Unprintable Lyrics: The Unpublished Poems of William Morris

Abstract

Unprintable Lyrics:The Unpublished Poems of William Morris Florence S. Boos (bio) Almost all the poetic works of William Morris were published in his lifetime, with the exception of forty-two personal lyrics he drafted in the late 1860s and 1870s. The tone of several of these poems resembles that of the “idle singer[’s]” wistful monthly lyrics in the Earthly Paradise, and others are grieving, personal, introspective, and as “unmediated” in their emotional nuances as anything he ever wrote. Almost all of these lyrics were apparently drafted between the publication of Morris’s Life and Death of Jason in 1867 and the appearance of his Earthly Paradise in 1868–1870, and four of them did find their way into periodicals in 1869–1870. He reproduced eleven more in his 1870 hand-illuminated copy of A Book of Verse, and several in the 1891 Poems by the Way, along with some but not all of those he had copied out in A Book of Verse. The rest, however, were left unpublished at his death, and in what follows I will suggest some reasons for this omission. In volume twenty-four of the Collected Works (1910–1915), his daughter May Morris reprinted without comment a selection of these poems, among them the four he had published in periodicals, and she added three more in her 1936 Artist, Writer, Socialist, a sequence of publication which obscured their unity.1 She also took one of the verses in Eddic meter to Dame Bertha Phillpott, an authority in Old Norse,2 but put it aside when she understood it was not a translation, but a ‘nordic’ expression of Morris’s grief in sublimated form. Students of Morris’s life and work have long known about the affair conducted by Morris’s wife Jane Morris and Dante Rossetti between 1868 or 1869 until as late as 1874, as recorded in contemporary letters William Bell Scott sent to his partner Alice Boyd as well as Jane Morris’s and Dante Rossetti’s extensive correspondence made available in 1964, and more recently in carefully annotated scholarly editions.3 These document the lovers’ frequent long visits (among many other things), and the obligatory social contacts with Rossetti occasioned by Morris, Marshall, Faulkner and Company weekly gatherings. Except for the poems just mentioned, Morris absorbed the implications of his wife’s affair with his erstwhile friend in stoic silence, whereas Rossetti freely transposed his experiences into the [End Page 193] Click for larger view View full resolution Fig. 1. William Morris in 1874, photograph by Frederick Hollyer. [End Page 194] Click for larger view View full resolution Fig. 2. The Morris and Burne-Jones Families in 1874, photograph by Frederick Hollyer. sonnets of “The House of Life,” protected by the fiction that these honored the memory of his dead wife Elizabeth Siddal. A gender-reversed parallel to this dispiriting period in Morris’s personal life emerged in May 1868, when Georgiana Burne-Jones discovered the first of Edward Burne-Jones’s many extramarital liaisons.4 Morris had made many lifelong friends at Oxford, but the closest by proximity in interests and temperament was Ned Jones, and their two families had shared countless meals and travels together. Mutual awareness of intertwined betrayals must have cast a shadow over their long-standing goodwill, in ways that may have found expression on 25 May 1869, when Morris wrote Burne-Jones that “I am afraid I was crabby last night, but I didn’t mean to be, so pray forgive me—we seem to quarrel in speech now sometimes, and sometimes I think you find it hard to stand me . . . but again forgive me for I can’t on any terms do without you. / Yours / W. Morris” (MacCarthy, p. 215). The more than twenty-year time lapse between the Collected Works (1910– 1915) and Artist, Writer, Socialist (1936) may have smoothed the path for the now-elderly May Morris to (re)print several more of these poetic responses to her parents’ estrangement as an act of loyalty to her father’s memory. Proprieties had [End Page 195] become less rigid, Jane Morris had died in 1914, and May may well have wished to...