When both our mouths went wandering in one way,
And aching sorely, met among the leaves;
Our hands being left behind strained far away.
we feel that a certain sacrifice of emotional directness of speech is being made to a sense that intrudes on the poetry without intensifying it. And we have the same feeling when Galahad says:—
No maid will talk
Of sitting on my tomb until the leaves
Grow big upon the bushes of the walk,
East of the Palace-pleasaunce, make it hard
To see the minster therefrom.
The elaboration in these places blurs rather than quickens our vision, as it does again in Rapunzel's song:—
Send me a true knight,
Lord Christ, with a steel sword, bright,
Broad and trenchant; yea, and seven
Spans from hilt to point, O Lord!
And let the handle of his sword
Be gold on silver.
We may almost forgive a young poet flaws which are in themselves lovely and are but excesses of a method which he commonly uses to wholly admirable ends; but they are flaws none the less. The sense of values is not yet consistently true. But the indistinctness of outline of which I have spoken is a more serious weakness than this occasional indiscretion in the use of colour.
The poems in the volume may, somewhat arbitrarily, but fitly for the present purpose, be considered as four or five groups. The poems in the first, headed by The Defence of Guenevere, King Arthur's Tomb and Sir Galahad, have love for their central theme and aim at conducting a more or less simple love story to its successful or disastrous issue with directness and clarity. The obscurity that alone threatens their complete success is not due to subtlety on the one hand nor to vagueness of conception on the other, but merely to a power of expression that was not yet sure of itself. Psychological subtlety was not, as is sometimes supposed, outside Morris's range; on the contrary, he gives constant and varied evidence of a depth of perception in human affairs quite remarkable, as will be shown. But the subtlety was never confused and blurred by the sophistry that tempts so many poets on making a really pregnant psychological discovery into all kinds of unintelligible elaboration. When he saw clearly into the workings of the mind he recorded his vision in a few sharp and clearly defined strokes, and left it. Subtlety and obscurity are never synonymous in his work. And although, at twenty-four, his understanding of man's love for woman was naturally not very profound or wide in its range, it was passionate and quite sure of itself within its own imaginative experience. His failure in places to give his understanding clear utterance is the failure of a man not yet wholly used to his medium. When Guenevere says:—
While I was dizzied thus, old thoughts would crowd,
Belonging to the time ere I was bought
By Arthur's great name and his little love;
Must I give up for ever then, I thought,
That which I deemed would ever round me move
Glorifying all things; for a little word,
Scarce ever meant at all, must I now prove