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Two Red Roses across the Moon. And I remember thinking that the poem was nonsense. With Mr. Morris's other early verses,
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The Defence of Guinevere, this song of the moon and the roses was published in 1858. Probably the little book won no attention; it is not popular even now. Yet the lyrics remain in memories which forget all but a general impression of the vast
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Earthly Paradise, that huge decorative poem, in which slim maidens and green-clad men, and waters wan, and flowering apple trees, and rich palaces are all mingled as on some long ancient tapestry, shaken a little by the wind of death. They are not living and breathing people, these persons of the fables; they are but shadows, beautiful and faint, and their poem is fit reading for sleepy summer afternoons. But the characters in the lyrics in
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The Defence of Guinevere
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The Defence of Guinevere, they would be the ballads of
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Shameful Death, and of
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The Sailing of the Sword, and
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The Wind, which has the wind's wail in its voice, and all the mad regret of
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Porphyria's Lover
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in all these pieces, is very curious and happy. The red ruby, the brown falcon, the white maids,
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in
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The Sailing of the Sword, make the poem a vivid picture. Then look at the mad, remorseful sea-rover, the slayer of his lady, in
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The Wind
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For my chair is heavy and carved, and with sweeping green behind It is hung, and the dragons thereon grin out in the gusts of the wind; On its folds an orange lies with a deep gash cut in the rind; If I move my chair it will scream, and the orange will roll out far, And the faint yellow juice ooze out like blood from a wizard's jar, And the dogs will howl for those who went last month the war.
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The Blue Closet, which is said to have been written for some drawings of Mr. Rossetti, is also a masterpiece in this romantic manner. Our brief English age of romanticism, our 1830, was 1856-60, when Mr. Morris, Mr. Burne Jones, and Mr. Swinburne were undergraduates. Perhaps it wants a peculiar turn of taste to admire these strange things, though
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The Haystack in the Floods,
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The Earthly Paradise especially, were less art than
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This may be an ungrateful and erroneous sentiment.
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The Earthly Paradise, and still more certainly
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Jason, are full of such pleasure as only poetry can give. As some one said of a contemporary politician, they are
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Even from narrative poetry Mr. Morris has long abstained. He, too, illustrates Mr. Matthew Arnold's parable of
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The Progress of Poetry.
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The Mount is mute, the channel dry.
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and the same title seems very appropriate to Mr. Swinburne. Probably few readers had heard his name--I only knew it as that of the author of a strange mediaeval tale in prose--when he published
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Atalanta in Calydon