lyrical poetry - OUDL Home

ARNOLD AND PRE-RAPHAELITE GROUPSleep) and Shameful Death and The Haystack in theFloods; never made more telling use of passionate, expressivegesture:Her tired feet looked cold and thin,Her lips were twitch'd, and wretched tears,Some, as she lay, roll'd past her ears,Some fell from off her quivering chin.Her long throat stretch'd to its full length,Rose up and fell right brokenly ;As though the unhappy heart were nighStriving to break with all its strength.Nor was he ever again quite so boyishly, so delightfullyromantic as in some of the ballads with refrains—TwoRed Roses across the Moon and The Eve of Cregy and TheSailing of the Sword—if the refrains lend themselves alittle to Calverley's parody, "Butter and eggs and apound of cheese."But it will not quite do to say with the late MrDixon Scott that the effect of these poems was a kindof accident, due to the vividness with which Morrissaw and painted, that he had no cunning of word andrhythm, and that his later, more diffuse poetry isaltogether of another kind. The hearty, cheerfulMorris of whom the Life tells never found his wayinto the poetry, which is all in one key. The moodof the early poems is the mood of the later, if neveragain expressed with such dramatic intensity, in suchsharp, vivid pictures. He wrote hereafter in a softerstrain, in a more diffuse and equable style, in a morelulling verse, but the burden of it all is the same—delight in beauty, the beauty of nature and of craftsmanship,things made with human hands, the beautyof strength and courage, courage in the face of death109