The Earthly Paradise by William Morris
"The Earthly Paradise" by William Morris is a significant poetic work that reflects the author's admiration for medieval legends and ancient myths. Published between 1868 and 1870, the poem is structured similarly to Geoffrey Chaucer's "The Canterbury Tales," utilizing a series of interconnected stories told by a group of Norsemen who journey to find the mythical Earthly Paradise. Their quest ultimately leads them to a nameless city where they recount tales from both classical and Norse traditions during monthly feasts, creating a rich tapestry of narratives that explore themes of love, loss, and the passage of time.
The poem is divided into twelve books, each corresponding to a month, and features a total of twenty-four stories—half drawn from Greek mythology and half from medieval sources like the Icelandic sagas. Notably, one of the prominent tales is "The Lovers of Gudrun," which highlights themes of betrayal and regret. Morris's writing showcases a fluid poetic style and a deep appreciation for beauty, although it has been critiqued for being overly ornate at times.
Overall, "The Earthly Paradise" revitalized interest in long narrative poetry in England and contributed to a broader cultural revival in the arts during the Victorian era. As a work that marries storytelling with lyrical beauty, it invites readers to reflect on the complexities of human experience, while also revealing Morris's own philosophical contemplations on life and creativity.
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The Earthly Paradise by William Morris
First published: 1868-1870
Type of work: Poetry
The Work:
Of all the poems of William Morris, the most successful, in terms of popularity, is The Earthly Paradise, published originally in five thick volumes. Following closely the plan of Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales (1387-1400), this composition reveals Morris’s attraction to Chaucer’s method as well as his sense of beauty. Like Chaucer, Morris found in medieval legends and ancient myths material for his poetic narrative art, and he also found a general plan according to which these unrelated stories could be brought together harmoniously by a technique in which Eastern cultures had long anticipated Chaucer and other Europeans. Unlike Chaucer, whose plan was so large that he could not complete it, Morris, upon an almost equal scale, brought his work to a happy conclusion.
The prologue introduces a company of Norsemen who have fled the pestilence and set sail to seek the fabled Earthly Paradise “across the western sea where none grow old.” Not having succeeded in their quest, they have returned “shrivelled, bent, and grey,” after lengthy wanderings abroad, to a “nameless city in a distant sea” where the worship of the ancient Greek gods has not died out. In this hospitable city they spend the rest of their lives. Twice each month they participate in a feast at which a tale is told, alternately, by one of the city elders and one of the wanderers. The former tell tales on classical subjects, and the latter draw their tales from Norse and other medieval sources. Thus, of the twenty-four stories, twelve are Greek and classical and twelve are medieval or romantic. Each pair of stories corresponds with one of the twelve months, the first two being told in January, the second two in February, and so on. Thus the long poem is neatly partitioned into twelve books with interpolated prologues and epilogues in the form of lyrics about the progressive changes in nature. The Earthly Paradise actually revived in England an enthusiasm for long romances. Despite their high cost, many thousands of Morris’s books were sold, and the effect was a favorable one for the new revival of romantic feeling that Morris was fostering in art and decoration as well as in literature. Instead of exhausting Morris, this poetic effort inspired him to embark on other vast projects such as the translation of Homer and Vergil and a modern version of a Scandinavian epic, Sigurd the Volsung.
Among the tales told by the wanderers in The Earthly Paradise, the most striking is “The Lovers of Gudrun,” a version of the Icelandic Laxdaela Saga. It tells of Gudrun, daughter of a great lord in Iceland, who is loved by many men but especially by Kiartan, a youth of manly deeds and kindly disposition. Although Gudrun passionately returns his love, Kiartan, before he will marry her, goes with his bosom friend and cousin Bodli to seek fame in Norway, where he remains some years at the court of Olaf Trygvesson. When Bodli returns alone to Iceland, he yields to his passion for Gudrun and tells her that Kiartan has fallen in love with King Olaf’s sister Ingibiarg and will marry her. Convinced of Kiartan’s unfaithfulness, Gudrun brokenheartedly marries Bodli. When Kiartan returns to claim his bride, Gudrun curses Bodli, and the desolate Kiartan, half in contempt, spares his life. Despairing and taunted by those about him, Bodli participates in an ambush set up by Kiartan’s enemies, treacherously slays his friend, and is in turn killed by Kiartan’s brothers. Although Gudrun marries again, what remains indelibly with the reader is Morris’s picture of her agonized realization of what, in her faithlessness, she has done:
She cried, with tremulous voice, and eyes grown wet
Morris was a natural creator; that his hand could not outspeed his brain is evidenced by his composing seven hundred lines of poetry in a day. Years after the composition of The Earthly Paradise he explained the nonchalant attitude toward the writing of poetry that enabled him to race undaunted through that enormous project: “Waiting for inspiration, rushing things in reliance on inspiration, and all the rest of it, are a lazy man’s habits. Get the bones of the work well into your head, and the tools well into your hand, and get on with the job, and the inspiration will come to you.”
In spite of its quantity, his poetry has a remarkably high quality. Although somewhat lacking in humor, pathos, and rich humanity, it shows none of the crabbed complaints of many poets. His range of subject matter is as broad as his composition was fluent. The very spacious cycle of stories in The Earthly Paradise includes these titles: “The Story of Theseus,” “The Son of Croesus,” “Cupid and Psyche,” “The King’s Treasure-House,” “Orpheus and Eurydice,” “Pygmalion,” “Atalanta’s Race,” “The Doom of King Acrisius,” “Rhodope,” “The Dolphin and the Lovers,” “The Fortunes of Gygis,” “Bellerophon,” “The Watching of the Falcon,” “The Lady of the Land,” “The Hill of Venus,” “The Seven Sleepers,” “The Man Who Never Laughed Again,” “The Palace East of the Sun,” “The Queen of the North,” “The Story of Dorothea,” “The Writing on the Image,” “The Proud King,” “The Ring Given to Venus,” and “The Man Born to Be King.”
These stories are so arranged that, with the revolving calendar, their temper becomes darker and stronger, developing into a sinister tone at the end. The full effect thus depends upon a continuous and consecutive reading. Conversely, the problem that arises as the reader progresses through this lengthy work is that the embroidery becomes too profuse to be sustained by the fabric. The result is the taint of decoration inherent in the Pre-Raphaelites—too much of beauty, love, languor, everything—so that the reader longs for a little substantial simplicity and cheerfulness. One might, therefore, argue for an occasional and selective reading of the stories, so long as their total scope is kept in mind.
The interludes give readers glimpses into the poet’s mind, and these glimpses give evidence that despite his disapproval of introspective poetry, Morris did not always avoid it. While the stories of The Earthly Paradise come from all parts of the medieval world, these poems of the months are unequivocally English; they give an admiring description of the land of Morris’s birth and life. With variations, they repeat the keynote of the prologue in which he characterizes himself as “the idle singer of an empty day” who has no power to sing of hell or heaven or to make death bearable. By “idle” Morris does not mean “useless” but, rather, one who can, by the scenes he presents, distract from “empty,” daily cares. In this manner he acknowledged spiritual emptiness in his time.
Throughout this poetic work there runs a strain of despondency, doubt, and mild skepticism that records the poet’s genuine pity for humanity. Although there is in the work an elemental vigor, glorying in youth, power, love, and possessions, these aspects of life are presented primarily through old men’s memories. Despite the swift-moving action, the narrative generally seems grandly slow. Neither the tale-tellers nor the actors in the tales are particularly individualized as characters. Finally, readers see a vast, intricate tapestry with its panorama of interwoven figures.
Bibliography
Boos, Florence Saunders. The Design of William Morris’ “The Earthly Paradise.” Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 1990. An analysis of the literary design of The Earthly Paradise. Discusses the literary structure of the work, the influences and sources for the poems, and their critical reception.
Calhoun, Blue. The Pastoral Vision of William Morris: “The Earthly Paradise.” Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1975. Places The Earthly Paradise within the genre of the pastoral; this perspective reveals motifs that can be connected to Morris’s socialism and artistic endeavors.
Clutton-Brock, Arthur. William Morris. New York: Parkstone Press, 2007. Biography chronicling Morris’s multifaceted career, including his work as a poet and prose writer.
Helsinger, Elizabeth K. Poetry and the Pre-Raphaelite Arts: Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Morris. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2008. Examines the works of the two poet-artists in order to describe the aesthetics of the Pre-Raphaelite movement and its expression in both literature and art. Chapter 8, “Designing The Earthly Paradise,” focuses on this work.
Hodgson, Amanda. The Romances of William Morris. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987. Examines why Morris used the genre of romance as a vehicle to express his views. A chapter analyzes The Earthly Paradise as a romance within the context of Morris’s development of this literary form.
Le Bourgeois, John Y. Art and Forbidden Fruit: Hidden Passion in the Life of William Morris. Cambridge, England: Lutterworth Press, 2006. An analysis of Morris’s life and poetry, describing his attachment to his sister Emma, who was a source of inspiration for his work.
Skoblow, Jeffrey. Paradise Dislocated: Morris, Politics, Art. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1993. Sets The Earthly Paradise within the context of modernism and Marxism. Argues that The Earthly Paradise expresses a sense of estrangement or dislocation that is a part of modern culture.
Thomas, Jane. “Morris and the Muse: Gender and Aestheticism in William Morris’s Pymgalion and the Image.” In Writing on the Image: Reading William Morris, edited by David Latham. Toronto, Ont.: University of Toronto Press, 2007. A close reading of one of the poems in The Earthly Paradise.
Tompkins, J. M. S. William Morris: An Approach to the Poetry. London: Cecil Woolf, 1988. A complete study of the poetic works, including prose romances, written by Morris. Two chapters are devoted to analysis of The Earthly Paradise, examining what the poems reveal about Morris’s feelings about society and his life.