William Morris:
(Walthamstow, London, 24 March 1834 – London, 3 October 1896).
Chief designer and utopian thinker of 19th-century England. He is widely regarded as the founder of the fantasy genre. He is best known as the spiritual father of the arts-and-crafts movement. He was a versatile man: he was involved in literature, designing, printing and publishing books, designing wallpaper, textiles, tiles, carpets, furniture, stained glass and interiors.
How the wind howls this morn / About the end of May, / And drives June on apace / To mock the world forlorn / And the world’s joy passed away…
The poem is a meditation on ‘melancholy and the cruelty of seasonal transition’. The howling wind at the end of May isn’t joyful spring energy — it’s driving June in too fast, as if mocking a speaker who feels out of step with the world’s renewal. Key themes:
– ‘Alienation’: the speaker’s face is “unlonged-for” — he feels unwanted, invisible to the world’s joy.
– ‘Sleep as false refuge’: dreams offer brief escape from grief, but waking only brings new delusions — “more lying tales to weave, more hope to perish soon.”
– ‘The bitter irony of hope’: the poem ends not with comfort but with the cycle of hope and disappointment repeating endlessly.
Origin:
The lines come from a poem titled “The End of May,” published in 1891 in the collection “Poems by the Way” — it is poem number 36. The collection was written during Morris’s period of deep involvement in socialist politics and the Arts and Crafts movement. The poem uses a ‘concatenation’ or chain-verse structure, where each stanza picks up the last line of the previous one, giving it a spiralling, obsessive quality that mirrors the mood.
Author:
William Morris (1834–1896) .
He is best known today as a designer, craftsman, and socialist activist, but he was also a prolific poet. This poem is characteristic of his literary voice: natural beauty (wind, dawn, the turning of seasons) thrown into sharp relief against inner desolation and longing.
Yes, May is come, and its sweet breath shall well-nigh make you weep today, and pensive with swift-coming death, shall ye be satiate of the May.
Late February days, and now, at last, might you have thought that winter’s woe was past so fair the sky was and so soft the air.
March: It’ s motto: “Courage and strength in times of danger.”
