A Singer and his Dream in 'William Morris's Pilgrims of Hope(Kansai English Studies)

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  • KIYOKAWA Sachie
    神戸大学大学院国際文化学研究科博士課程後期課程

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  • ウィリアム・モリスの『希望の巡礼者』における「詩人」と「夢」(関西英文学研究)
  • ウィリアム・モリスの『希望の巡礼者』における「詩人」と「夢」
  • ウィリアム ・ モリス ノ 『 キボウ ノ ジュンレイシャ 』 ニ オケル 「 シジン 」 ト 「 ユメ 」

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This paper intends to clarify the importance of William Morris's narrative poem, The Pilgrims of Hope (1885-86), and show that Morris's consistent credo of "fellowship" is already foreshown in it. Pilgrims was serialized in The Commonweal, the organ of the Socialist League in which Morris published his famous works, A Dream of John Ball (1886-87) and News from Nowhere (1890). Compared with these latter works, this poem has been left unnoticed by critics, except for a few attacks regarding its lack of completion. From his very first literary work, Morris kept adopting a monologue for his poetry after the fashion of Robert Browning (at least initially) to depict his ideal world. In Pilgrims, though the world is set in London and Paris of the 1870s, the scenery Morris envisioned is the very same as that of his later medieval romances. Through monologues by three narrators, who simply call themselves "I", Morris shows us his dream from various points of view. At the end of 1860s, he represented himself as merely an "idle singer of an empty day" (The Earthly Paradise). This direct indication of his melancholy as a helpless dreamer, however, changed into a conviction of hope at the end of Pilgrims. Frequent changes in narrator spoil the completeness of the work, but also stress Morris's message: people should believe in each other and pass their hope on to the next generation through "fellowship". As he himself declared in the lecture "The Hopes of Civilization" (1885), for Morris it is defeat that begets hopes, and only through "fellowship" can people turn defeat something that nurtures them and brings hope.

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