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91 lliE FIRST VERSION OF "1HE WANDERERS" The first draft of the Prologue to William Morris's The Earth~1 P
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91 lliE FIRST VERSION OF "1HE WANDERERS" The first draft of the Prologue to William Morris's The Earth~1 Paradise is inconspicuously preserved in the twenty-fourtllVolune 0 his collected works. t.fay Morris, in her introduction to that volune, "Scenes from the Fall of Tray and Other Poems," conments: In turning over the leaves of the First Prologue to The Earthly Paradise, one might wonder why the poet put as ide so vivid and picturesque a piece of work. It is a complete story, full of movement and incident, full of strangeness and of almost Eastern imagination -- once more, the narrative of a man who saw what he recolDlted. And inmediately theorizes that, by the time this Prologue was completed, my father had outworn his impulse to use the much-beloved balladquatrain, and was turning to something fresher; also that he saw that what he had written was not so much an introduction as a complete piece in itself: a book of the length he had in contemplation from the first could not be written in a metre of this kind, and for many reasons an introduction should strike the prevailing note of the whole work. . . . For the story had nm away with him, and in it we have a whole lifetime of voyage and adventure instead of the two or three vivid pictures which now live for ever in the mind of the reader. (1*) Although this is interesting, it intensifies rather than answers the question of why Morris, after expending so much labor and imagination on a poem more than eighty pages in length, put it aside? Certainly, the issue of meter is important, but hardly seems a sufficient reason. Nor can excessive variety of incident serve as an adequate explanation why Morris set aside the first draft; the revision is no less varied, containing the same number of episodes as the original, usually with the same subject matter as those in the first draft. In the following pages I shall analyse the poem both in tenns of its episodic structure and in tenns of its morphological ftmctions, hoping to demonstrate that the narrative logic of the text itself was crucial to ~~rris's decision to re-write the poem. Indeed, "the story had rtm away with him." It contained two quite distinct ideas: that of the hero who frees a maiden from bondage and receives in return marriage and power, a story of action told
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THE JOORNAL OF PRE-RAPHAELITE STUDIES
in a folktale form; and that of an obsession with immortality which is practically identical with an obsession with death. The first of these predominates until the next to last episode, at which point the second idea takes hold, destroying the narrative structure designed for the first and necessitating the revision of the poem. Although our perception of a narrative tends to center on characters, episodes, and plot, we should also keep in mind that, as V. Prrris to end the tale with the fulfil1ment of those needs. But this movement of the tale went counter to Morris's increas ingly powerful interest in the natUre of the wish for immortal .. ity, or more exactly, the wish for escape simultaneously from death and from the toil of this world. Morris 1 s Wanderers arrive prematurely, as it were, in an Earthly Paradise of pure eroticism, a goal which remained alluring for the poet throughout his life. But contrary to the title of one of his poems of this period, he was be... ginning to find that love is not enough, that it cannot be a refuge from all the grief of life, and that it cannot stop the inevitable decay of life, nor hide the fact of death. The seventh episode of the poem begins when in middle age Rare hea.rs a song which concludes:
o Love,
weep that the days flit
As on my neck I feel your breath
That I may then remember it When I am old and near my death. o kiss me, love, for who knoweth What thing cometh after death? (138) He becomes melancholy and goes down to the harbor where he finds Nicholas, whose wife has recently died. They discuss mortality and remember their old dream. Now that the ~zons are Christians and they need not fear for their own souls on that account, the two old Wanderers begin to forget the promises of their faith and decide to sail off again in search of the Earthly Paradise. The persuade twenty of their fellows to go with them, leaving wives whose "blood was chill," without much regret, and again set sail for the west. This is the beginning of an epilogue, a different story growing from the end. of the traditional erotic rescue tale, one with quite a different tone. These old mariners spend forty days at sea and rtm. low on food and drink, which they ration for eleven days more until they see land. They sail into the harbour of one of .t«>rris's usual lilitewalled cities and are surprised to find the ship they had thought lost
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in a stom thirty years before I "The Fighting Man." Rafe throws a grapnel onto the side of "The Fighting Man" as they sail past it. Its boards crumble "As though it had been built of sand. tt (146) Another of the. Wanderers pokes a spear into the side of the ship. Through the hole that results they can see their fonner companions, as if asleep, and as young as they had been thirty years before. Stunned, the Wanderers let their own boat drift to shore, then. walk into the city. It is a city in suspended animation, even the sailors on the other ships are frozen. There stood the sailor with one hand Upon the rOPe, or on the shroud One foot. And in that quiet land Our footfalls seemed to groan aloud. (147) They see that "these men were dead/But uncorrupted"; it is as if it had been the Earthly Paradise but "God had o'erwhelmed it with His blows/That kill without destroying men." (147) The famished Wanderers attempt to take the fair seeming bread from stalls, but it crumbles in their hands. Even the water is impossible to touch. But when unto the water wan I stooped and thought to set my mouth, Nought met my mouth but common air. (148) '!"hey find a palace and in the center of that a pool with. three (more) naked ladies wading in it. ''Well nigh we wept thereat, although/We were in evil case, and old; . • • " (149) There are also treasures here and there and frozen courtiers and a banquet hall with the banqueting still seemingly going on. Minstrels were in the gallery, With silent open roouths, and hands That moved not on the psaltery and citern; • • • (ISO) Here, by way of contrast to the rest of the city, the food is still fresh. The Wanderers eat. And at the last, which was the worst, Grown bold, we dared to take our seat By those dead folk, and slake our thirst From out their cups; yea and did eat
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THE JOORNAL OF PRE-RAPHAELlTE STUDIES
From dead hands many a strange morsel: Thereof we grew right mad at last And drtmk with very wine of Hell. And as we laughed and chattered fast Things worthy weeping, suddenly All things grew dim, and deadly sleep And heavy dreams came over me While watch the stony folk did keep With glittering eyes, and that set smile MJre sad to see than bitter tears; And the great fire burned all the while As it had done these many years. (151) Rafe dreams that he is a shipwrecked knight. who is picked up by a shipload of old men looking fot the fotmtain of youth, and becomes their leader. They reach a coast where there is a stream banked with glass, across it a dark and tangled wood resounding with screams of anguish. Nonetheless, they rush into the stream and :fi.hd as they teach the other side Our clothes fell :front Us; then. were we Naked 1ike Adam without shame And fair and young as folk might be. (154) At this poi.ht the dream ends and another takes its place: . that he is a knight somehow transpJrted to an ancient city where the people cannot die, but wish to. They Came flocking romd me crYing out. "God, let us die! God, let us die!" (156) From which dream he 'tWoke suddenly, i.h that same place/Watched by the sleepless stony eyes." (156) It is now Rafe's dream and not Nicholas's alone that compels the Wanderers. The tone of the poem has changed, darkening, becoming obsessed not with the search for pleasure, but with the fear and horror of death, which eventually becomes its inverse, the wish for death as an escape fran the hottors of life. Rafe's companions wake with long hair and rusted anoour. Nicholas announces that he bel ieves they have all had the same dream and so have lost their "lust to live on earth." They "moved down towards the shore/Hoping for nought but quiet death,/Nor did we look back ~
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more/en those fair creatures that lacked breath." (158) We see them rowing out of the harbor, their sails having rotted while they slept, and traveling again until they reach another white-walled city: the one Miich Nicholas had seen in his first dream of the Earthly Paradise. But as they approach it they hear a song which breaks· Nicho1as ' s heart. He dies on the spot. seize this hour while you may; Let it pass - - there cometh day When all things will turn to grey. For to each shall come a day When no pleasure shall be bought, When no friend can gues s our thought, When all that has been, shall be nought. (163) In the final episode, the full-scale companion to the abbrevia.ted first episode, this city turns out to be the Greek city at which the Wanderers had arrived when the poem began, its lords the auditors of their tale. Rafe concludes his story by saying that if the Greeks try to kill them, they will fight, even though Old, but if not they will pay for their keep by telling "tales of many lands we know." (165) "The People of the Shore" reply that althoUgh the search for the Earthly Paradise is futile, the Wanderers have found a pleasant land which the Gods might envy, with many virtues ~ including beautiful maidens: "Like you, Sirs, am I chilled with eld,/Yet still I look on He continues with verses in praise of his land them with joy," (167) and offers the Wanderers a chance to stay there, to tell their tales, and to hear in exchange those of these descendants of Greek refugees from the Medes. Now, Sirs, go rest you from the sea,
And soon a great feast will we hold, Whereat some pleasan.t history Such as ye wot of, shall be told. (170) This completes the first draft of the prefatory verses for the immense cycle of poems which comprise Morris's The Earthly Paradise. The seventh episode of the first draft is significantly diffel"~ ellt in tone from the bulk of the story. It presents that supematU'tal effect attached to the priest's warning of living in Hell and its mood dominates the final draft of ''The Wanderers." Although Morris's revisions were extensive, he left the episodic structure intact. The Wanderers go through the same nunber of adventures in each vel'S ion.
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The transfonnations between the drafts are of tone: from the fantastic to the ironic. Naturalistic events are systematically substituted for supernatural occurrences, psychological difficulties for magical traps. What had been an adventure tale, a barbaric romance with characters motivated by a desire for i.mJoorta1ity barely distinguishable from greed, becomes an almost inward accomt of the ironic consequences following the search fot eternal youth. If one were to argue that the Earthly Paradise is utopia, the re" visions of t'TheWanderers" might be seen as ringing the changes on the very concept of utopia, from pagan paradise to the Other in its most negative aspect: death. The ironic mode of the revised "Wander.. ers" is initiated in that it is utopia itself that they, in their failure, find. The change from the ballad meter of the first draft to the long, sad, couplets of the revision was perhaps motivated by the change in tone that occurred as Morris got further into his story. With the aid of Propp' s analytical method, we can see that Morris, attempting to decide between the priest's tale, that·of the Hel1"inlife Which awaits searchers for the Earthly Paradise, and the folktale of the questing hero who finds kingdom and maiden, at first chose the latter, but fOlmd it to be an inadequate vehicle for the melancholy vision of life that was growing within him during those years of maturity and early sorrow. Michael Holzman
FOOTNOTES
(1*) May Morris, "Introduction,ttto The Collected WorkS of Wi1liam Morris (London: Longmans Green anef1XiriPany, 1915), pp.Xx:'\tiii..
xxix.
(Austf~~)UnY~e~i~'o~te=o~e~,t~~6~)CktQt5ia~r='~~:n~:~c()tt
are from Chapter 11, ''The Method and Material," pp. 19 and following. (3*) Ma:x F. Schulz, ''Turner's Fabled Atlantis: Venice, Carth.. age, and London as Paradisal Cityscape," Studies in Romanticism (Fall 1980). -