ival mediaevalism, but they give a
poetical sense of a barbaric age strongly and sharply real." [36] These
last words point at Tennyson. The first four pieces in the volume are on
Arthurian subjects, but are wholly different in style and conception even
from such poems as "The Lady of Shalott" and "Sir Lancelot and Queen
Guinevere." They are more mannerised, more in the spirit of
Pre-Raphaelite art, than anything in Morris' later work. If the
name-poem is put beside Tennyson's idyl "Guinevere"; or "Sir Galahad, a
Christmas Mystery," beside Tennyson's "Sir Galahad," the difference is
striking. In place of the refined ethics and sentiment, and purely
modern spiritual ideals which find a somewhat rhetorical expression in
Tennyson, Morris endeavours to render the genuine Catholic mediaeval
materialistic religious temper as it appears in Malory; where
unquestioning belief, devotion, childish superstition, and the fear of
hell coexist with fleshly love and hate--a passion of sin and a passion
of repentance. Guenevere's "defence" is, at bottom, the same as Phryne's:

"See through my long throat how the words go up
In ripples to my mouth: how in my hand
The shadow lies like wine within a cup
Of marvellously colour'd gold."

"Dost thou reck
That I am beautiful, Lord, even as you
And your dear mother?" [37]

Morris criticised Tennyson's Galahad, as "rather a mild youth." His own
Galahad is not the rapt seer of the vision beatific, but a more
flesh-and-blood character, who sometimes has cold fits in which he doubts
whether the quest is not a fool's errand; and whether even Sir Palomydes
in his unrequited love, and Sir Lancelot in his guilty love, do not take
greater comfort than he.

Other poems in the book were inspired by Froissart's "Chronicle" or other
histories of the English wars in France: "Sir Peter Harpdon's End,"
"Concerning Geffray Teste Noire," "The Eve of Crecy," etc.[38] Still
others, and these not the least fascinating, were things of pure
invention, lays of "a country lit with lunar rainbows and ringing with
fairy song." [39] These have been thought to owe something to Edgar Poe,
but they much more nearly resemble the work of the latest symbolistic
schools. When reading such poems as "Rapunzel," "Golden Wings," and "The
Tune of Seven Towers," one is frequently reminded of "Serres Chaudes" or
"Pelleas et Melisande"; and is at no loss to understand why Morris
excepted Maete