ABSTRACT
“God’s curses” epitomizes the Pre-Raphaelite grotesque as an oxymoronic convergence of incongruities. “They cling, God’s curses,” sickening Guenevere and preventing her from embracing her beloved Launcelot: “not/ever again shall we twine arms and lips”. Not “over,” but “across”: William Morris exploits his favourite preposition as a momentary crucifixion image. Their meeting at the tomb is presented as a coincidence of the plot, until we recognize the tomb is an image that will arise as a psychological barrier between them wherever they may meet. Yeats made his epigrammatic observation in an essay on “The Philosophy of Shelley’s Poetry”: “There is for every man some one scene, some one adventure, some one picture that is the image of his secret life, for wisdom first speaks in images.” Morris would be the first to agree that Yeats’s comment applies more aptly to Morris than to Shelley.
