Page:The Life of William Morris.djvu/310

ÆT. 39] ginning of winter, but it was afterwards very much altered. It gave him more real trouble than any other of his poems. "I have come down here for a fortnight," he writes from Kelmscott on the 13th of February, 1872, "to see spring beginning, a sight I have seen little of for years, and am writing among the grey gables and rook-haunted trees, with a sense of the place being almost too beautiful to live in. I have been in trouble with my own work, which I couldn't make to march for a long time; but I think I have now brought it out of the maze of re-writing and despondency, though it is not exactly finished." For other reasons, to be mentioned presently, it was not published till the end of the year.

"Love is Enough" is probably the least familiar to most readers of Morris's longer poems; but apart from any question of purely poetical quality, it is in some technical respects much the most remarkable. It reconstitutes, under modern conditions, forms of later mediæval poetry which had long fallen into disuse. The fluctuating contest between epic and romantic treatment which is visible in "The Earthly Paradise" is here put aside; they are replaced by a dramatic form which combines qualities taken from both, but is itself of a quite distinct kind: a kind which was being gradually worked up to in England during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, when the Renaissance burst in with a crash and produced the new world of the Elizabethans. The distinctively mediæval structure, with its carefully planned architectural arrangement, is resumed in a manner which dramatic poetry had abandoned for over three hundred years. In his use of receding planes of action which yet do not lie in what might be called, by an easy metaphor from another art, any real aerial per-.