"—a little isle of bliss Midmost the beating of the steely sea"
which typifies the weary problems and turmoil of contemporary life.
"Jason" was a poem of epic dimensions, on the winning of the Golden Fleece; "The Earthly Paradise," a series of twenty-four narrative poems set in a framework of the poet's own. Certain gentlemen of Norway, in the reign of Edward III. of England, set out—like St. Brandan—on a voyage in search of a land that is free from death. They cross the Western ocean, and after long years of wandering, come, disappointed of their hope, to a city founded centuries since by exiles from ancient Greece. There being hospitably received, hosts and guests interchange tales in every month of the year; a classical story alternating with a mediaeval one, till the double sum of twelve is complete. Among the wanderers are a Breton and a Suabian, so that the mediaeval tales have a wide range. There are Norse stories like "The Lovers of Gudrun"; French Charlemagne romances, like "Ogier the Dane"; and late German legends of the fourteenth century, like "The Hill of Venus," besides miscellaneous travelled fictions of the Middle Age.[48] But the Hellenic legends are reduced to a common term with the romance material, so that the reader is not very sensible of a difference. Many of them are selected for their marvellous character, and abound in dragons, monsters, transformations, and enchantments: "The Golden Apples," "Bellerophon," "Cupid and Psyche," "The Story of Perseus," etc. Even "Jason" is treated as a romance. Of its seventeen books, all but the last are devoted to the exploits and wanderings of the Argonauts. Medea is not the wronged, vengeful queen of the Greek tragic poets, so much as she is the Colchian sorceress who effects her lover's victory and escape. Her romantic, outweighs her dramatic character. Sea voyages, emprizes, and wild adventures, like those of his own wanderers in "The Earthly Paradise," were dearer to Morris' imagination than conflicts of the will; the vostos or home-coming of Ulysses, e.g. He preferred the "Odyssey" to the "Iliad," and translated it in 1887 into the thirteen-syllabled line of the "Nibelungenlied." [49] Of the Greek tales in "The Earthly Paradise," "The Love of Alcestis" has, perhaps, the most dramatic quality.
Like Chaucer and like Rossetti,[50] Morris mediaevalised classic fable. "Troy," says his biographer, "is to his imagination a town exactly like Bruges or Chartres, spired and gabled, red-roofed, filled (like the city of King Aeetes in 'The Life and Death of Jason') with towers and swinging bells. The Trojan princes go out, like knights in Froissart, to tilt at the barriers." [51] The distinction between classical and romantic treatment is well illustrated by a comparison of Theocritus' idyl "Hylas," with the same episode in "Jason." "Soon was he 'ware of a spring," says the Syracusan poet, "in a hollow land, and the rushes grew thickly round it, and dark swallow-wort, and green maiden-hair, and blooming parsley and deer-grass spreading through the marshy land. In the midst of the water the nymphs were arraying their dances, the sleepless nymphs, dread goddesses of the country people, Eunice, and Malis, and Nycheia, with her April eyes. And now the boy was holding out the wide-mouthed pitcher to the water, intent on dipping it; but the nymphs all clung to his hand, for love of the Argive lad had fluttered the soft hearts of all of them. Then down he sank into the black water." [52] In "Jason," where the episode occupies some two hundred and seventy lines, one of the nymphs meets the boy in the wood, disguised in furs like a northern princess, and lulls him to sleep by the stream side with a Pre-Raphaelite song:
"I know a little garden close
Set thick with lily and red rose";
the loveliest of all the lyrical passages in Morris' narrative poems except possibly the favourite two-part song in "Ogier the Dane";
"In the white-flower'd hawthorne brake,
Love, be merry for my sake:
Twine the blossoms in my hair.
Kiss me where I am most fair—
Kiss me, love! for who knoweth
What thing cometh after death?"
This is the strain which recurs in all Morris' poetry with the insistence of a burden, and lends its melancholy to every season of "the rich year slipping by."
Three kinds of verse are employed in "The Earthly Paradise": the octosyllabic couplet; the rime royal, which was so much a favourite with Chaucer; and the heroic couplet, handled in the free, "enjambed" fashion of Hunt and Keats.
"Love is Enough," in the form of a fifteenth-century morality play, and treating a subject from the "Mabinogion," appeared in 1873, Mackail praises its delicate mechanism in the use of "receding planes of action" (Love is prologue and chorus, and there is a musical accompaniment); but the dramatic form only emphasises the essentially undramatic quality of the author's genius. What is the matter with Morris' poetry? For something is the matter with it. Beauty is there in abundance, a rich profusion of imagery. The narrative moves without a hitch. Passion is not absent, passionate love and regret; but it speaks a sleepy language, and the final impression is dream-like. I believe that the singular lack which one feels in reading these poems comes from Morris' dislike of rhetoric and moralising, the two main nerves of eighteenth-century verse. Left to themselves, these make sad work of poetry; yet poetry includes eloquence, and life includes morality. The poetry of Morris is sensuous, as upon the whole poetry should be; but in his resolute abstention from the generalizing habit of the previous century, the balance is lost between the general and the concrete, which all really great poetry preserves. Byron declaims and Wordsworth moralises, both of them perhaps too much; yet in the end to the advantage of their poetry, which is full of truths, or of thoughts conceived as true, surcharged with emotion and uttered with passionate conviction. One looks in vain in Morris' pages for such things as