William Morris

The Defence of Guenevere and Other Poems William Morris

The poem is recognizably a Morris poem because of its uses of description of all of the senses at once. It also uses a great deal of Medieval language, because Morris had a tendency to look back on those times as a sort of golden age of Olde England and wanted to make his poems based in that historical time authentic. This Chaucer-esque language and style is typical of Morris, and can also be seen in a number of the other poems in the collection, most notably in the related King Arthur's Tomb and Sir Galahad, a Christmas Mystery. Many of Morris' poems were love poems, but rather than talk about love, and what it meant to him, he based the greater questions of love, betrayal and loss in historical times, focusing on the romances of Medieval time in order to ponder the nature of love, betrayal and loss.