
Luke Batterham
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MORRIS VERSES FOR BURNE-JONES PAINTINGS: these verses were written to complement and embellish the eponymous paintings of 1869 by his lifelong friend, Edward Burne-Jones. The pictures, upright full-length personifications of the seasons, with Morris's lines inscribed in a cartouche at the foot of each figure, were painted for the Drawing Room, designed by Norman Shaw, at No. 49 Princess Gate, the house of the Liverpool shipping magnate Frederick Leyland, who had also commissioned Whistler's famous 'Peacock Room' (Burne-Jones's paintings are now in a private collection, and are illustrated by Christopher Wood, Burne-Jones, 1998, pp. 70-71).
The text of our manuscript in fact differs from that used by Burne-Jones: lines 3 and 4 of 'Autumn' are transposed, and the quatrain for 'Winter' is completely different but agrees with a version published in The Academy for 1 February 1871 (p.109). An expanded version entitled 'Verses for Pictures' with an extra stanza at beginning and end for 'Day' and 'Night' (figures added by Burne-Jones) was published in Morris's Poems by the Way (1891); where the text accords with that used by Burne-Jones.