SOURCE: Herbert, Isolde Karen. “‘A Strange Diagonal’: Ideology and Enclosure in the Framing Sections of The Princess and The Earthly Paradise.” Victorian Poetry 29, no. 2 (summer 1991): 145-59.

In the following essay, Herbert contrasts the function of the frame structures of Alfred Tennyson's The Princess and Morris's The Earthly Paradise.

After reading the first volume of The Earthly Paradise, Browning complimented Morris on the poem's “continuous key and recurring forms,—the New masked in the Old and perpetually looking out of the eyeholes of its disguise.”¹ Recurrence and disguise in the form of framing strategies shape Tennyson's The Princess and Morris' The Earthly Paradise into narratives in which similar structural designs create antithetical effects. Tennyson's enigmatic hint that “there is scarcely anything in the story which is not prophetically glanced at in the prologue”² and May Morris' recollection that the Prologue to The Earthly Paradise gave Morris “more trouble than...