VIII. Well, the Spring 's back now! the thrushes Are astir as heretofore, As of old about the door. I must wonder, in all this, IX. (Winning thus what I have lost) ATHENS. (1865.) [From After Paradise.] The burnt-out heart of Hellas here behold! Quench'd fire-pit of the quick explosive Past, Thought's highest crater-all its fervours cold, Ashes and dust at last! And what Hellenic light is living now To gild, not Greece, but other lands, is given : Not where the splendour sank, the after-glow Of sunset stays in heaven. But loud o'er Grecian ruins still the lark ANDROMEDA. I. The monster that with menace guarded thee Rock-bound, unhappy one, at last is slain; And thy long-prisoned loveliness set free From the chill torment of its cruel chain. For what, then, do those wistful gazes wait? And why art thou still lingering there alone, In fruitless freedom, so disconsolate? Perseus is gone! II. Heroic men, 'tis yours to dare and do. WILLIAM MORRIS. [WILLIAM MORRIS was born at Elm House, Walthamstow, in 1834, went to school at Marlborough, and proceeded from it to Exeter College, Oxford. On taking his degree he became an articled pupil of G. E. Street, the architect, but quitted his office before long in order to devote himself to painting, designing, and decoration, as well as to poetry. His first published poems appeared in the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, founded and carried on by him and a group of his friends, in 1856; and his first published volume, The Defence of Guenevere, and other Poems, in 1858. For some years afterwards he was chiefly occupied with the work which developed round the firm of Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co. (afterwards Morris & Co.), manufacturers and decorators. In 1865 he returned to London from the house he had built and furnished for himself in Kent, and resumed the writing of poetry. The Life and Death of Jason appeared in 1867, and The Earthly Paradise in 1868-1870. During these years he had learned Icelandic, and translated a number of the Sagas. In 1871 he became tenant of Kelmscott Manor House, Lechlade, which remained his country home for the rest of his life, though he chiefly lived and worked in London. Love is Enough was published in 1872 and Sigurd the Volsung and the Fall of the Niblungs in 1876. In 1877 he declined to accept nomination for the Professorship of Poetry at Oxford; about this time his political activity began, at first as an advanced Radical, gradually developing into the active Socialism of his later years. On January 13, 1883, he was elected an Honorary Fellow of Exeter and enrolled himself as a member of the Social Democratic Federation. From that time forward the chief among his multifarious occupations were, designing for and carrying on the business of his firm, organizing and working on behalf of the Socialist movement, lecturing and writing on art and social questions, writing prose romances, and carrying on the work of the famous Kelmscott Press, started by him in 1891. In this last year he brought out, as the second volume printed at that press, a selection of his own unpublished poems under the title of Poems by the Way. Among his poetical works should also be mentioned his verse translations of Virgil's Aeneid (1875) and Homer's Odyssey (1887). He died at Kelmscott House, Hammersmith, in October 1896.] Of all the great English poets, William Morris is the one whom it is least possible to consider or to appreciate as a poet alone. To him, poetry was not an isolated art. It was the application to the material of rhythmical language of the constructive and decorative principles common to all arts. And art itself-of which all the particular arts were the applications to one or another material—was not an isolated thing. It was simply the visible or audible recorded expression of the joy of life, 'production,' as Aristotle had defined it long before,' with pleasure and for the sake of pleasure.' His wellknown sayings that 'talk of inspiration is sheer nonsense, it is a mere matter of craftsmanship,' and that, in terms still more concrete and vivid, 'if a chap can't compose an epic while he's weaving tapestry, he had better shut up,' express his considered doctrine, and also his consistent practice. He handled the art of poetry as he handled the arts of weaving or dyeing or printing, the production of household furniture or wall-decoration; all were pleasurable production meant for pleasurable use. Hence while it remains true that his poetry, like that of others, has to be estimated simply as poetry, it will convey its full meaning only to those who realize what he meant it to be, what place he meant it to occupy in a scheme of human life. It would be beside the point here to enlarge on the manifold scope of his activities, or on the influence which in many ways they exercised, and still exercise, on civilization. But neither must this be forgotten; for otherwise we should, by treating his poetry as a detached thing, miss its structural import and part of its individual quality. That he came to be known as 'the author of The Earthly Paradise' is more than a happy accident. For the creation of an earthly paradise in a perfectly literal sense of the words, of an actual world in which beauty and joy should be incorporated with daily life and be of the essence of all productive activity, was the object which he pursued throughout; and his own divergent activities were all threaded from that one centre. This way of regarding and handling poetry began in him as an instinct, and gradually wrought itself out into a settled doctrine. In his earlier poetry it is only latent. His first volume represents the last outcome of the Romantic movement, and its linking up with the mediaeval tradition through a new imaginative insight into history. It had been foreshadowed by Keats in poems like the Eve of St. Mark and La Belle Dame Sans Merci, and was intimately connected with the Pre-Raphaelite movement and the potent influence, alike in poetry and painting, of Rossetti. The Defence of Guenevere, like the Lyrical Ballads of sixty years before, attracted little immediate attention, but, like them, was a germinal force of incalculable vitality. Technically the poems in this volume are uncertain in handling, immature, full of the crude sap of youth. But they were the symbol of the new era and the manifestation of a new poet, 'Where,' in Swinburne's just words, ' among other and older poets of his time and country, is one comparable for perception and experience of tragic truth, of subtle and noble, terrible and piteous things? where a touch of passion at once so broad and so sure?' The chord of imaginative beauty sounded by three typical pieces, King Arthur's Tomb, The Haystack in the Floods, Summer Dawn, is something which stands by itself and alone. Arthurian romance and the early Middle Ages, Chaucer and Froissart and the full expansion of the fourteenth century, are recaptured and brought into vital connexion with the beauty and wonder of the actual world as these took shape in a fresh and wholly original and underivative imagination. Perhaps now, after sixty more years have passed, these poems appeal to new minds with even enhanced poignancy. They have never been widely popular; the fashion they set, the school they formed, are negligible. Their effect has been over poetry itself, in a way at once more intimate and more profound. To this early germinal period of romantic exploration succeeded, after an interval of nearly ten years, the middle period of trained and deliberate craftsmanship. This is represented by the Life and Death of Jason and The Earthly Paradise. English poetry in the early sixties had come to a point of uncertainty and partial stagnation. Swinburne's Atalanta in Calydon (1864), Morris's Jason (1867), and Rossetti's Poems (1870) mark the emergence of fresh forces which poured new life into it and gave it a fresh orientation. All three won immediate and wide recognition. In Jason, the Chaucerian element in the mixed impulse of Morris's earlier volume becomes predominant. Here he developed his full gift as a story-teller, a gift rare among poets, and absent or inconspicuous in many of the greatest. Constructional power, sense of design, and the application to design of rich continuous ornament had now all been mastered. The long narrative-poem-a form in which English poetry had but little of the first rank to show, and which had succumbed to the idyllic treatment of episodes--was reinstated. But in Jason Morris also re-established that connexion with the Middle Ages which had been broken by the Elizabethans and since then, in the main, lost. Its whole atmosphere is mediaeval, |