Achievements
Algernon Charles Swinburne comes closest of all the Victorians to being a Renaissance man. John Ruskin said that he could write as well in Greek, Latin, Italian, and French as he could in English. He wrote two burlesques entirely in French, a novel titled La Fille du Policeman and a play, La Soeur de la Reine, of which only two acts are known to have survived. Swinburne was intimately familiar with five great literatures. Only John Milton among the English poets exceeded him in knowledge. Swinburne was a great parodist and translator, a prolific and fascinating letter writer, a novelist, and a voluminous dramatist and critic. His The Heptalogia, in addition to the well-known parody of Alfred, Lord Tennyson—“The Higher Pantheism in a Nut Shel”—contains a devastating parody of himself, the “Nephilidia,” and fiendishly clever parodies of the Brownings, Coventry Patmore, “Owen Meredith,” and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Cecil Lang in his introduction to his edition of Swinburne’s letters comments that Swinburne’s ability to absorb the manner and reproduce the mannerisms of his targets constitutes “a miracle of ’negative capability.’” The same could be said of his border ballads, which seem more authentic than imitative or derivative. “Lord Scales,” “Burd Margaret,” and “The Worm of Spindlestonheugh” capture the form and essence of the early ballad as well as any modern poems.
According to Cecil Lang, Swinburne as a translator “could have ranked with the great masters.” Passages from Greek and Latin poets appear in his works as well as selections from nineteenth century Italian and French writers. His only sustained translations are of François Villon, and some of them are masterpieces. His “Ballad of the Lords of Old Time” and “Ballad of the Women of Paris” capture the spirit of Villon’s original poems as closely as it is possible for translations to do, and as English translations they are equaled only by Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s “Ballad of Dead Ladies.” Swinburne’s failure to translate Villon’s The Great Testament (1461), must be counted as a great loss to literature.
As a novelist Swinburne was the only certified aristocrat of the period to write fiction about the aristocracy. Love’s Cross-Currents and Lesbia Brandon, in the words of Edmund Wilson, introduce us to “a world in which the eager enjoyment of a glorious out-of-door life of riding and swimming and boating is combined with adultery, incest, enthusiastic flagellations and quiet homosexuality” (The Novels of A. C. Swinburne). Wilson regards Love’s Cross-Currents as almost a neglected masterpiece. Lesbia Brandon contains passages of superb description, strong characterization, and convincing dialogue. Both works suggest that Swinburne had at least the potential of being a significant novelist. Unfortunately, these novels are the most neglected of his major writings.
Although Swinburne’s reputation is based primarily on his poetry, it was as the author of Atalanta in Calydon that he first gained fame. This little-read play is best remembered today for its choruses, which are often included in anthology collections of Swinburne, but it is a genuine tour de force: a treatment in English, on the model of Greek tragedy, of a famous myth that had not been used before as the subject of a play. It is widely regarded by critics as the finest Greek tragedy in English, although the concentration of Milton’s Samson Agonistes (1671) is closer to the Greek tragedians than the diffuse blank verse of Swinburne’s work. About Erechtheus, Swinburne’s other experiment with Greek drama, David G. Riede writes in his Swinburne: A Study of Romantic Mythmaking that it “is a masterpiece in all respects—it is unrivaled as a re-creation of the Greek spirit and drama, nearly untouchable as a sustained lyric effusion, astounding in its metrical variety, dazzling in its metaphoric representation, and even remarkable in its philosophical import. . . .” Unfortunately, this play today is even less read than Atalanta in Calydon. Swinburne’s trilogy on Mary Stuart was deeply researched and created over a period of many years, but it is entirely unsuited for the theater. Bothwell alone has well over fifty characters, and the epic length of its five acts illustrates Swinburne’s disregard for the contemporary stage. Chastelard is the easiest of the trilogy to read, but the extent of its preoccupation with sexual passion has prevented it from being as widely appreciated as its artistry warrants. Mary Stuart is given high marks by T. Earl Welby in his A Study of Swinburne for transforming prose matter into poetry, but Welby concludes that it “inspire[s] respect rather than enthusiasm.” Of Swinburne’s other plays it should perhaps be said that Marino Faliero (pb. 1885) compares favorably with Byron’s treatment of the same subject; The Duke of Gandia (pb. 1908) displays the powerful concentration of style of which Swinburne was capable, and The Sisters provides a fascinating insight into Swinburne’s strange sexual proclivities.
As a critic, Swinburne’s contributions are more substantial. At his best, he is capable of judicious insights expressed in fine prose, while at his worst, his strong feelings lead to idiosyncratic pronouncements and his prose style is baroque to the point of opacity. Swinburne left behind no innovations of critical approach and no permanent principles of judgment. Critical theory did not particularly interest him. Although he is the most cosmopolitan of the Victorian critics, his attentions are directed almost exclusively to literature or in some few cases to painting. Unlike Matthew Arnold, he does not travel in the broader ranges of society and religion. Swinburne’s strength as a critic rests in his abiding love of literature and his genuine respect for those who made permanent contributions. This most aristocratic of English writers created in his mind an aristocracy of genius that included not only William Shakespeare and Victor Hugo, whom he revered to the point of idolatry, but also such writers as François Villon, William Blake, Robert Burns, and Charles Baudelaire. He had a special affinity for those writers who cut across the grain of convention. His William Blake: A Critical Essay is immensely original, charting new paths through the wilderness of the Prophetic Books and repairing years of neglect of this poet. If the insights now appear dated, certain passages have retained the freshness of great poetry.
It was as a poet that Swinburne made his most memorable and lasting contributions to literature. The seventeen volumes of poetry he published in his lifetime, exclusive of volumes printed only for private circulation, constitute a remarkable feat of creative exuberance even in an age as prolific as the Victorian. His early poetry is sometimes characterized by such rhetorical excess that the figures of speech call attention to themselves rather than enforce wider meanings. Such uncontrolled use of rhetoric is especially pronounced in the lengthy A Song of Italy and in the sadomasochistic poems of the first series of Poems and Ballads. As he matured as a poet, Swinburne came to exercise greater imaginative control over his materials, and his finest poems display a masterful command of the resources of language to create visions of striking beauty. “A Forsaken Garden” and “Ave Atque Vale,” Swinburne’s magnificent elegy on Baudelaire, clearly illustrate that rhetorical richness held in check by imaginative restraint that is characteristic of Swinburne at his best. A similar progressive mellowing of subject matter is evident in Swinburne’s poetry. The violent denunciations of traditional Christianity and the preoccupation with various forms of sexual perversion that mark so much of Swinburne’s early work disappear from the middle and later poetry, just as the melancholy hedonism of the early poems gives place to optimistic declarations about the triumph of freedom in the political poems and to a kind of quiet stoicism in the more personal ones. That said, it should be remembered that variety of subject matter and form remains the hallmark of Swinburne’s huge body of poetry, and easy generalizations about it must be regarded with suspicion.
Biography
Algernon Charles Swinburne was born in London on April 5, 1837. His family on both sides was aristocratic, the Swinburnes being clearly traceable to the time of Charles I and the Ashburnhams dating back before the Norman Conquest. As the eldest of six children, Swinburne had an active childhood, spent mainly at the family seat on the Isle of Wight with regular visits to another family house in Northumberland. The contrasting beauty of these diverse parts of England left a lasting impression on Swinburne, who as a child displayed an almost Wordsworthian responsiveness to nature. He early developed a passion for the sea, which is reflected in much of his poetry.
From the beginning, Swinburne was surrounded by books and fine paintings. His mother, Lady Jane, introduced him to a wide range of literature, including the Bible, William Shakespeare, Sir Walter Scott, Charles Dickens, Dante, and Molière. She also taught her son French and Italian, laying the foundation for his cosmopolitanism. In April of 1849, Swinburne entered Eton College. In the four years he spent there, he received a thorough grounding in Greek and Latin poetry and some acquaintance with the French and Italian classics. He independently acquired a remarkable knowledge of English literature. He was especially attracted to the Elizabethan dramatists, an interest that would remain constant for the remainder of his life. The Unhappy Revenge, a bloodcurdling fragment in the manner of Cyril Tourneur and John Webster, dates from about 1849. His earliest poem to survive, “The Triumph of Gloriana,” was a school exercise to commemorate a visit by Queen Victoria and Prince Albert to Eton on June 4, 1851. Its stiff heroic couplets give no clue of the direction Swinburne’s genius was to take.
Although his academic record at Eton was good, it was decided in August of 1853 for reasons that are not entirely clear that he would not return, much to the surprise of his classmates. Instead, he would receive private tutoring for his entrance into Oxford, where his family expected him to pursue a degree leading to a legal or ecclesiastical career. Swinburne’s patriotism was fired when he learned of Balaklava in the fall of 1854, and he wished to enter the army, but his father, Admiral Charles Henry Swinburne, would not permit it, perhaps because of his son’s frailty. After a summer trip to Germany in the company of an uncle, Swinburne entered Balliol College, Oxford, on January 23, 1856.
At Oxford, Swinburne fell under the influence of John Nichol, the guiding spirit of Old Mortality, a small group of student intellectuals to which Swinburne belonged. Nichol, who was to remain a lifelong friend, undermined Swinburne’s religious faith and confirmed him in political republicanism. It was under Nichol’s influence that Swinburne wrote the “Ode to Mazzini” and became a devotee of the Italian patriot. Later, Swinburne was to be an outspoken advocate of Italian Unity. Most of Swinburne’s future political poems were either to espouse Liberty and Freedom or castigate Tyranny in equally fervent language. Percy Bysshe Shelley may have become the main spiritual presence in Swinburne’s political poetry, but it was Nichol who first directed Swinburne’s thought along republican lines.
Another major influence on Swinburne at Oxford was the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. In 1857, he met Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Morris, and Edward Burne-Jones and immediately fell under their spell. Morris’s poems, particularly “The Defence of Guenevere,” influenced Swinburne profoundly. Shortly after meeting Morris, he began Queen Yseult, and until 1860, his poems are, in the words of Georges Lafourcade, “a long self-imposed grind, a series of prosodic exercises” (Swinburne: A Literary Biography). One such exercise was Laugh and Lie Down, an Elizabethan pastiche written in 1858-1859, the sado masochistic elements of which anticipate Swinburne’s discovery of the writings of the Marquis de Sade in 1861. In 1860, because of his preoccupation with poetry and his irregular habits, which were cause for increasing concern, Swinburne encountered serious academic difficulties at Oxford, and he left without taking a degree.
In the spring of 1861, after a visit to France and Italy, Swinburne settled in London determined to make his mark as a poet. Shortly before, he had published The Queen-Mother. Rosamond. Two Plays, plays that did nothing to establish his reputation. His father had reluctantly agreed to a literary career for his son and settled on him a small allowance. Swinburne quickly resumed his relations with the Pre-Raphaelites, developing a close friendship with Rossetti that was to last until 1872. He also made friends with such notable figures as Richard Burton, the explorer, and Simeon Solomon, the painter, and throughout the decade lived a bohemian life marked by increasingly severe alcoholic debauches from which he was repeatedly rescued by his father. In 1862, an affair with Jane Faulkner, the only serious love of his life, ended unhappily, causing him to write “The Triumph of Time,” one of his finest poems. About this time he also wrote an autobiographical novel, A Year’s Letters, which appeared under the pseudonym of “Mrs. Horace Manners” in 1877. Also to 1862 belongs “Laus Veneris,” his first poem to crystallize many of the themes of the first series of Poems and Ballads: the apotheosis of female beauty, the celebration of eroticism, the wish for death, the defiance of God, and the damnation of Christianity as a religion of restraint.
Along with poetry, Swinburne wrote a number of critical reviews in the early 1860’s including favorable articles on Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal (1857, 1861, 1868; Flowers of Evil, 1909) and George Meredith’s Modern Love (1862). In spite of all these efforts, serious recognition continued to elude Swinburne until Atalanta in Calydon was published, at his father’s expense, in 1865. The reviews were all but unanimously enthusiastic. Swinburne was at last established in the front ranks of Victorian poets. His triumph was marred only by the fact that Walter Savage Landor, whom he had visited in Florence the year before to dedicate the then unfinished work, had died. Also in 1865 appeared Chastelard, the first part of a dramatic trilogy on Mary Stuart. The next year saw the publication of Poems and Ballads (first series), which scandalized the reading public. The volume was widely condemned by the reviewers as immoral, heretical, and insincere. Swinburne, never one to take criticism calmly, replied in kind with Notes on Poems and Reviews.
After Poems and Ballads, Swinburne’s drinking grew worse, and in 1867, he had an affair with the scandalous Adah Isaac Menkin, which was the talk of London society. Swinburne’s image as the enfant terrible of the Victorian era was firmly established. Nevertheless, throughout this period of storm and stress, Swinburne was able to do some of his best work. After several years of writing and revising, William Blake: A Critical Essay made its appearance in 1868, as did “Ave Atque Vale,” the serenely beautiful elegy on Baudelaire. According to Lafourcade, these two works bring an end to the Pre-Raphaelite and art-for-art’s-sake phases of Swinburne’s poetic growth.
In London on March 20, 1867, Swinburne met Giuseppe Mazzini, whom he had idolized since his Oxford days, and his political consciousness was intensified. He gave up writing his erotic novel, Lesbia Brandon, and for the next three years devoted his efforts to writing poems on political and social themes. A visit to France in the summer of 1869 confirmed his hatred of Napoleon III, which he recorded in several scathingsonnets. Swinburne’s renewed interest in world affairs came to a head in 1871 with the publication of Songs Before Sunrise. This volume makes a dramatic shift in the direction of Swinburne’s poetry. The private eroticism of Poems and Ballads had given way to public denunciations of political and religious repression and Shelleyan prophecies of the triumph of freedom.
After the publication of Songs Before Sunrise, Swinburne began to dissipate more than ever, and yet his output throughout the decade was prodigious. In the 1870’s, his poetry becomes quieter in tone and more melancholy and introspective. The second series of Poems and Ballads is tinged with a stoical acceptance of the impermanence of youth and love that is absent from the first. Bothwell, the most impressive work of his dramatic trilogy, appeared in 1874, followed by Erechtheus in 1876. In the 1870’s, Swinburne turned increasingly to criticism. His Essays and Studies, which contains discerning appreciations of several contemporaries, was published in 1875. From 1875 to 1880, he worked on A Study of Shakespeare. Always contentious, he became increasingly involved in quarrels of various kinds. His attack on Ralph Waldo Emerson in the form of a public letter was occasioned by an unfavorable remark that Emerson allegedly made about him to the press. He attacked George Eliot in his A Note on Charlotte Brontë (1877) and was involved in a protracted dispute with F. J. Furnival, the Shakespearean scholar, on ideological grounds. He wrote a brilliant parody of Tennyson and revised earlier ones on the Brownings, all published in The Heptalogia in 1880.
After his father’s death in 1877, Swinburne’s health broke. Through much of 1878, he was bedridden from dissipation, and the decade that began with his expulsion from the Arts Club ended with the poet prostrate in his disordered London chambers near death from alcoholism. His friend and legal adviser, Theodore Watts (later Watts-Dunton), rescued him, and for the last thirty years of his life Swinburne lived at Watts’s home, The Pines, in Putney. Watts severely restricted Swinburne’s social contacts, but he did accompany him to Paris in 1882 for his meeting with Victor Hugo, whom Swinburne had revered for so long. This was to be his last visit to the Continent. During his years at The Pines, Swinburne contributed well over two hundred articles to newspapers and periodicals and published more than twenty volumes. Mary Stuart was published in 1881, finally completing the dramatic trilogy conceived years before. Swinburne’s early interest in Arthurian materials was revived and Tristram of Lyonesse, and Other Poems appeared in 1882 and The Tale of Balen in 1896. He also continued to write political poems, directed largely against Russia abroad and William Gladstone and Charles Parnell at home. His aristocratic background never allowed him to regard the liberal prime minister as anything other than a dangerous radical. He opposed Home Rule as fiercely as earlier he had advocated the liberation of Italy. He ended as a republican who was opposed to democracy.
Having outlived most of his friends and all his family except for one sister, Swinburne died at The Pines on April 10, 1909. He was buried in Bonchurch Churchyard on the Isle of Wight. Theodore Watts-Dunton, true to the poet’s request, would not permit the Burial of the Dead to be read over the grave.
Analysis
The body of Algernon Charles Swinburne’s poetry is so vast and varied that it is difficult to generalize about it. Swinburne wrote poetry for more than sixty years, and in that time he treated an enormous variety of subjects and employed many poetic forms and meters. He wrote English and Italian sonnets, elegies, odes, lyrics, dramatic monologues, ballads, and romances; and he experimented with the rondeau, the ballade, and the sestina. Much of this poetry is marked by a strong lyricism and a self-conscious, formal use of such rhetorical devices as alliteration, assonance, repetition, personification, and synecdoche. Swinburne’s brilliant self-parody, “Nephilidia,” hardly exaggerates the excessive rhetoric of some of his earlier poems. The early A Song of Italy would have more effectively conveyed its extreme republican sentiments had it been more restrained. As it is, content is too often lost in verbiage, leading a reviewer for The Athenaeum to remark that “hardly any literary bantling has been shrouded in a thicker veil of indefinite phrases.” A favorite technique of Swinburne is to reiterate a poem’s theme in a profusion of changing images until a clear line of development is lost. “The Triumph of Time” is an example. Here the stanzas can be rearranged without loss of effect. This poem does not so much develop as accrete. Clearly a large part of its greatness rests in its music. As much as any other poet, Swinburne needs to be read aloud. The diffuse lyricism of Swinburne is the opposite of the closely knit structures of John Donne and is akin to the poetry of Walt Whitman.
Poems and Ballads
Nowhere is this diffuseness more clearly visible than in those poems of the first series of Poems and Ballads, which proved so shocking to Victorian sensibilities: “Anactoria,” “Laus Veneris,” “Dolores,” “Faustine,” and “Felise.” Although they all exhibit technical virtuosity, these poems are too long, and their compulsive repetition of sadomasochistic eroticism grows tiresome. Poems that celebrate the pleasures and pains of sexual love are most successful when the language is sufficiently sensuous to convey the immediacy of the experience—Ovid’s Amores (c. 20 b.c.e.; English translation, c. 1597) comes to mind—and it is ironic that Swinburne’s sensual poems in this early volume fall somewhat flat because they are not sensuous enough. Faustine and Dolores fail to come to life, just as the unnamed speakers, reveling in the pains of love, remain only voices. One feels that the dramatic form is ill-chosen. Swinburne tells us in his Notes on Poems and Reviews that in “Dolores” he strove “to express that transient state of spirit through which a man may be supposed to pass, foiled in love and weary of loving, but not yet in sight of rest; seeking refuge in those ’violent delights’ which ’have violent ends,’ in fierce and frank sensualities which at least profess to be no more than they are.” This is a legitimate purpose for a poem, but it is not realized in these early works.
Still, this volume cannot be dismissed too lightly. Swinburne wrote it partly to shock and partly to accomplish what he attributed to Charles Baudelaire’s Flowers of Evil: the transformation of ugliness into beauty, immorality into morality by the sheer power of the imagination. He certainly succeeded in shocking, and at times he was able to invest desperate and dark thoughts with a languorous beauty of sound, as in these lines from “The Garden of Proserpine”:
I am tired of tears and laughter,
And men that laugh and weep;
Of what may come hereafter
For men that sow to reap:
I am weary of days and hours,
Blown buds of barren flowers,
Desires and dreams and powers
And everything but sleep.
This is quintessential early Swinburne. Nothing had been heard in English poetry quite like it. For all their defects, the longer dramatic poems in the first series of Poems and Ballads expanded the boundaries of the subject matter of English poetry in much the way that Whitman did for American poetry. In the shorter lyrics, such as “A Leave-taking,” “Rococo,” and “A Match,” Swinburne created a note of elusive melancholy that had not been heard before. “Madonna Mia,” one of the most exquisitely beautiful lyrics in the language, by itself compensates for the flawed longer poems and ends on a more hopeful note than the other poems of the volume.
Songs Before Sunrise
In Swinburne’s next volume of poems, Songs Before Sunrise, the Femme Fatale is replaced by the goddess Freedom; the earlier obsession with flagellation is sublimated into a more acceptable form of violence—namely, the overthrow of tyranny; and the desperate hedonism of the “Hymn to Proserpine” gives way to the militant humanism of the “Hymn of Man.” “A little while and we die; shall life not thrive as it may?” is changed to “Men perish, but man shall endure; lives die, but the life is not dead.” The doctrine of art for art’s sake evaporates in these poems of social concern as the influence of Victor Hugo and Giuseppe Mazzini replaces that of Charles Baudelaire and the Marquis de Sade. With the exception of “Before a Crucifix,” a powerful attack on the Roman Catholic Church for self-aggrandizement in a suffering world, the poems of Songs Before Sunrise are aggressive, forward-looking accounts of the defeat of oppression and the triumph of liberty. “Hertha” affirms the immortality of humankind—“In the buds of your lives is the sap of my leaves; ye shall live and not die”—and asserts that “the morning of manhood is risen, and the shadowless soul is in sight.” This philosophical poem ends, in words that echo Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound: A Lyrical Drama in Four Acts (1820), with a revelation of the death of God and the birth of “love, the beloved Republic, that feeds upon freedom and lives.” The other philosophical poems of Songs Before Sunrise, the “Hymn of Man,” similarly asserts the immortality of the race and proclaims the demise of God, who in the figure of Christ is imaged as a tyrant: “By the spirit he ruled as his slave is he slain who was mighty to slay/ And the stone that is sealed on his grave he shall rise not and roll not away.” The poem concludes with a striking perversion of Scripture, a characteristic technique of Swinburne:
Thou art smitten, thou God, thou art smitten; thy
death is upon thee, O Lord.
And the love-song of earth as thou diest resounds
through the wind of her wings—
Glory to Man in the highest! for Man is the master
of things.
The other poems of this volume are more closely related to the events of the day. “Super Flumina Babylonis” celebrates the release of Italy from bondage in imagery that recalls the resurrection of Christ. The open tomb, the folded graveclothes, the “deathless face” all figure in this interesting poem that sings out, “Death only dies.” In “Quia Multum Amavit,” France, shackled by tyranny, is personified as a harlot who has been false to liberty. She has become “A ruin where satyrs dance/ A garden wasted for beasts to crawl and brawl in.” The poem ends with France prostrate before the spirit of Freedom, who speaks to her as Christ spoke to the sinful woman in the Pharisee’s house, in a tone of forgiveness.
A Channel Passage, and Other Poems
Although
Swinburne’s later political poems continued to attack tyranny abroad, especially in Russia, the emphasis in them shifted to England. In A Channel Passage, and Other Poems, Swinburne’s last volume of poetry published in his lifetime, the poems having to do with political subjects tend to reflect Swinburne’s insularity. Poems such as “The Centenary of the Battle of the Nile,” “Trafalgar Day,” and “Cromwell’s Statue” celebrate glorious moments of England’s past in language of chauvinistic hyperbole, while others such as “The Commonweal: A Song for Unionists,” “The Question,” and “The Transvaal” counsel the severest measures against England’s enemies, who, be they Irish or Boers, are invariably depicted as the “cowardliest hounds that ever lapped/ blood” or “dogs, agape with jaws afoam.” These poems lack the rhetorical richness of Songs Before Sunrise, suggesting that, in the twilight of his career, Swinburne’s strength lay not in contention but in the peaceful lyricism that informs “The Lake of Gaube” and “In a Rosary,” the finest of the poems in this volume.
Poems and Ballads: Second Series
With the publication in 1878 of Poems and Ballads: Second Series, Swinburne reached the height of his powers as a poet. The unhealthy eroticism and hysterical denunciations of Christianity have disappeared. The language is altogether more restrained, and there is a greater harmony of form and substance. The major themes are the impermanence of love and the inevitability of death. The predominant mood is elegiac, but the despair of “Hymn to Proserpine” has been replaced by the resignation of “At Parting,” and a few of the poems hold out some hope of personal immortality, although on this subject Swinburne’s private beliefs are never made clear.
In “A Forsaken Garden,” one of the loveliest of Swinburne’s poems, the landscape as dry as “the heart of a dead man” serves as an emblem for “lovers none ever will know/ Whose eyes went seaward a hundred sleeping/ Years ago.” “Love deep as the sea as a rose must wither” and lovers now living must follow those who have gone before. The poem concludes that the forsaken garden is now beyond further change until the world itself ends, and there with the ghosts of bygone lovers “As a god self-slain on his own strange altar/ Death lies dead.” This mood-piece manages to convey through the effective use of detail and tight control of rhetoric a landscape more vividly realized than is to be found in Swinburne’s earlier poems. “A Vision of Spring in Winter” displays an equally rich texture of natural description brought into focus by a restrained imagination. In this lovely poem, Swinburne bids farewell to youth. The poet tells the spirit of Spring, “I would not bid thee, though I might, give back/ One good thing youth has given and borne away.” The loves and hopes of youth “Lie deeper than the sea” and Spring could not restore them even if the poet wished for their return. The poem ends on a wistful note: “But flowers thou may’st and winds, and hours of ease/ And all its April to the world thou may’st/ Give back, and half my April back to me.”
Virtually all the elegies in this remarkable volume merit special mention. In “Inferiae,” a poem of simple and quiet beauty, Swinburne pays tribute to his father, who has just died; and in words whose marmoreal quality recalls Landor, the poet who earlier had proclaimed the death of God expresses hope of immortality. “In Memory of Barry Cornwall” opens with a marvelous picture of a kind of Socratic paradise “where the singers whose names are deathless/ One with another make music unheard of men.” “To the beautiful veiled bright world where the glad ghosts meet” has gone “Barry Cornwall.” Although Time has taken him and other poets from us, the poem affirms that he shall not take away “the flower of their souls,” nor will “the lips lack song for ever that now lack breath.” The elegy on Baudelaire, “Ave Atque Vale,” was written soon after the publication of the first series of Poems and Ballads, but it is closer in language and tone to this volume, where it properly appears. Swinburne’s deep affection for the dead French poet is felt throughout, and the resonant poignance created by the sibilance and dark vowels of the majestic stanzas and accentuated by the speaker’s apostrophe of Baudelaire as “brother” helps make this one of the great elegies of English poetry. It conveys more sincerity than either “Lycidas” or “Adonais” and it is more tender than “Thyrsis.” After paying tribute to Baudelaire’s genius—“Thou sawest, in thine old singing season, brother/ Secrets and sorrows unbeheld of us”—the poem affirms that even though he is “far too far for wings of words to follow,” his poetry lives on. Remembering that everyone will one day meet death as the poet has, the poem concludes with a profound serenity.
There is no such serenity in “Fragment on Death,” one of Swinburne’s masterful translations of François Villon. Here death is depicted in all its medieval horror. This and the other translations, particularly the “Ballad of the Women of Paris,” provide a contrast to the poems already discussed, but not so shocking a one as the four sonnets attacking Russia, which appear completely out of place in this volume.
Later works
After the second series of Poems and Ballads, Swinburne continued to publish poems for twenty-six years in a continuing variety of subject matter and form. The Arthurian romances Tristram of Lyonesse, and Other Poems and The Tale of Balen, while containing passages of undisputed power and beauty, suggest that Swinburne’s forte as a poet was not in extended narration. The many poems about babies in A Century of Roundels reveal a mature tenderness that one would not have expected from the author of Songs Before Sunrise. There are beautiful passages in Songs of the Springtides. The second series of Poems and Ballads, however, remains the pinnacle of Swinburne’s achievement as a poet, and if he had written no more poetry after 1878, his reputation would have been essentially unchanged.