A Selection from the Poems of William Morris — Reading Notes

Diction and the Medieval Register

Morris's poetic language consistently reaches toward an archaic, medieval register. In the excerpt from Sigurd the Volsung, phrases such as 'the sea-flood's surging lip' and 'the crag-dwelling eagles' rely on compound epithets and inversion that evoke Old English and Norse verse. The syntax often places the verb before the subject: 'There merry men went bedward when their tide of toil was done.' This deliberate archaism is not merely decorative; it establishes a world apart from Victorian modernity. The poem The Earthly Paradise employs a similar strategy, with its refrain 'Cry out, for he heedeth, fair Love that led home' echoing liturgical repetition. Morris's diction rarely admits colloquialism, maintaining a formal, almost incantatory tone throughout.

Voice and the Shifting Speaker

The selection reveals Morris's skill in modulating voice across different poems. In The Earthly Paradise, the speaker alternates between a collective cry—'Cry out, the World heedeth not'—and the direct address of a divine or beloved figure: 'Come cling round about me, ye faithful who sicken.' This polyphonic structure creates a sense of ritual dialogue. By contrast, the narrative voice in Sigurd the Volsung is omniscient and distanced, describing the land of the Helper with a catalog of its features: 'a goodly strip, / 'Twixt the mountains cloudy-headed and the sea-flood's surging lip.' The shift from lyric to epic voice is marked, yet both modes share a measured, stately rhythm. The memoir's inclusion of Rossetti's doggerel provides a jarring counterpoint, reminding readers that Morris himself was subject to the informal banter of his circle.

Structure and the Use of Refrain

Morris frequently employs refrain as a structural device, particularly in his lyric poems. The excerpt from The Earthly Paradise repeats the line 'Cry out, for he heedeth, fair Love that led home' at the end of each stanza, creating a cumulative emotional effect. The refrain anchors the poem's meditation on longing and fulfillment, while the intervening lines vary in imagery—'the Cup with the roses around it,' 'the World's Wound well healed.' In Sigurd the Volsung, Morris uses a different structural principle: the narrative unfolds in long, unbroken verse paragraphs, with occasional shifts in focus signaled by phrases like 'Now this is the first book.' The editor's selection juxtaposes these two approaches, allowing readers to observe how Morris adapts his form to genre. The memoir's anecdotal structure, with its inserted letters and rhymes, mirrors this variety in a prose context.

Setting and the Geography of Myth

Morris's settings are often liminal spaces where the mundane meets the mythical. In Sigurd the Volsung, the land of the Helper is described as 'hidden' and 'many-peopled,' lying 'Twixt the mountains cloudy-headed and the sea-flood's surging lip.' This geography is both specific and archetypal: the mountains and sea define a borderland, while the 'earth-born watchers' and 'Giant kin' hint at a pre-human past. The hall of Gripir stands 'where the waste and the tillage meet,' a threshold between civilization and wilderness. Similarly, The Earthly Paradise evokes a 'House of Fulfilment of Craving' that is at once a physical place and a spiritual state. Morris's descriptive passages rarely linger on visual detail for its own sake; instead, setting serves to establish the moral and emotional atmosphere of the poem.

Readers approaching this selection should attend to the interplay between Morris's medievalist diction and the editorial frame provided by Hueffer. The memoir's personal anecdotes—Rossetti's rhymes, the letter from Forman—offer a glimpse of the poet as a figure among friends, not merely a voice from the past. The poems themselves reward close attention to rhythm and refrain, as Morris builds his effects through repetition and variation. This edition serves as a compact introduction to a poet who sought, in his own words, to make 'the deeds to be' visible through the lens of ancient story.

That rainy afternoon, I kept returning to Morris’s Sigurd, the vowel-weight of his lines settling like mist, until a footnote mentioned a gentler American voice. I’d forgotten Lowell’s questing, frost-crisp rhythms. By dusk, my copy of The Vision of Sir Launfal And Other Poems by James Russell Lowell; Edited with an Introduction and Notes by Julian W. Abernethy, Ph.D. — Reading Notes lay open beside it, both dreaming of distant grasses.