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History of English Literature

Notes Morris was particularly interested in Chaucer, the fourteenth-century English poet. Though there
is no resemblance worth the name between Morris and Chaucer, yet Morris’ interest in the middle
Ages (to which Chaucer belonged) is noteworthy. Like Rossetti he found asylum from the sordidness
of contemporary life in the splendour of the middle Ages. Most of Morris’ works (such as Guinever
and Other Poems, The Haystack in the Flood, and some poems in the collection Earthly Paradise)
are steeped in the medieval spirit. Explaining Morns’ return to the middle Ages, Alfred Noyes
observes in William Morris (English Men of Letters): “Morris turned to the Middle Ages not as a
mere aesthete seeking an anodyne, not as an aesthetic scholar composing skilful exercises, but as
a child turns to the fairy land.”

20.3.3 Devotion to Detail
The Pre-Raphaelites, as a rule, bothered more about the particular than about the general. Both in
their painting and their poetry we come across a persistent tendency to dwell scrupulously on each
and every detail, however minor or even insignificant by itself. They do not wield a broad and
hurried brush, but love to linger on details for their own sake. They tried to paint the thing itself-
not a traditional copy of it. For a perfect faithfulness of description the fidelity to details was,
therefore, necessary. Sometimes this concern for details degenerates into a mannerised trick, but
very often it strikes the reader with a forceful, concrete effect, making for freshness of perception.
It may be pointed out that even before the Pre-Raphaelites, in some poems such as Tennyson’s
Mariana, Coleridge’s Christabel, and Keats’s The Eve of St. Mark) this tendency to linger on simple
details is discernible.

Did u know? Christabel has rightly been called “the first Pre-Raphaelite poem.”
The details we have been talking about are purely visual in painting, but in poetry they may be
auditory as well as visual. Pre-Raphaelite poets love both visual and auditory details. Now to take
some examples, see the closing lines of Rossetti’ A Lost Confession:
She had a mouth
Made to bring death of life-the underlip
Sucked in, as if it strove to kiss itself;
Her face was pearly pale.
Again, note the details in the very first stanza of The Blessed Damozel:
The blessed Damozel leaned out
From the gold bar of heaven;
Her eyes were deeper than the depth
Of waters stilled at even;
She had three lillies in her hand,
And the stars in her hair were seven.
The third and fourth lines are suggestive as well as concrete, but the last two lines could have been
written by Defoe himself. Consider, again, the following passage from Morris’ Golden Wings:
There were five swans that never did eat
The water-weeds, for ladies came
Each day, and young knights did the same
And gave them cakes and bread for meat.
As an illustration of the abundance of auditory details, see the following passage from Rossetti’s
My Sister’s Sleep:

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