In place of the refined ethics and sentiment, and purely modern spiritual ideals which find a somewhat rhetorical expression in Tennyson, Morris endeavours to render the genuine Catholic mediaeval materialistic religious temper as it appears in Malory; where unquestioning belief, devotion, childish superstition, and the fear of hell coexist with fleshly love and hate—­a passion of sin and a passion of repentance.  Guenevere’s “defence” is, at bottom, the same as Phryne’s: 

“See through my long throat how the words go up
In ripples to my mouth:  how in my hand
The shadow lies like wine within a cup
Of marvellously colour’d gold.”

            “Dost thou reck
  That I am beautiful, Lord, even as you
  And your dear mother?” [37]

Morris criticised Tennyson’s Galahad, as “rather a mild youth.”  His own Galahad is not the rapt seer of the vision beatific, but a more flesh-and-blood character, who sometimes has cold fits in which he doubts whether the quest is not a fool’s errand; and whether even Sir Palomydes in his unrequited love, and Sir Lancelot in his guilty love, do not take greater comfort than he.

Other poems in the book were inspired by Froissart’s “Chronicle” or other histories of the English wars in France:  “Sir Peter Harpdon’s End,” “Concerning Geffray Teste Noire,” “The Eve of Crecy,” etc.[38] Still others, and these not the least fascinating, were things of pure invention, lays of “a country lit with lunar rainbows and ringing with fairy song.” [39] These have been thought to owe something to Edgar Poe, but they much more nearly resemble the work of the latest symbolistic schools.  When reading such poems as “Rapunzel,” “Golden Wings,” and “The Tune of Seven Towers,” one is frequently reminded of “Serres Chaudes” or “Pelleas et Melisande”; and is at no loss to understand why Morris excepted Maeterlinck from his general indifference to contemporary writers—­Maeterlinck, like himself, a student of Rossetti.  There is no other collection of English poems so saturated with Pre-Raphaelitism.  The flowers are all orchids, strange in shape, violent in colouring.  Rapunzel, e.g., is like one of Maeterlinck’s spellbound princesses.  She stands at the top of her tower, letting down her hair to the ground, and her lover climbs up to her by it as by a golden stair.  Here is again the singular Pre-Raphaelite and symbolistic scenery, with its images from art and not from nature.  Tall damozels in white and scarlet walk in garths of lily and sunflower, or under apple boughs, and feed the swans in the moat.

“Moreover, she held scarlet lilies, such
As Maiden Margaret bears upon the light
Of the great church walls.” [40]

“Lord, give Mary a dear kiss,
And let gold Michael, who look’d down,
When I was there, on Rouen town,
From the spire, bring me that kiss
On a lily!” [41]

The language is as artfully quaint as the imaginations are fantastic: