraft trial, is promised "An end that few men would forget, / that saw it"; John of Castel Neuf has a gaze so intense that it clothes, reanimates, and causes him to fall in love with the bones of a dead woman. The accounts and sights of violence are heightened by the tone in which they are related; often the narrative voice is cool, factual, unimpassioned. Morris presents horrors in an agressively impersonal way.
As in
Goblin Market
, a sense of mystery, incompleteness, and melancholy broods over the
Defence
volume. Not carelessness (as some critics insist) but a desire to recapture the dramatic quality of the folk ballad leads Morris to withhold information from his audience. Jehane in "Golden Wings" and Margaret in "The Wind" are suddenly and senselessly murdered; readers cannot be certain who has killed them or why. We never learn why the male narrators of "Spell-Bound" and "In Prison'' are imprisoned, nor who holds them in bondage. "The Tune of Seven Towers" and "The Blue Closet," the two fantasy poems based on watercolors Morris had purchased from Gabriel Rossetti, carry the element of mystery to its zenith. Each poem is a commentary on, rather than an illustration of, the picture that is its source, and in each case Morris turns Rossetti's visual detail into symbolic narrative. He locates sinister subtexts in Rossetti's brilliantly colored, claustrophobic pictures and creates verbal correlatives to them.
In "The Tune of Seven Towers" a lady seated at a medieval instrument in the watercolor is transformed into a femme fatale, while the towers, depicted on the banner that cuts diagonally across the painting, become the haunted place to which she sends her lover. Readers never learn the lady's motives noralthough the poem hints at deaththe final outcome of the lover's quest. In the more complex "Blue Closet" Morris turns a conventional Rossettian composition of four medieval ladies, two singing and two playing instruments, into a supernatural
 
Page 498
narrative of imprisoned maidens and a demon lover. Locked in a tower, Morris's ladies are trapped by a mysterious "they" who permit them to sing one song on Christmas Eve. The song summons Lady Louise's dead lover; he, too, is imprisoned by a mysterious "she," a mermaid or siren who keeps him under the sea. As a red lily (in the foreground of the painting) shoots up "from the land of the dead," the metamorphosed lover invades the world of the living and leads the ladies to death.
In his 1868 review "Poems by William Morris," reprinted as "Aesthetic Poetry," Walter Pater described the volume as lit by "dreamlight." Eight of the poems contain or allude to dreams, while, in others, dream becomes an important structural device. Connections of time, place, and event are missing; relations between cause and effect are absent; the fragmentation and hyperclarity of dream pervade numerous poems ranging from "Rapunzel," ''King Arthur's Tomb," and "The Wind" to minor lyrics like "The Gillyflower of Gold."
Morris never recaptures the intense tone of the
Defence
volume, but Pre-Raphaelite themes and strategies survive in later works.
Love is Enough
(1871), an elaborate medieval morality play, is really "Rapunzel" rewritten and enlarged.
Poems By the Way
(1881) contains numerous poems of fantasy and supernaturalism; here, however, they are translations from or retellings of Scandinavian materials.
In Morris's two long, Chaucerian narratives,
The Life and Death of Jason
(1867) and
The Earthly Paradise
(18681869), painting yields to design; the two-dimensional quality of these poems, although loved by the Victorians, has not made them popular in our own time.
Jason
, loosely modeled on the
Argonautica
of Apollonius of Rhodes, is a medievalized, fanciful retelling of the Hellenistic Greek epic of Jason and Medea.
The Earthly Paradise
is an examination of the loss of Eden; it is filled with distant settings, tableaux of figures set in wastelands or gardens, and flat, externally characterized heroes and lovers. The volumes comprise twenty-four tales drawn from Greek and medieval sources. Arranged by a concept of seasonal progression, the tales, like patterns in a carpet, repeat with variations the conventional Pre-Raphaelite themes of love and loss, of heroism and failure, of the fact of mutability and the desire for permanence.
However, embedded in
The Earthly Paradise
are powerful and personal love lyrics, not unlike the sonnets of Gabriel Rossetti's
House of Life
. In a series of poems to the months, a narrator speaks of seasonal
 
Page 499
and human change, of the decline and death of love, of faint hopes for its rebirth or fulfilment. Melancholy but not static, these lyrics are poignant in their accounts of alienation, of "love left unloved alone." They are Pre-Raphaelite in their carefully observed, specific, and often symbolic images of nature, in their fusion of the concrete and the abstract, in the intensity of their analysis of passion.
When he turned to the Muse of the North in his last major poem,
The Story of Sigurd the Volsung
(1876), Morris left the Pre-Raphaelite fold, though only briefly. Ironically,
Sigurd
rather than
Jason
best represents what Pater saw as Morris's progression from "dreamlight" to "daylight."
Sigurd
contains the ''simple elementary passions-anger, desire, regret, pity, and fear and what corresponds to them in the sensuous world" that Pater found in
Jason
. And there is little reminiscent of either "brotherhood" in this direct, broadly limned epic; instead, Morris's Pre-Raphaelite impulses entered and transformed the long prose romances he began to write in the late 1880s. The energy and intensity of Morris's earlier work passed to an unlikely disciple, the young Algernon Charles Swinburne.
When Swinburne met Gabriel Rossetti, Burne-Jones, and Morris in 1857 and became part of "the Jovial Campaign"the project to paint murals on Arthurian subjects in the Oxford Unionhe also became an immediate if momentary Pre-Raphaelite. He was instantly attracted by Rossetti's contribution to the ill-fated scheme, a fresco on "Sir Launcelot's Vision of the Sanc Grail," and it became the visual source of his unfinished "Lancelot." Later, other Rossetti paintings would directly or obliquely inspire works in Swinburne's
Poems and Ballads
, First Series (1866), including "A Christmas Carol" and "A Ballad of Life."
For poetic inspiration, Swinburne turned to Morris; several of his early poems, including "Lancelot," are highly Morrisian in their meter, matter, and medievalism. Indeed, Swinburne's description of Guenevere, posed against an apple tree, offering Lancelot the fruits of temptation and obscuring his vision of the grail, could well be part of "King Arthur's Tomb." Even the language and form are imitative; we hear the cadence of "The Chapel in Lyonesse":
Lo, between me and the light
Grows a shadow on my sight
A soft shade from left to right,
Branched as a tree.
 
Page 500
Furthermore, in his Arthurian "Queen Yseult," Swinburne treats Iseult as if she were Guenevere's sister. Resembling Morris's queen physically, Yseult also shares Guenevere's turbulent, defiant nature. Both she and Queen Blanchefleurs, Tristram's mother, choose love outside of marriage and fidelity to their lovers; Swinburne applauds their moral stance.
Swinburne's closely imitative phase lasted only momentarily; by the time of
Poems and Ballads
he had evolved his own Pre-Raphaelite vision. This also metamorphosed into a poetry different from that of his precursors, although bits of Pre-Raphaelitism remained to flavor his two long quasi-medieval Arthurian poems of later years,
Tristram of Lyonesse
(1882) and "The Tale of Balen" (1896). However, during the late 1850s and early 1860s Swinburne was indeed to be counted among the "fleshly school." While his characteristic form was the roundel rather than Gabriel Rossetti's sonnet or Christina Rossetti's songs or Morris's medievalized dramatic monologues, and while his pulsing meters were sometimes different from theirs, his images, many of his essential themes, and his poetic strategies were, like theirs, Pre-Raphaelite.
Only in his earliest works and in the first series of
Poems and Ballads
does Swinburne highly value specificity. Although perfectly capable of writing formalized, decorative Pre-Raphaelite narratives like "A Lay of Lilies," with its images of "five lilies growing on a hill" and five lilylike maidens "dwelling under it,'' he tends to intensify or invert the Pre-Raphaelite tendencies he inherits. Nature, for example, is seldom merely natural; few poems contain conventional landscape imagery. Even in "The Sundew," the carefully detailed description of the "little marsh-plant, yellow green, / And pricked at lip with tender red" functions to establish a symbolic register.
For the most part, Swinburne's eye is on the large forces of nature rather than on the three small cups of the Woodspurge. Yet
Poems and Ballads
, dramatic in that most of its poems are uttered by voices other than the poet's own, is filled with vividly pictorial emblematic figures. "Madonna Mia," Swinburne's version of Morris's "Praise of My Lady," is typical:
She has no more to wear
But one white hood of vair
Drawn over eyes and hair,
    Wrought with strange gold. . . .

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