William Morris: Poet, Craftsman, Socialist

by Elisabeth Luther Cary

Thus across the charming images of French romance, Hellenic legend, and Norse drama, falls the suggestion of his own personality, and it is due to this pervading personal mood or sentiment that The Earthly Paradise has a power to stir the imagination almost wholly lacking to his later work. It cannot be said that even here he is able to awaken a strong emotion. But the human element is felt. A warm intelligence of sympathy creeps in among dreams and shadows, the reader is aware of a living presence near him and responds to the appeal of human weakness and depression. It is because Morris in the languid cadences of The Earthly Paradise spoke with his own voice and took his readers into the confidence of his hopeless thoughts, that the book will remain for the multitude the chief among his works, the only one that portrays for us in its most characteristic form the inmost quality of his temperament. Nor does he seem to have had for any other book of his making quite the intimate affection he so frankly bestowed upon this. The final stanzas in which the well-known message is sent to “my Master, Geoffrey Chaucer,” confide the autobiographic vein in which it was written. Says the Book of its maker:

I have beheld him tremble oft enough
At things he could not choose but trust to me,
Although he knew the world was wise and rough:
And never did he fail to let me see
His love,—his folly and faithlessness, maybe;
And still in turn I gave him voice to pray
Such prayers as cling about an empty day.
Thou, keen-eyed, reading me, mayst read him through,
For surely little is there left behind;
No power great deeds unnameable to do;
No knowledge for which words he may not find;
No love of things as vague as autumn wind—
Earth of the earth lies hidden by my clay,
The idle singer of an empty day.

Written at great speed, one day being marked by a product of seven hundred lines, the last of The Earthly Paradise was in the hands of the printers by the end of 1870, and Morris was free for his Icelandic journey and new interests.

Portrait of Edward Burne-Jones
By Watts

He was no sooner home from Iceland than he set to work upon a curious literary experiment—a dramatic poem of very complicated construction, called Love is Enough, or the Freeing of Pharamond: A Morality, the intricate metrical design of which is interestingly explained by Mr. Mackail. Rossetti and Coventry Patmore both spoke in terms of enthusiasm of its unusual beauty. The story is that of a king, Pharamond, who has been gallant on the field and wise on the throne, but is haunted by visions of an ideal love sapping his energy and driving peace from his heart. He deserts his people, and with his henchman, Oliver, wanders through the world until he encounters Azalais, a low-born maiden, who satisfies his dream. He returns to find that his people have become estranged from him and he abdicates at once, to retire into obscurity with his love. There has been an obvious struggle on the part of the poet to obtain a strong emotional effect, and certain passages have indeed the “passionate lyric quality” ascribed to them by Rossetti; but as a drama it hardly carries conviction. The songs written to be sung between the scenes have nevertheless much of the haunting beauty soon to be lost from his work, and of these the following is a felicitous example:

Love is enough: it grew up without heeding
In the days when ye knew not its name nor its measure,
And its leaflets untrodden by the light feet of pleasure
Had no boast of the blossom, no sign of the seeding,
As the morning and evening passed over its treasure.
And what do ye say then?—that Spring long departed
Has brought forth no child to the softness and showers;
That we slept and we dreamed through the Summer of flowers;
We dreamed of the Winter, and waking dead-hearted
Found Winter upon us and waste of dull hours.
Nay, Spring was o’er happy and knew not the reason,
And Summer dreamed sadly, for she thought all was ended
In her fulness of wealth that might not be amended,
But this is the harvest and the garnering season,
And the leaf and the blossom in the ripe fruit are blended.
It sprang without sowing, it grew without heeding,
Ye knew not its name and ye knew not its measure,
Ye noted it not ’mid your hope and your pleasure;
There was pain in its blossom, despair in its seeding,
But daylong your bosom now nurseth its treasure.

Although Morris planned a beautifully decorated edition of the poem which was highly valued by him, its failure to impress itself upon the public was no great grief to him, and he put it cheerfully out of mind to devote himself to translation and to Icelandic literature.

The surprising task to which he first turned was a verse translation of Virgil’s Æneid, in which he attempted to give the closest possible rendering of the Latin and to emphasise the romantic side of Virgil’s genius. He followed with an almost word-for-word accuracy the lines and periods of the original using, and he threw over the poem a glamour of romance, but Mr. Mackail says truly that he had taken his life in his hands in essaying a classic subject with his inadequate training and unclassic taste. The same authority, who on this subject, certainly, is not to be disputed by the lay reader, considers the result a success from Morris’s own point of view, declaring that he “vindicated the claim of the romantic school to a joint ownership with the classicists in the poem which is not only the crowning achievement of classical Latin, but the fountain-head of romanticism in European literature.” The opposing critics are fairly represented by Mr. Andrew Lang, who, in this case as in many another, is an ideal intermediary between scholar and general reader.

“There is no more literal verse-translation of any classic poem in English,” he says, “but Mr. Morris’s manner and method appear to me to be mistaken. Virgil’s great charm is his perfection of style and the exquisite harmony of his numbers. These are not represented by the singularly rude measures and archaistic language of Mr. Morris. Like Mr. Morris, Virgil was a learned antiquarian, and perhaps very accomplished scholars may detect traces of voluntary archaism in his language and style. But these, if they exist, certainly do not thrust themselves on the notice of most readers of the Æneid. Mr. Morris’s phrases would almost seem uncouth in a rendering of Ennius. For example, take