Middle Ages, those of folklore and the supernatural, those of dream. What Dante is to Gabriel Rossetti, Malory and Froissart are to William Morris. Three of the first four and most famous poems in the volume"The Defence of Guenevere," "King Arthur's Tomb," and "Sir Galahad: A Christmas Mystery''are attempts at interpreting the texture and spirit of the
Morte D'Arthur
. Poems derived from the
Chronicle
, including "Sir Peter Harpdon's End," "Concerning Geffray Teste Noire," and "The Haystack in the Floods" depict Froissart's Middle Ages, a fifteenth-century epoch of blood, violence, and brutality. A third group of poems, including several that comment on Gabriel Rossetti's watercolors, create medievalized fantasy worlds, grounded in folklore or dream.
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Yet the poems, despite their medievalized worlds, are Victorian and Pre-Raphaelite in their concerns: the plight of fallen women, the tensions between romantic passion and the marriage of convenience, political and social injustice, and the attempt to define both heroism and failure. Even the volume's interest in history, its appropriation of the past, is essentially typical of its era. The dramatic monologues and lyrics of Robert Browning, whom Morris then idolized, influence its forms, meters, and moral attitudes.
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Honoring both Browning and Gabriel Rossetti, Morris creates painterly details and memorable images. These are often almost metaphysical in their combinations of unexpected elements. Rapunzel, in the poem that bears her name, sees from her tower a knight slain in battle; the blood from his wounds seems "like a line of poppies red / In the golden twilight. . . ." Alice de la Barde, in "Sir Peter Harpdon's End," dreams of sleeping amid the flowers of Avalon: "soft mice and small / Eating and creeping all about my feet." In "Golden Wings" an idyllic castle is so fully described that readers know that green moss grows only on the scarlet brick of its walls, while "yellow lichen [grows] on the stone." Although we are given the precise appearance of the swan-house in the castle moat, we never learn the cause of the castle's destruction or the nature of its destroyers.
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Morris's elaborate detail is often symbolic; the mad Norse protagonist of "The Wind" finds, in an orange "with a deep gash cut in the rind," an analogy to the mutilated body of his beloved. Yet often particularity functions as it does in dream or paintingas rich, decorative, evocative, yet essentially untranslatable imagery. The
Defence
is replete with brightly colored pictures, like the rich watercolors Gabriel Rosset-
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