William Morris
From Commonplace Book
Defense of Guenevere
- pub in volume The Defence of Guevevere and other Poems (1858) and then in Kelmscott edition (1892)
- intertext with Malory’s Morte D’Arthur
- interlocking pentameter tercets
- the Kelmscott lineation and typographic spacing deliberately obscure the clear tercet structure, emphasizing links across prosodic line
- starts in medias res diagetically after Gauwaine’s accusation but also in media terms in conversation with Malory and the body of Arthurian literature (cf Cowan 2015 on mediation and translation)
- with Christmas setting also Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (ln 62)
- 75-6 "let the clock tick, tick, / To my unhappy pulse, that beat right through / my eager body"
- clock time part of the medieval remediation (like a Shakespearean anachronism)
- elaborate nature simile 93-103 again classical feeling or medieval
- 136-8 erotic charge within bounded imagery
- 165 "So, ever must I dress me to the fight”: adopting masculine language to continue persuading Gauwaine after mentioning his mother, who died because accused of infidelity
- again a masculine simile in 288-90
- 244-58 the containment of her gender roles ("For no man cares now to know why I sigh"), she cannot ask a man to speak to her in her room without suspicion.
- reminiscent of the more claustrophobic containment in "Mariana"
- 295 and ends in medias res with Launcelot coming
