With many a kiss she closed his eyes;
She kissed him cheek and chin:
E'en so in the painted Paradise
Are Earth's folk welcomed in.
The short lyrics, 'Love's Gleaning Tide,' 'Spring's Bedfellow,' 'Pain and Time Strive Not,' and two or three others, have just that intangible beauty that makes lyrical poetry at once unforgettable and impossible to discuss in any detail. In one of them, 'The Garden by the Sea,' which is the lovely song from the Hylas episode in Jason, Morris altered three lines, not, I think, for the better. The fairy poem 'Goldilocks and Goldilocks' is play, but the play of a great poet. Then we have the charming verses written for tapestries and pictures, slight enough and yet struck by Morris's unerring instinct into sparks of poetry. This of the Vine—
I draw the blood from out the earth;
I store the sun for winter mirth.
and this of the Mulberry Tree—
Love's lack hath dyed my berries red:
For Love's attire my leaves are shed.
are perfect of their kind. There remain two groups, both inspired more or less by the same impulse, but differing a good deal in their artistic value. The first of these consists of poems written directly to embody the principles of active socialism that absorbed the greater part of his energy in later life; it includes 'All for the Cause,' 'The Day is Coming,' and 'The Voice of Toil' among others. Here again Morris proved his incapacity to write verse that was not poetry, but he gets nearer to the border-line at times in these poems than he does anywhere else in his work; he is, however, still well on the right side. 'All for the Cause' is a fine direct challenge to the workers to assert their own lives, but the challenge is made to all that is best in their nature, even to the best of that nature that the poet hopes will yet be fostered in them. 'The Day is Coming' has a strong vein of irony in it that looks a little strange in Morris's verse, and yet it is admirably managed—
For then, laugh not, but listen to this strange tale of mine,
All folk that are in England shall be better lodged than swine.
Then a man shall work and bethink him, and rejoice in the
deeds of his hand,
Nor yet come home in the even too faint and weary to stand.
Men in that time a-coming shall work and have no fear
For to-morrow's lack of earning and the hunger-wolf anear.
I tell you this for a wonder, that no man shall be glad
Of his fellow's fall and mishap to snatch at the work he had.