SOURCE: Tarvers, Josephine Koster. “‘The Deep Still Land of Colours’: Color Imagery in The Defence of Guenevere and Other Poems.” Studies in Philology 84, no. 2 (spring 1987): 180-93.

In the following essay, Tarvers contends that Morris utilizes vivid color imagery in The Defence of Guenevere and Other Poems to manipulate “readers' emotional responses to the character and situations in his poetry.”

From the beginning of the Pre-Raphaelite movement, bright and vivid color was a striking feature of the pictures produced by members of the Brotherhood. For example, artists such as Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Holman Hunt, by the use of a white wet-ground¹ for their paintings, went against the prevalent French technique, so deplored by Ruskin,² of toning colors with grey, and created instead brighter, more intense effects.³ Meanwhile, unlike their paintings, the poetry of the Pre-Raphaelites, while laden with exotic, sensuous details, can be better described as “studies...