“Concerning Geffray Teste Noire”

• What do we know about the speaker of this dramatic monologue? Where does he live, and what are his political allegiances? What does the reader know in hindsight about the success of British ventures in southwestern France?
• What is added to the poem by setting it in what to Morris's readers would be a remote region of France in a distant time period?
• Is the speaker successful in persuading his auditor to tell his story to the great historian Jean Froissart?
• What kind of society is revealed by his account of Geffray Teste Noire and of his own life? To whom does he owe allegiance, if anyone? Does he have any allies?
• Who is the speaker’s auditor? Do we know his attitude toward the speaker, and toward the story he hears? Are there any reasons to doubt his sympathy?
• What is the poem’s form? Does it seem suitable in setting the pace of its narrative? What kind of details are included?
• How would you describe the poem’s plot? To what extent does it make sense, and how are the different parts connected?
• What brings about Geffray's death, and are the speaker's immediate and lifelong efforts helpful in bringing this about?
•  How does the speaker respond to finding two armored corpses in the woods? Is there sufficient evidence for his reconstructions? Does he seem to identify with the dead man, the dead woman, both or neither?
• What time frame(s) seem present? How do you explain any gaps or flashbacks?
• What seems to preoccupy the speaker? What effect do you think a life of war and danger has had on his mind?
• What scenes of violence are present in the poem, and are they in any way related? What childhood scene does he remember?
• What seems the speaker's attitude toward violence against women?
• Is the story of the corpses in the wood likely to have seemed important to the author of Froissart’s  Chronicles of the Hundred Year’s War?
• What is the importance of the final scene in which the speaker describes the effigy he has commissioned for the unknown couple? Is there a poignance to the fact that the speaker commemorates persons he does not know?
• What do we learn about him from the fact that he owns a small, remote castle?
• Morris was 24 when this poem was published in 1858, and the Crimean War had just ended in 1856. Can you see any correlation between the poem, the period of its composition, and the youth of its author?
• What would you say is the theme or tone of this poem? How would you contrast Morris's poem and the psychology of its speaker with the tone and themes of other poems we have read?
• This is a period when many debated how history should be told, and whether historical accounts could be trusted as accurate. Based on this poem, what views do you think the young Morris may have held?
• If formal histories of the past miss much of the truth of human life, what then should be the special role of literature?