Victorian Poetry

Aesthetic and Decadent poetry

Be the green grass above me

With showers and dewdrops wet;

And if thou wilt, remember,

And if thou wilt, forget. (CR i - 8)

At first glance, the female speaker seems to accept a well-known Victorian
stereotype of bourgeois femininity - romantically dead, aesthetically
pleasing, and totally undemanding. But the potentially ironic tone quickly
undermines this hackneyed image. By exerting control over her lover's
reactions to her death, she expresses an independence and self-sufficiency
that ultimately exclude him. Her identity remains intact whether he
remembers her or not. Here Christina Rossetti's speaker distances herself
from her already excluded existence as a woman. She does so by turning to
what she implies is the freedom afforded by death. This is one of Rossetti's
main techniques for refusing to adapt to the objectified position in which
male aestheticism frequently tries to fix femininity.

In some respects, William Morris's representations of femininity mark a
similar departure from Dante Gabriel Rossetti's and Swinburne's memor-
able icons of objectified womanhood. But where Christina Rossetti often
links the integrity of her art with the liberating power of the afterlife,
Morris attempts to bring aestheticism to all aspects of the everyday world.
Architect, bookmaker, designer, painter, and poet: the multitalented Mor-
ris's intention from the mid-i85os onward was to return Victorian society
to the pre-industrial beauty, individuality, and simplicity that he often
associated with the Middle Ages. Assuredly, the sheer quantity of his works
in different media is truly astounding. But his immense productivity is even
more remarkable for its consistently high quality and complexity. This is a
feature particularly evident in his poetry. Like Dante Gabriel Rossetti, with
whom he worked closely, poetry was a prized activity for Morris, since it
was untainted by any motive for profit. His poetry often deepens the
sophistication evident in some of the powerful images of women that he
depicted in many different paintings, stained glass, and tapestries.

Morris's portrait of Guenevere, King Arthur's adulterous queen, depicts a
typically Pre-Raphaelite tragic and troubled beauty (see Figure i). Yet it is
only when we look at his dramatic monologue "The Defence of Guenevere"
(1858) that we comprehend clearly why this female figure maintained such
a strong hold over Morris's imagination. Certainly, Guenevere - to follow
Morris' spelling of her name - was topical in the late 1850s. She came to
public attention not just through Morris's art but also in the first volume of
Tennyson's Idylls of the King (1859-85). Indeed, these adaptations of
Arthurian legend provided Victorian readers with an image of an ideal
kingdom that belonged to the distant past. At the same time, this legendary

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