William Morris Archive

List of Surviving Early Morris Poems, and Poetic and Prose Fragments

(including those published in The Oxford and Cambridge Magazine)

Starred (*) entries below remained unpublished in Morris's lifetime.

Where have you been so long to-day?

Ballad: Malmston had a dream in the night

*The Mosque Rising in the Place of the Temple of Solomon (formerly known as "The Dedication of the Temple").

*Fragment: From all other moving shadows

*Fragment: And then as the ship moves over the deep

The Willow and the Red Cliff

Fragment: The Maying of Queen Guenevere

The Long Land (Scene: A place that no one knows.)

Rejected fragment from Sir Peter Harpdon's End

Once my Fell Foe

The Romance of the Three Wooers

St. Agnes' Convent

Palomydes Quest

We have done all that men could do

Ballad: There were two knights rode together

Saint George

*Why do they make these lists in the great square?

*A time there was in days long past away

*The Lady of Havering

I went through many lands and found no rest

Rejected fragment from The Defence of Guenevere

Scenes from the Fall of Troy

On the Edge of the Wilderness

*The Sleeve of Gold

*The Lady of the Wasted Land

*Lo Sirs a Desolate Damozel

*Introduction to the "Story of the Flower"

Songs from “The Hollow Land”

Song from “Gertha's Lovers”

Summer Dawn

Song from “Golden Wings”

*Prose Fragment: The Lady of the Waste Land

*Prose Fragment: The Green Summer

*Sir Richard

*Dear friends, I lay awake in the night

*Early Draft: The Man Born To Be King

*Fragment: Yoland

*Mad as I was I stopped

*I who am curious . . . Sir Jaques prayed . . .

Sir Giles War Song

Song from "Frank's Sealed Letter" ("Wearily, drearily")

"Hands" ('Twixt the Sunlight and the Shade" (later, the Prince's Song in "Rapunzel")

The Captive (later "Riding Together")

*That Queer Story  

*"My squire, in many lands I have been," fragment.

Drafts in British Library Add. MS 45,298A, may be Morris's adolescent hand.

These titles below are all written in a large, loose, symmetrical script, quite different from that used by the copyist of "The Mosque Rising in the Place of the Temple of Solomon" (formerly known as "The Dedication of the Temple"), a poem which May Morris received in the same batch of poems from her niece Effie Morris in 1921, and which she describes as written out "for or by" her aunt. May Morris apparently hesitated to identify her aunt's handwriting, but at least did not assume that the very different "Fame" script was hers. The uncertainty is resolved, however, by the one surviving Emma Morris letter (to her niece Jenny, 1887, William Morris Gallery MS J77), written in the script of "The Mosque Rising" copyist. Emma was not the copyist for "Fame" or the other poems in the same handwriting which were found in her drawer; other possibilities include Henrietta Morris or Morris himself. Morris's handwriting varied widely; although the handwriting of "Fame" is less compressed than that of the Fitzwilliam early script, the capital letters are similarly formed. May Morris often mentioned whether drafts were in her father's hand, but here said nothing. See also the note on 10

Fame: Why weepeth he? why weepeth he?

The Abbey and the Palace: Standing away from the cornfields

The Night-Walk: Night lay upon the city

The Banners: Stands a house among the trees

Drowned: What is the bottom of the river like?

The Three Flowers

*The Ruined Castle

The Fen-River

*14. The Blackbird

16. Winter Weather (earlier "The Midnight Tilt")

17. 'Twas in Church on Palm Sunday

18. Blanche (Broad leaves that I do not know /Grow upon the ground
 full low)

Sources cited:

AWS. May Morris, ed., William Morris: Artist, Socialist, 2 vols. Oxford: Blackwell, 1936.

CW. William Morris, The Collected Works of William Morris,
ed. May Morris. 24 vols. London: Longmans, 1910-15.

OCM. The Oxford and Cambridge Magazine

John Le Bourgeois, “The Youth of William Morris.” Diss. Tulane,
1971.

Jack Lindsay, William Morris: His Life and Work.
London: Constable, 1975.

E.E. Stokes, "The Morris Letters at Texas,"
The Journal of the William Morris Society, 1, No. 3 (1963): 23-30.

Fitz. MS 1 Fitzwilliam Museum, "Autograph MS of 7 Poems and 1 Prose
Tale."

Fitz. MS 2 Fitzwilliam Museum, "Autograph MS of 4 Fragmentary Poems
and 1 Prose Tale."

Fitz. MS 3 Fitzwilliam Museum MS 14/1917.