Professor Borges - A Course on English Literature

sea;
Beneath an apple-tree our heads
Stretched out toward the sea;
Grey gleam’d the thirsty castle-leads,
When the Sword came back from sea.
Lord Robert brought a ruby red,
When the Sword came back from sea;
He kissed Alicia on the head:
I am come back to thee;
’Tis time, sweet love, that we were wed,
Now the Sword is back from sea!
Sir Miles he bore a falcon brown,
When the Sword came back from sea;
His arms went round tall Ursula’s gown:
What joy, O love, but thee?
Let us be wed in the good town,
Now the Sword is back from sea!
My heart grew sick, no more afraid,
When the Sword came back from sea;
Upon the deck a tall white maid
Sat on Lord Roland’s knee;
His chin was press’d upon her head,
When the Sword came back from sea!
    The two older sisters receive a gift, and as the stanzas continue, we see that Lord Roland is beginning to forget her. The first is dressed in red. The next in brown. This foreshadows or predicts that something is going to happen. The name of the ship is
The Sword
. At the end, when Roland returns, he returns with a white maiden. And the narrator was dressed in white at the beginning. You can see that this poem is like a painting, in addition to the music of the lines.
    Well, as you can see, Morris began by writing visual, musical, and vaguely medieval poems. But then the years passed; he devoted himself to his other activities: architecture, design, typography; and he planned out his great work. And that great work—I think it is his most important work—is called
The Earthly Paradise
, and was published in two or three volumes from the year 1868 to 1870. Now, Morris had always been interested in stories, but he believed that the best stories had already been invented, that a writer did not have to invent
new
stories. That the true work of the poet—and he had an epic sense of poetry—was to repeat or re-create these ancient stories. This might seem strange to us as far as literature goes, but painters never thought so. We could almost say that for centuries painters have repeatedly painted the same stories, the story of the Passion, for example. How many crucifixions are there in painting? And as for sculpture, it is exactly the same. How many sculptors have made equestrian statues? And the story of the Trojan War has been retold many times, and the
Metamorphosis
ofOvid retells myths that readers already knew. And Morris, around the middle of the nineteenth century, thought that the essential stories already existed and that his task was to re-imagine them, re-create them, tell them anew. Moreover, he admiredChaucer, who had not invented plots, either, but rather took Italian, French, and Latin ones, as well as some from unknown sources but that undoubtedly existed, like the story of the man who sells pardons. So, Morris set himself the task of writing a series of stories like
TheCanterbury Tales
, and he placed them in the same era, the fourteenth century. Now, this book, which consists of twenty-four stories and which Morris managed to finish in three years, is written in imitation of Chaucer. But at the same time—and this is something the critics seem not to have noticed—as a kind of challenge to Chaucer, not only in terms of the sources but also in terms of the language. Because, as you know, Chaucer looks for an English that abounds in Latin words. This intention of his is logical, for with the Norman invasion England became full of Latin words. Morris, on the other hand—Morris, who translated
Beowulf
—was falling in love with Old Norse literature, and wanted English to return, to whatever degree possible, to its primitive Germanic roots. So he writes
The Earthly Paradise
.
    I think that Chaucer could have done something similar if he had wanted to, but Chaucer was drawn to the south—to the Mediterranean, to the Latin tradition, a tradition that Morris certainly did not scorn, for half the stories in
The Earthly Paradise
are Hellenic. There are eleven of Hellenic origin, and another that is Arabic. Morris took that one from the medieval book
A Thousand and One Nights
, which was compiled in Egypt, though its sources (Hindu and Persian) are much older. Chaucer found a framework for his stories, the idea of the famous pilgrimage to Becket’s shrine, and Morris needed a framework, a pretext to tell a lot of stories. So he invented a story, a more romantic story than, let’s say, Chaucer’s. Because between Chaucer in the fourteenth century and Morris in the