Unpublished Lyrics of William Morris

Abstract

At the end of a letter to Andreas Scheu giving some biographical details about himself, William Morris wrote: 'I should have written above that I married in 1859 and have two daughters by that marriage very sympathetic with me as to my aims in life.'l The comment on his daughters was no empty platitude. Both Jenny and May Morris took a profound interest in all of their father's activities: they embroidered, they helped with the arrangements for socialist meetings, they made fair copies of his poetry. Because of chronic illness, Jenny could not undertake strenuous tasks, but May energetically devoted her life, as Sir Basil Blackwell said, 'to keeping her father's memory not only green but dynamic'.2 Her edition of her father's work in twenty-four volumes, published by Longmans between I9IO and 1915, was undertaken with prodigious care and love: manuscripts were diligently sought out and copied; the collation of manuscripts with earlier editions was scrupulously undertaken; editorial emendation was kept to a minimum and was made only after taking advice from Morris's executors (notably Sir Sydney Cockerell, formerly Morris's secretary); and the critical commentary offered was intelligent and full of insight. The task was, however, an enormous one, the manuscripts were scattered, and May was not entirely systematic. As a result, The Collected Works of William Morris is, in places, confusingly and repetitively organized. Nevertheless, by the twenty-fourth volume May had managed to include virtually all of what was available to her except for items that she deliberately, though often reluctantly, excluded. Unfinished poems and drafts were generally not printed in full, though they were often drawn from in the introductions to the volumes; and much of Morris's journalistic and lecturing work was passed over. Her pencilled comment on an unfinished ballad of which she quoted part is 'I see no reason to print more of this, as we are not printing early fragments wholesale'.3 In general she accepted Cockerell's opinion: 'the three existing volumes of lectures contain the greater part of what he wished to stand as his message on art and socialism. I do not think his reputation will gain by a gathering together of everything by him that can be collected, the bulk of his writing being already very large.'4 Even while the edition was in progress, though, May seems to have felt that she had been too rigid in excluding certain material, and when the opportunity was provided by Sir Basil Blackwell to bring out two supplementary volumes (William Morris: Artist, Writer, Socialist, 1936) she included many more lectures and journalistic items, many more fragmentary drafts and notes. But perhaps the most interesting items were drawn from a manuscript that had come to light only after the completion of The Collected Works. It was a set of very early poems discovered in