As recent criticism of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood has indicated, early Pre-Raphaelite verse and versifiers quite possibly paved the way for the poetry of the Aesthetic Movement and the fin-de-siècle. In particular The Germ, the short-lived magazine founded in 1850 by Dante Gabriel and William Michael Rossetti, William Holman Hunt and others, constituted an important step not simply in the configuration of mature Pre-Raphaelite verbal-visual poetics, but also in the poetics of Aesthetic and Symbolist literature. Indeed, some littleknown essays and poems belonging to the first season of Pre-Raphaelitism may offer interesting and varied hints for development at the hands of aesthetes, symbolists and decadents. Examples are Thomas Woolner's lyrics in The Germ ‘ My Beautiful Lady’ and ‘Of My Lady in Death’, whose rendering of love that merges diverse poetic traditions – from Stilnovo to Tennyson – anticipates Swinburne, Wilde and Dowson. Analogously, D. G. Rossetti's poems ‘The Blessed Damozel’, ‘Pax Vobis’ and ‘Sonnets for Pictures’, also published in The Germ, predict specific concerns of fin-de-siècle poetry in their portrayal of sensual-spiritual love, Catholic inspiration and interart experimentations.

Among early Pre-Raphaelite poems apparently heralding tendencies of subsequent verse another case in point is ‘Morning Sleep’ by William Bell Scott (1811–1890), a minor lyric, rather obscure even within the canon of initial Pre-Raphaelitism, which appears significant as a transition piece. Firmly grounded on the Romantic idyll genre and on Romantic escapism (it has been described as an ‘imaginary evocation of a state of reverie’), ‘Morning Sleep’ can nevertheless be taken to represent a kind of Urtext for the Orientalist vein in late nineteenth-century British poetry. Aware of the originality and novelty of this argument, I will here propose an analysis of Bell Scott's poem as constituting a potential model for Orientalist motifs in fin-de-siècle literature, which, in their turn, became somehow inspirational for some pieces of Modernist verse. I will precisely refer to texts by Wilde, Symons and Yeats, also considering Walter Pater as a decisive mediating influence in this dissemination of Orientalist imagery and themes.

‘Morning Sleep’ was published in the second issue of The Germ in February 1850.