EARTHLY PARADISE, The, the great narrative poem of William Morris, was writ ten in the years 1865 to 1870, the height of his career as craftsman and business man. The scheme that holds together this strange medley of Greek myth, Norse saga, French romance and Arabian talc is amazingly simple. The scene is laid at the end of the 14th century in "a nameless city in a distant sea," inhabited by descendants of the Greeks. Hither came a band of Norse wanderers, driven into years of voy aging by those two recurring medieval motives! fear of the dread Black Death and hope of an Earthly Paradise, of endless life. Here the wanderers linger on, finding, not immortality, but rest, and at last, release from fear; and here, month by month, each company tells the other a tale — one classic, one medieval, till the 24th ends the year. This scheme is suc cessful, not only because out of the most diverse material it builds a single; simple struc ture, but because it justifies an equally single and simple treatment. Differences of tone there inevitably arc. Such a tale as "The Lovers of Gudrun," taken direct from an Ice landic saga, moves with a swift relentlessness, a tragic intensity; "The Land East of the Sun and West of the Moon" carries out the dream device in its dreamlike leaping and lingering.
But the unity that links such variety as "Cupid and Psyche" and "The Man Who Never Laughed Again" (from the 'Arabian Nights') goes deeper than any narrative scheme or re currence of metric form. It is the spirit of Morris himself — master story-teller — that unites these stories of lovers fair and strong, of great things dared and endured. And for those who weary of this endless revel of love and adventure, of sunshine and color, there is the subtler lyric beauty of the interludes, in which the artist's own imagination is most surely revealed. It is not simply that these brief interludes — one for every month — are among the loveliest of English landscape poetry; but that in them, from the famous Prelude to the moving Envoi to his master Chaucer, the poet utters his deepest feeling about his life and his art. A "dreamer of dreams, born out of my due time," a hater of death, "not know ing what it meant," but a lover of life, "through green leaf and through sere," he has learned with his wanderers and his Norse heroes to face life and death heroically. Consult 'The Collected Works of William Morris' (ed. by May Morris, London 1910) ; Mackail, J. W., 'The Life of William Morris' (2 vols., 1904).