Subtleties of Punctuation

In his lively book on How to Read a Poem, Terry Eagleton has an early approving mention of ‘the critic who said of some lines of T.S. Eliot: “There is something very sad about the punctuation”’ (p.3).  When I asked Terry which critic he meant by this, since there is no footnote in the book itself, he referred me to Gabriel Pearson’s essay in Graham Martin’s excellent albeit dated collection, Eliot in Perspective.

We don’t have very much in the way of studies of William Morris’s punctuation, which is why I welcome Stephen Arata’s comment, in his 2003 Broadview edition of Morris’s utopia, on ‘the dash – one of Morris’s favoured punctuation marks in News from Nowhere, and one he often uses to great effect.  To replace the dash, the Kelmscott edition [of the book] uses a combination of ellipses, commas, semi-colons, and colons, which somehow fails to achieve the rhythmical effects Morris achieved with the dash’ (p.49).

So here is a fine literary-critical task for someone to carry out: to analyse, with all the Empsonian or Ricksian subtlety one can command, the precise local rhythmic and semantic effects achieved by the Morris dash.

What's in a Logo?

We’ve had a while now to get used to that cute little red bird with a sprig in its beak which is the William Morris Society’s new logo, and in the Spring 2016 issue of the Society’s Magazine its designer, Angus Hyland of Pentagram, explains the thinking that went into it: ‘we looked at what visually speaking you had in your tool box … Very quickly the bird motif came to the fore … a long tradition of birds as symbols or logos … And people just like birds’.

I don’t doubt that Morris himself liked birds and that he often represented them in both his visual and his literary art; but I would want something stronger than ‘people just liking birds’ as justification for a Society logo.  That chirpy little red fellow certainly fits in – despite his colouring – with what we might call ‘green Morris’, a contemporary construction of our hero which sees him as benign environmentalist pioneer, peaceable and organicist in his tastes and politics. 

But Morris is actually a good deal less cosy than this.  Politically, he is a Communist not a Green; and in Pilgrims of Hope and News from Nowhere he is the poet of State massacres, civil war, revolutionary and counter-revolutionary violence, not just birds cheeping in the reed-beds of the upper Thames.  And in more purely literary terms, he is also the poet of ghosts, witches and monsters, of eerie metamorphosis and extreme, transformative violence (as Ingrid Hanson has finely shown). 

So can we come up with an apt logo for this more unsettling, indeed positively dangerous Morris?  Well, yes, if we turn to his epic poem Sigurd the Volsung and take those ‘two mighty wood-wolves’ of its first Book.  These brutes devour many of King Volsung’s sons, and later in that Book Sigmund and his own incestuously produced son Sinfiotli actually become wolves themselves: ‘as very wolves they grew/In outward shape and semblance, and they howled out wolvish things’.  So I’d happily replace the cheery red bird-and-sprig as Society logo with a snarling northern wolf (suitably stylised, of course); the latter would semiotically signal an altogether different kind of challenge to us.

William Morris Exam

I’ve always liked those old volumes of poetry or criticism – often intended as school editions – which have lists of essay or exam questions at the back, so that you can test yourself out when you’ve finished the book.  My volume of Matthew Arnold’s poems in the King’s Treasuries of Literature is of this kind: ‘Do you consider that Arnold was master of the sonnet?’; ‘Show that Arnold is at his best when describing river scenery’; and so on.  So too is my old Macmillan Casebook anthology on The Tempest: ‘How important is music in the play?’; ‘Trace the interplay of feelings of wonder and disillusion in the play’, etc.

In the case of Morris, we could compile a whole series of such exams from Fiona MacCarthy’s 1996 biography.  Has any other biography ever asked itself so many questions, some just rhetorical, others indicating genuine puzzlement on the author’s part?  By extracting a run of these one could set a whole series of test papers on Morris and his circle.  So here, lifted out pretty much at random, is a set of such questions to get your teeth into (I’ve given page references in case you’re moved, after trying these, to look up MacCarthy’s own answers to them):

1.How original was Red House? (161)

2.Without Morris in fact would there have been a Gertrude Jekyll? (165)

3.Why did Jason succeed where Guenevere failed? (204)

4.Were Janey and Rossetti technically lovers? (225)

5. Is poetry socially useful or superfluous? (240 – a rather big topic, I admit)

6.What did Morris like so much about the sagas? (290)

7.A blue movie Morris? (353 – an enigmatic little teaser, that one)

8.What did Morris gain from Leek? (356 – the place, not the vegetable)

9.How successful was the [carpet=making] episode?  How Eastern were these carpets? (405)

10.What has been the reason for such longevity that even the well-educated middle classes of late-twentieth-century Britain can measure out their generations in William Morris rooms? (414)

11.But how idealistic was the Firm now in reality? (452)

12.How far was Mrs Morris conscious of her son’s activities? (483)

There are in fact so many self-posed questions in MacCarthy’s mighty tome that one could repeat this exercise many times over.

Zadie Smith's Morris Epigraph

I sometimes think I should abandon my inveterate habit of browsing in secondhand and charity bookshops – it takes up a good deal of time and money, after all.  On the other hand, it leads to many good and serendipitous discoveries.  So today I have returned home, after dispensing a modest 75 pence, with a nice clean paperback copy of Zadie Smith’s 2012 London novel, NW.  It caught my eye on the shelf because it has this epigraph from Morris’s A Dream of John Ball: ‘When Adam delved and Eve span/Who was then the gentleman?’

‘Will no-one tell me what she sings … ?’ William Wordsworth asks in his ‘The Solitary Reaper’.  Will no-one tell me, in turn, why Zadie Smith uses the famous Morris quote as the apt tag to her novel, since I won’t have time in the midst of a very busy academic term to start reading my delightful new acquisition?  Thanks in advance to any reader of this blog who can help out with this, and hooray for those local bookshops that let fall such good discoveries into our eager hands.