The Truth about Guenevere: William Morris’ poem The Defence of Guenevere
by Julia Zgurzynski
In 1858, Victorian poet William Morris wrote a dramatic monologue imagining how Queen Guenevere would defend herself against the charges of adultery and treason. Amid her scattered recollections, she asserts at three points in the poem, “Nevertheless, you, O Sir Gauwaine, lie, / Whatever may have happen’d these long years, / God knows I speak truth, saying that you lie!” Thus, Guinevere’s topic here is truth, and she believes that she has the correct version of it, and Gauwaine does not. Further, she acknowledges that the affair has indeed happened all these long years, but that it is somehow commensurable with some other truth which she speaks. Therefore, Guenevere believes that truth is something different from factual events, which is hard to understand and accept. By examining the way she tells the narrative account, I discovered something about Guenevere’s alternative theory of truth. She implies that truth is found in the immediacy of human experience, that is the synthesis of the indubitable appearances and intense feelings present to us in each moment. In that way, the poet draws the reader’s mind beyond the issue of the trial of Guenevere, and to a critical consideration of our own ways of defining and experiencing truth.
As part of her defense, Guenevere narrates pieces of her life along with the complex set of observations, emotions, intentions, expectations and assumptions accompanying each moment. One such moment is the spring day on which she kissed Lancelot for the first time, in “the quiet garden walled round every way” (line 111). To the outside observer, she is simply committing adultery, but as Guenevere says, the truth is only found when she explains the event from her point of view.
She describes her dreary married life, followed by the beauty of spring with its cheerful sights and sounds that drove her “half mad” (line 109).
“All the beauty: to the bone,
yea right through to my heart, grown very shy
with weary thoughts, it pierced, and made me glad”
(lines 114-116)
Each moment consists of much more than her outward actions, yet her interior life is totally informed by the appearance of the world presented to her. Indeed, the appearances of the world around her are so strong, that they “pierce” her very being, down to the level of her “bone and heart”. In that state of madness she kissed Lancelot. She did not plan to do so, in fact she placed herself in a walled garden away from all people but her maids, and she partly resisted the kiss— her hands were “left behind strained far away”. Nevertheless, her “lips ached” to kiss him, and bliss followed (lines 135-137). Thus she was caught in an unwanted situation, tangled in her own conflicting desires, without all her wits about her. That is the complicated truth about Guenevere, which only she can speak.
Therefore, the poem is more than Guenevere’s defense of herself, it is a challenge to appreciate the deeper truth about each person which eludes observation and analysis, even when it seems to conflict with the obvious facts.
