Page:The Life of William Morris.djvu/681

272 years. It begins with the first of the "Chants for Socialists" of 1884; and includes the political verses, as they might be called, of militant Socialism, the fragments which he thought most worthy of survival from his versified Socialist romance of the "Pilgrims of Hope," and the ballads and romantic pieces of the three or four years which had elapsed since the beginnings of his return to literature. Intermediate between the two main groups, and of very various dates, are the verses for his own tapestries, or for Burne-Jones's pictures, of which between thirty and forty are printed in the volume. Only one poem previously unpublished, "The Folkmote by the River," belongs to the more recent years.

Some of the poems of the earlier period have a special history or association. "The God of the Poor" (which had already been printed in the Fortnightly Review for August, 1868) was almost, if not quite, the first piece he wrote when he resumed the writing of poetry after he had left Red House. The two beautiful lyrics, "From the Upland to the Sea" and "Meeting in Winter," are songs from "The Story of Orpheus," which had been written for "The Earthly Paradise," but never published. "A Garden by the Sea" is a later version of the song of the waternymph to Hylas in the fourth book of "The Life and Death of Jason." The minute differences in language, in one of the most haunting and exquisitely finished of all his lyrics, are of no little interest. The lines "To the Muse of the North," it may be worth while to note, were written before his first visit to Iceland, and show more clearly than any comment how the land and all that had come from it filled his imagination. The curious poem entitled "Pain and Time Strive Not," which is of a date somewhere between