ABSTRACT
Richard Watson Dixon, the most unfortunate in respect of recognition of the original Morris group, went unillustrated for all that his earlier work contains many invitations to the illustrator. St Mary Magdalene reads like a poem made for a design by Rossetti. In other pieces there is such matter as this: Row ranged on row they came; the light of love Burned softly in their eyes, row ranged on row of men in heavenly panoply, a grove of violet plumes and lifted swords; below And through, twixt arm and shoulder, and between Plumed helm and helm, wild eyes and golden hair and passionate lips; with throngings here and there. The epithet earthly there; the wintered bird in his bewildered bower; the drifted ring of the fallen leaves: Dixon is full of these unobtrusive felicities in poems which, written after he had emerged from Pre-Raphaelitism, may seem rather bare and flat at a first glance.
