A Selection From The Poems Of William Morris Part 1

A Selection from the Poems of William Morris.

by William Morris.

MEMOIR

OF

WILLIAM MORRIS.

William Morris, poet, decorative designer and socialist, was born in 1834 at Clay Street, Walthamstow, now almost a suburb of London, at that time a country village in Ess.e.x. He went to school at Marlborough College and thence to Exeter College, Oxford, where he took his degree in 1857. During his stay in the University the subsequent mode of his life was prepared and foreshadowed in two important directions. Like most poets Morris was not what is called very a.s.siduous "at his book"; the routine of college training was no more an attraction to him than the ordinary amus.e.m.e.nts and dissipations of undergraduate existence. But he was studious all the same, reading the cla.s.sics in his own somewhat spasmodic way and exploring with even greater zeal the mysteries of mediaeval lore. His fellow-worker in these studies and his most intimate friend was and is at the present day Mr. Burne Jones, the famous painter, at that time a student of divinity. Artistic and literary pursuits thus went hand in hand, and received additional zest when the two young men became acquainted with Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Holman Hunt and other painters of the Pre-Raphaelite school who came to Oxford to execute the frescoes still dimly visible on the ceiling of the Union Debating Hall. Of the aims and achievements of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, and of the revival of mediaeval feeling in art and literature originally advocated by its members ample account has been given in the memoir of Rossetti prefixed to his poems in the Tauchnitz edition. Its influence on Morris's early work, both in matter and form, will strike every observant reader of the opening ballads of the present collection. Later on the poet worked out for himself a distinct and individual phase of the mediaeval movement, as will be mentioned by and by. At one time little was wanting to make Morris follow his friend Burne Jones's example and leave the pen for the brush. There is indeed still extant from his hand an unfinished picture evincing a remarkable sense of colour. He also for a short time became a pupil of the late Mr.

G. E. Street, the architect, to whose genius London owes its finest modern Gothic building--the Law Courts in the Strand. On second thoughts, however, Morris came to the conclusion that poetry was his true field of action. His first literary venture was a monthly periodical started under his auspices in 1856 and called _The Oxford and Cambridge Magazine_. It contained, amongst other contributions from Morris's pen, a prose tale of a highly romantic character, and was, as regards artistic tendencies, essentially a sequel of _The Germ_, the organ of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, begun and continued for three numbers only, six years before. Several of the contributors to the earlier venture, including Rossetti, also supported its offshoot.

Neither, however, gained popular favour, and after a year's struggling existence _The Oxford and Cambridge Magazine_ also came to an untimely end. At present both are eagerly sought for by collectors and fetch high prices at antiquarian sales. So changeable is the fate of books.

In 1859 Morris married, after having the year before brought out his first volume of verse ent.i.tled _The Defence of Guenevere and Other Poems_. The book fell dead from the press, and it was not till it was republished 25 years later that the world recognised in it some of the freshest and most individual efforts of its author, whose literary position was by that time established beyond cavil. That position the poet owed in the first instance to two works published in rapid succession, _The Life and Death of Jason_, and _The Earthly Paradise_, the latter a collection of tales in verse filling four stout volumes.

His remaining original works are _Love is enough_, a "morality" in the mediaeval sense of the word, and _The Story of Sigurd the Volsung_, his longest and, in the opinion of some, his most perfect epic. In addition to these should be mentioned the translations from the old Norse undertaken in conjunction with Mr. Magnusson the well-known Icelandic scholar, and comprising _The Story of Grettir the Strong_ (1869), _The Volsunga Saga, with certain songs from the Elder Edda_ (1870), and _Three Northern Love Stories_ (1875); and finally a metrical rendering of _The aeneids of Virgil_.

For a critical discussion or a detailed a.n.a.lysis of Morris's work this is not the place. It must be sufficient to indicate briefly the ideas which underlie that work and give it its literary _cachet_. Two main currents, derivable perhaps from a common source but running in different directions can be easily discerned. The subjects of his tales are almost without exception derived either from Greek myth or from mediaeval folklore. After all that has been said and written of the gulf that divides the cla.s.sic from the romantic feeling--_"Barbaren und h.e.l.lenen_", as Heine puts it, such a conjunction might appear incongruous. But the connecting link has here been found in the poet's mind. He looks upon his cla.s.sical subject-matter through a mediaeval atmosphere, in other words he writes about Venus and Cupid and Psyche and Medea as a poet of Chaucer's age might have done, barring of course the differences of language, although in this respect also it may be noted that the archaisms of expression affected by the modern poet appear indifferently in the Greek and the mediaeval tales. The phenomenon is by no means unique in literature. Let the reader compare Chapman's Homer with Pope's, or let him open Morris's _Jason_ where the bells of Colchis "melodiously begin to ring", and the meaning of the afore-mentioned "mediaeval atmosphere" will at once be as palpable to him as it was to Keats when, reading Chapman's rude verse, after Pope's polished stanzas, he felt

like some watcher of the skies When a new planet swims into his ken.

It was the romantic chord of Keats's nature, that chord which vibrates in _La belle Dame sans Merci_, which was harmoniously struck and made the great master of form overlook the formal imperfection of the earlier poet. To the same element such stories as _Jason_, or _The Love of Alcestis_ and the _Bellerophon_ in _The Earthly Paradise_ owe their charm.

Morris's position towards mediaeval subjects did not at first essentially differ from that of other poets of similar tendency. In his first volume English and French knights and damsels figure prominently, and the beautiful and frail wife of King Arthur is the heroine of the chief poem and has given her name to the book. But in the interval which elapsed between that volume and the _Earthly Paradise_ a considerable change had come over the poet's dream. By the aid of Mr. Magnusson he had become acquainted with the treasure of northern folklore hidden in the Icelandic sagas, the two Eddas, the story of the Volsungs (of which a masterly translation is due to the two friends), the Laxdaela saga and other tales of more or less remote antiquity.

In the _Earthly Paradise_ the double current of the poet's fancy above alluded to is most strikingly apparent. The very framework in which the various tales are set seems to have been designed with that view. Guided probably by a vague tradition of a pre-Columbian discovery of America by the Vikings, the prologue relates how during a terrible pestilence certain mariners leave their northern home in search of the land where old age and death are not and where life is rounded by unbroken pleasure. Sailing west they come to a fair country. They gaze on southern sunshine and virgin forest and fertile champaign, but death meets them at every step, and happiness is farthest from their grasp when the people worship them as G.o.ds and sacrifice at their shrine.

Escaping from this golden thraldom they regain their ship, and after many dangers and privations are driven by the wind to an island inhabited by descendants of the ancient Greeks, who have preserved their old worship and their old freedom. Here the weary wanderers of the main are hospitably received, and here they resolve to dwell in peace, forgetful of their vain search for the earthly paradise. At the beginning and the middle of every month the elders of the people and their guests meet together to while away the time with song and friendly converse. The islanders relate the traditions of their Grecian home, the mariners relate the sagas of the North, and Laurence, a Swabian priest who had joined the Nors.e.m.e.n in their quest, contributes the legends of Tannhauser and of the ring given to Venus by the Roman youth. Here then there is full scope for the quaint beauty of romantic cla.s.sicism and for the weird glamour of northern myth. Without encroaching upon the field of criticism proper the writer may state that, in his opinion, amongst the cla.s.sic tales none is more graceful and finished than "The Golden Apples", and amongst the northern none more grandly developed and more epical in the strict sense of the word than _The Lovers of Gudrun_ based upon the Icelandic Laxdaela saga. The latter, unfortunately, cannot find a place in this volume for reasons of s.p.a.ce.

Every student of old northern literature is aware that amongst its remains none are more interesting as literary monuments, none more characteristic of the people from which they sprang than the two Eddas and the Volsunga Saga. Next to the Siege of Troy and the Arthurian legends perhaps no story or agglomeration of stories has left so many and so important traces in international fiction as the tale of Sigurd or Siegfried and his race, the heroic G.o.d-born Volsungs. Considering indeed the political insignificance and remoteness in which that story took its earliest surviving form this enormous success--if the modern term may be applied--seems at first singularly out of proportion. But it must be remembered that Iceland was little more than the storehouse of these old traditions which were the common property of the Teuto-Scandinavian race long before the Nors.e.m.e.n set foot on the northern isle. Of the two modern versions of the tale which are most thoroughly inspired by the ancient myth one, that of Wagner in his tetralogy _Der Ring des Nibelungen_, is dramatic in form, the other, Morris's _The Story of Sigurd the Volsung_, bears all the characteristics of the epic. To this difference of artistic aim, the difference of shape which the tale takes in the hands of the two poets may be traced. In one point however they agree. Both Wagner and Morris go back to the old Icelandic sources in preference to the mediaeval German version of the tale embodied in the _Nibelungenlied_. From this the German poet borrows little more than the localization of his drama on the banks of the river Rhine, the English poet scarcely anything but his metre--the _Langzeile_ or long-line with six hightoned, and any number of unaccentuated syllables.

The ordinary modern reader taking up the Volsunga Saga or either of the Eddas without preparation would probably see in them little more than a confused acc.u.mulation of impossible adventures and deeds of prowess with an admixture of incest, fratricide and other horrors. But on looking closer one discovers a certain plan in this entanglement, a plan much obscured by the unbridled fancy of the old narrators, and hardly realised by themselves, but which, if properly sifted, amounts to what we should call a moral or idea. To "point this moral," to consistently develop this idea, is the task of the modern poet courageous enough to grapple with such a subject. Two ways are open to him. Either he may wholly abandon the sequence of the old tale, and group its _disjecta membra_ round a leading idea as a centre, or else he may adhere to the order and essence of the legend as originally told, only emphasising such points as are essential to the significance of the story, and omitting or throwing into comparative shade those incidents which by their nature betray themselves to be arbitrary additions of later date.

Wagner has chosen the former way, Morris the latter. This fact, and the divergent requirements of the drama and the epic, sufficiently account for their difference of treatment. The leading idea in both cases remains the same; it is the fatal curse which attaches to the gold or, which is the same in a moral sense, to the desire for gold--_auri sacra fames_.

At first sight the tale of Sigurd, Fafnir's bane, seems to have little connection with this idea. It is briefly this. Sigurd, the son of Sigmund the Volsung, is brought up at the court of King Elf, the second husband of his mother, after Sigmund has been slain in battle. With a sword, fashioned from the shards of his father's weapon, he slays Fafnir, a huge worm or dragon, and possesses himself of the treasure watched by the monster, including a ring and the "helm of aweing," the latter in the _Nibelungenlied_, converted into the "Tarnkappe", a magic cap which makes the bearer invisible and endows him with supernatural strength. Tasting of the blood of the dragon, he understands the language of birds, and an eagle tells him of a beautiful maiden lying asleep on a rock called Hindfell, surrounded by a wall of wavering fire.

Through it Sigurd rides and awakes Brynhild the sword maiden, or Valkyrie, from her magic slumber. Love naturally follows. The pair live together on Hindfell for a season and Brynhild teaches the youth the runes of her wisdom, a conception of woman's refining and civilising mission frequently met with in old Germanic tales. When Sigurd leaves her to seek new adventures they plight the troth of eternal love, and

Then he set the ring on her finger, and once if ne'er again They kissed and clung together, and their hearts were full and fain.

From Brynhild's rock Sigurd journeys to a realm "south of the Rhine"

where dwell the kingly brothers, Gunnar, Hogni, and Guttorm, the Niblungs, together with their sister Gudrun, "the fairest of maidens", and their mother Grimhild, "a wise wife" and a fierce-hearted woman, as the Volsunga Saga alternately describes her. It is through a love-philter brewed by her that Sigurd forgets the vows exchanged with Brynhild, and becomes enamoured of Gudrun, whom he soon after weds. So powerful is the charm that the very name of his former love has been wiped from Sigurd's memory, and he willingly undertakes the task to woo and win Brynhild for his brother Gunnar. For that purpose he, by means of his magic cap, a.s.sumes Gunnar's semblance, and after having once more crossed the wall of wavering flame compels Brynhild to become his bride. But, faithful to his promise, he places a drawn sword between himself and the maid "as they lie on one bed together." On parting from her he receives back from Brynhild his own ring given to her at Hindfell in the days of their bliss. Sigurd then returns to Gunnar and resumes his own form, and all return home, the King leading his unwilling bride in triumph.

The subsequent events are the outgrowth of the tragic guilt thus incurred. Sigurd reveals the secret of Brynhild's wooing to his wife, and allows her to take possession of the fatal ring, which she during a quarrel shows to Gunnar's wife. Brynhild thus informed of the fraud practised on her, thinks of vengeance, and incites her husband and his brothers to kill Sigurd. The deed is done while Sigurd lies asleep in his chamber with Gudrun, or, according to the more poetic version of the German epic, while he bends over a brook in the forest to quench his thirst after a day's hunting. But as soon as her beloved foe is killed the old pa.s.sion never quenched rises up again in Brynhild's heart. To be united with her lover in death she pierces her breast with a sword, and one pyre consumes both.

With this climax Wagner very properly concludes his drama. But the epic poet likes to follow the course of events to their ultimate consequences, and Morris, in accordance with the Volsunga Saga, proceeds to relate how, after many years of mournful widowhood, Gudrun is married to Atli, a mighty king, the brother of Brynhild. Eager to become possessed of Sigurd's treasure he invites the Niblungs, its actual owners, to his country, and there the kingly brothers and all their followers are killed by base treachery and after the most heroic resistance. They refuse sternly to ransom their lives by a discovery of the h.o.a.rd which previous to their departure they have hidden at the bottom of a lake, and which thus is irrecoverably lost to mankind.

Gudrun has incited her husband to the deed and has looked on calmly while her kinsmen were slain one after the other. But when all are dead and the murder of Sigurd has been revenged, the feeling of blood relationship so powerful among Northern nations is reawakened in her.

While Atli and his earls are asleep she sets fire to the kingly hall, and her wretched husband falls by her own hand. It is characteristic of the Icelandic epic that after all these fates and horrors Gudrun lives for a number of years and is yet again married to a third husband. But to this length even Morris refuses to accompany the tale. In accordance with the Volsunga Saga his Gudrun throws herself into the sea; but the waves do not carry her "to the burg of king Imakr, a mighty king and lord of many folk."

All this is very grand and weird, the reader will say, but where is the moral, the ideal essence of which these events are but the earthly reflex? To this essence we gradually ascend by inquiring into the mythological sources of the tale, by asking who is Sigurd, whence does he come, on what mission is he sent and by whom? also what is the significance of the treasure watched by a dragon and coveted by all mankind? This treasure we then shall find and the curse attaching to it ever since it was robbed from Andvari, the water-elf, is the keynote of the whole story. The curse proves fatal to all its successive owners from Andvari himself and Fafnir, who, for its sake, kills his father, down to Sigurd and Brynhild and the Niblung brothers. Nay, Odin himself, the supreme G.o.d, becomes subject to the curse of the gold through having once coveted it, and we dimly discern that the ultimate doom of the Aesir, the Ragnarok, or dusk of the G.o.ds, of which the Voluspa speaks, is intimately connected with the same baneful influence. It further becomes evident that Sigurd the Volsung, the descendant of Odin, is destined to wrest the treasure and the power derived from it from the Niblungs, the dark or cloudy people who threaten the bright G.o.dworld of Valhall with destruction. And this leads us back to a still earlier stage of the myth in which Sigurd himself becomes the symbol of the celestial luminary conquering night and misty darkness, an idea repeatedly hinted at by Morris and splendidly ill.u.s.trated by Wagner, when Siegfried appears on the stage illumined by the first rays of the rising sun. In the work of the German poet all this is brought out with a distinctness of which only dramatic genius of the highest order is capable. With an astounding grasp of detail and with a continuity of thought rarely equalled, Wagner has remoulded the confused and complex argument of the old tale, omitting what seemed unnecessary, and placing in juxtaposition incidents organically connected but separated by the obtuseness of later sagamen.

Morris, as has been said before, proceeds on a different principle. His first object is to tell a tale, and to tell it as nearly as possible in the spirit and according to the letter of the old Sagas. In this he has succeeded in a manner at once indicative of his high poetic gifts and of a deep sympathy with the spirit of the Northern Myth, which breathes in every line and in every turn of his phraseology. To compare the peculiar tinge of his language with the ordinary archaisms and euphonisms of literary poets would be mistaking a field flower for its counterpart in a milliner's shop window. It is true that he also hints at the larger philosophic and moral issues of the tale. But when he refers to the end of the G.o.ds brought about by their own guilt or to the redeeming mission of Sigurd, it is done in the mysterious, not to say half conscious manner of the saga itself, and the effect is such as from his own point of view he intended it and could not but intend it to be.

Between the publication of _The Defence of Guenevere_ and that of Jason ten years elapsed. During most of this time the poet was employed in artistic pursuits. In 1861 he started in conjunction with a number of friends the business of decorator and artistic designer which still bears his name. Growing from very modest beginnings this enterprise was destined to work an entire change in the external aspect of English homes. It soon extended its activity to every branch of art-workmanship.

D. G. Rossetti, Madox Brown, and Burne Jones drew cartoons for the stained gla.s.s windows to be seen in many of our churches and colleges.

Morris himself designed wall-papers and the patterns of carpets. The latter are woven on hand-looms in his factory at Merton Abbey, which stands on the banks of the river Wandle surrounded by orchards, and looks as like a medieval workshop as the modern dresses of the workgirls will allow. Another member of the firm, Philip Webb, was the first modern architect to build houses of red brick in the style vaguely and not quite correctly described as "Queen Anne." At present these houses count by thousands in London and a whole village of them has been built at Turnham Green. The members of the firm did not confine their attention to any particular style or age or country. Wherever beautiful things could be found they collected them and made them popular. Old china English, and foreign, j.a.panese fans and screens, Venetian gla.s.s and German pottery were equally welcome to them and through them to the public generally. It may be said that the "aesthetic" fashion as it came to be called will like other fashions die out, and that people in the course of time will grow tired of "living up to" their furniture and dresses. At the same time the idea thus insisted upon that beauty is an essential and necessary ingredient of practical modern English life is not likely to be without beneficial and permanent effect.

It was as artistic worker and employer of skilled labour that Morris imbibed that profound disgust with our social condition which induced him to adopt the principles of extreme socialism. For a long time his views had tended in that direction, and at the end of 1884 he joined the Socialist League, a body professing the doctrines of international revolutionary socialism. He is the editor of its official organ, the _Commonweal_, which contains many contributions from his pen both in prose and verse. That the poet has not been entirely sunk in the politician, that longing for beauty is at least the partial cause of this desire for change at any price, is however proved by such a sentiment as, "Beauty, which is what is meant by _art_, using the word in its widest sense, is, I contend, no mere accident of human life which people can take or have as they choose, but a positive necessity of life, if we are to live as nature meant us to, that is unless we are content to be less than men," or by such a vision of a future earthly paradise as is expressed in the following lines:

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,

For that which the worker winneth shall then be his indeed, Nor shall half be reaped for nothing by him that sowed no seed.

Then all _mine_ and _thine_ shall be _ours_, and no more shall any man crave For riches that serve for nothing but to fetter a friend for a slave.

One may admire the pathetic beauty of such lines, without sharing the poet's hope, that their import will ever be realised, in a world peopled by men and not by angels. History teaches and personal experience confirms that art enjoyment and art creation of the highest type must be confined to the few, and it is to be feared that social democracy, whatever it may do for the physical welfare of the many, will care little about beauty, either in nature or in art. The _Demos_ will never admire Rossetti's pictures or Keats's poetry, and the first thing the much-vaunted peasant proprietors, or peasant communes would do would be to cut down our ancient trees, level every hedgerow and turn parks and commons into potato plots or it may be turnip fields. One may feel certain of all this and yet admire the author of _The Earthly Paradise_, "the idle singer of an empty day" when he preaches universal brotherhood in the crossways of Hammersmith, and wrestles with policemen, or wrangles with obtuse magistrates about the freedom of speech. Conviction thus upheld at the cost of worldly advantage and personal convenience and taste must command respect even from those who cannot share it.

Francis Hueffer.

CONTENTS.

Page

From "THE DEFENCE OF GUENEVERE AND OTHER POEMS."

The Defence of Guenevere 23 A Good Knight in Prison 36 Shameful Death 41 The Eve of Crecy 43 The Haystack in the Floods 45 Riding together 51 Summer Dawn 54

From "THE LIFE AND DEATH OF JASON." (Book XIV.)

The Sirens.--The Garden of the Hesperides.--The Heroes do Sacrifice at Malea 55

From "THE EARTHLY PARADISE."

An Apology 82 From Prologue--The Wanderers 84 Ogier the Dane 95 The golden Apples 147 L'Envoi 168

From "LOVE IS ENOUGH."

Interludes 173