‘Bring me that Kiss': Incarnation and Truth in William Morris’s The Defence of Guenevere, and Other Poems

William Morris's first volume of poetry, The Defence of Guenevere, and Other Poems (1858), performs acts of poetic incarnation and resurrection, giving fleshly life to characters long dead and speaking into being his own fictional creations, based on history or myth. These poetic and dramatic personae, in turn, speak flesh onto dead bones, re-embody their past selves, or conjure the image of the incarnate Christ. They kiss, try to kiss, or imagine being kissed by lovers, antagonists, or spiritual beings, reaching for the transcendent through the material. In this reading of Morris's poems, I argue that they evoke the violent medieval world and its myths to challenge the concept of God as ordering presence or absolute truth and de-spiritualize the idea of incarnation. They affirm embodiment and contingency, celebrating the corporeal, however flawed, as a means of understanding and re-organizing reality.