‘For the language of his version Morris once felt it necessary to
make an apology. Except a few words, he said, the words used in it
were such as he would not hesitate to use in an original poem of
his own. He did not add, however, that their effect, if slipped
sparingly in amid his own pellucid construction and facile
narrative method, would be very different from their habitual use
in a translation.... As the work advanced, he seems to have felt
this himself, and his pleasure in the doing of it fell off.’
--Mackail’s _Life_, ii. 284-5.
Finally, the version does not _translate_. Words like ‘Spearman’ for
_Ocean_, and combinations like ‘the sight seen once only’ for _the
face_, can be understood only by the intimate student of Old English
poetry, and there is no reason why such a person should not peruse
_Beowulf_ in the original tongue rather than in a translation
occasionally as obscure as the poem itself.
If one can peer through the darkness of Morris’s diction, he will
discover a fairly pleasing use of the so-called imitative measure. The
verse is not nearly so rough as the original; many of the characteristic
substitutions are avoided. There is evident a tendency toward the
‘rising verse’ and the anapestic foot. The feminine ending is frequently
used. The verse is, therefore, not strictly imitative in that it retains
the Old English system of versification, but rather in that it attempts
to suggest the Old English movement by the use of four principal
stresses and a varying number of unstressed syllables. Morris’s verse is
the best of all the ‘imitative’ measures.
[Footnote 1: See Mackail’s _Life_, i. 198.]