Mr. Morris's Poems - Page 2

belonged, in date of composition, mainly to this period.

In 1858, when "The Defence of Guenevere" came out, Mr. Morris must have been but a year or two from his undergraduateship. Every one has heard enough about his companions, Mr. Burne Jones, Mr. Rossetti, Canon Dixon, and the others of the old Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, where Mr. Morris's wonderful prose fantasies are buried. Why should they not be revived, these strangely coloured and magical dreams? As literature, I prefer them vastly above Mr. Morris's later romances in prose--"The Hollow Land" above "News from Nowhere!" Mr. Morris and his friends were active in the fresh dawn of a new romanticism, a mediaeval and Catholic revival, with very little Catholicism in it for the most part. This revival is more "innerly," as the Scotch say, more intimate, more "earnest" than the larger and more genial, if more superficial, restoration by Scott. The painful doubt, the scepticism of the Ages of Faith, the dark hours of that epoch, its fantasy, cruelty, luxury, no less than its colour and passion, inform Mr. Morris's first poems. The fourteenth and the early fifteenth century is his "period." In "The Defence of Guenevere" he is not under the influence of Chaucer, whose narrative manner, without one grain of his humour, inspires "The Life and Death of Jason" and "The Earthly Paradise." In the early book the rugged style of Mr. Browning has left a mark. There are cockney rhymes, too, such as "short" rhyming to "thought." But, on the whole, Mr. Morris's early manner was all his own, nor has he ever returned to it. In the first poem, "The Queen's Apology," is this passage:--

"Listen: suppose your time were come to die, And you were quite alone and very weak; Yea, laid a-dying, while very mightily

"The wind was ruffling up the narrow streak Of river through your broad lands running well: Suppose a hush should come, then some one speak:

"'One of these cloths is heaven, and one is hell, Now choose one cloth for ever, which they be, I will not tell you, you must somehow tell

"'Of your own strength and mightiness; here, see!' Yea, yea, my lord, and you to ope your eyes, At foot of your familiar bed to see

"A great God's angel standing, with such dyes, Not known on earth, on his great wings, and hands, Held out two ways, light from the inner skies

"Showing him well, and making his commands Seem to be God's commands, moreover, too, Holding within his hands the cloths on wands;

"And one of these strange choosing-cloths was blue, Wavy and long, and one cut short and red; No man could tell the better of the two.

"After a shivering half-hour you said, 'God help! heaven's colour, the blue;' and he said, 'Hell.' Perhaps you then would roll upon your bed,