NOTES

POEMS AND BALLADS

A Ballad of Life and A Ballad of Death

Swinburne relished the most lurid accounts of Lucrezia Borgia’s cruelty and sexual adventurousness, as in Victor Hugo’s Lucrèce Borgia (1833), which he read at Eton, and Alexandre Dumas’s Crimes Célèbres (1839-1842). He would also have known of Byron’s theft of a strand of her hair and the poem by Landor which it inspired, ‘On Seeing a Hair of Lucretia Borgia’ (1825, 1846). In the early 1860s he had written part of a projected long story about Borgia; Randolph Hughes, who edited the fragment in 1942, sifts through the evidence for Swinburne’s sources for that work. The two poems open Poems and Ballads with Swinburne’s favourite femme fatale and, in addition, introduce the volume as a whole; the roses in the envoy to the first poem refer to the poems in the collection.

A central figure in the brilliant court at Ferrara, Borgia had received sophisticated verse in her praise (from Bembo and Ariosto among others). Swinburne’s two poems are ‘Italian canzoni of the exactest type’, in the words of William Rossetti, who adds that they have taken ‘the tinge which works of this class have assumed in Mr. Dante G. Rossetti’s volume of translations The Early Italian Poets [1861]’. That is, they consist of several stanzas in a rhyme scheme which is unique to each poem, include both pentameter and trimeter lines, and conclude with an envoy. Rossetti’s drawing of a woman playing a lute surrounded by three lecherous men, a work that evolved into his watercolour of Borgia, has also been adduced as an influence (cf. Virginia Surtees’ catalogue raisonné of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s paintings and drawings, catalogue numbers 47 and 48).

The rhyme ‘moon’ and ‘swoon’ (lines 5–6, ‘A Ballad of Life’) occurs in Tennyson’s ‘Fatima’ (1832), an adaptation of Sappho. For the blue eyelids (line 8, ‘A Ballad of Life’) as a sign of either fatigue or pregnancy, see Leah Marcus, Unediting the Renaissance, 1996, pp. 5–17. The phrase ‘whole soul’ (line 65, ‘A Ballad of Life’) is common in Tennyson and Browning as well as in Swinburne; it occurs twice in ‘Fatima’. ‘Sendaline’ (line 41, ‘A Ballad of Death’) is sendal, a thin rich silken material (the OED cites Swinburne alone for the form ‘sendaline’). The phrase ‘who knows not this’ (cf. line 86, ‘A Ballad of Death’) appears in Edward Young’s Night Thoughts (Night II, line 386) and Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s translation of a sonnet by Bonaggiunta Urbiciani, da Lucca, ‘Of Wisdom and Foresight’ (1861).

The diction is frequently biblical: for example, ‘righteous’ (line 70, ‘A Ballad of Life’), ‘lift up thine eyes’ (line 54, ‘A Ballad of Death’), ‘vesture’ (line 79, ‘A Ballad of Death’). ‘Honeycomb’, ‘spikenard’, and ‘frankincense’ (lines 64–7, ‘A Ballad of Death’) appear in the Song of Solomon. Swinburne’s diction throughout the collection is influenced by the Authorized Version; I have usually given references only in cases of allusion. In 1876, Swinburne planned to ‘subjoin in the very smallest capitals’ the words ‘In honorem D. Lucretiae Estensis Borgiae’ and ‘In obitum D. Lucretiae Estensis Borgiae’ under the titles of the respective poems (Lang, 3, 200).

Some copies of the 1904 Poems print ‘curled air’ rather than ‘curled hair’ (‘A Ballad of Death’, line 36).

Laus Veneris

The ‘Praise of Venus’ is Swinburne’s adaptation of the Tannhäuser legend, which emerged shortly after the time of the minnesinger’s death (c. 1270) in an anonymous ballad that tells the story of the knight who had been living in Venus Mountain but who, sated with pleasure, feels remorse and travels to Rome in order to obtain absolution. The pope, leaning on a dry dead staff, tells him that it will sprout leaves before the poet receive God’s grace. Swinburne’s fictitious French epigraph takes up the story at this point:

Then he said weeping, Alas, too unhappy a man and a cursed sinner, I shall never see the mercy and pity of God. Now I shall go from here and hide myself within Mount Horsel [Venus Mountain], entreating my sweet lady Venus of her favour and loving mercy, since for her love I shall be damned to Hell for all eternity. This is the end of all my feats of arms and all my pretty songs. Alas, too beautiful was the face and the eyes of my lady, it was on an evil day that I saw them. Then he went away groaning and returned to her, and lived sadly there in great love with his lady. Afterward it happened that the pope one day saw fine red and white flowers and many leafy buds break forth from his staff, and in this way he saw all the bark become green again. Of which he was much afraid and moved, and he took great pity on this knight who had departed without hope like a man who is miserable and damned. Therefore he sent many messengers after him to bring him back, saying that he would have God’s grace and good absolution for his great sin of love. But they never saw him; for this poor knight remained forever beside Venus, the high strong goddess, in the amorous mountainside.

Book of the great wonders of love, written in Latin and French by Master Antoine Gaget. 1530.

The story was popular among German Romantic writers. Ludwig Tieck introduced it in his story ‘Der getreue Eckart und der Tannhäuser’ (1799); Swinburne may have read the translation Thomas Carlyle made in 1827. The ballad itself became well known early in the century when it was printed in a collection of folksongs in 1806 and retold later by Grimm; Clemens Brentano, E. T. A. Hoffmann, Joseph von Eichendorff, Franz Grillparzer, and others also made use of it. Heinrich Heine’s poem ‘Der Tannhäuser. Eine Legende’ (1847) was a source for Wagner’s opera, which Baudelaire defended in La Revue européenne after its first performance in Paris in 1861. However, neither Wagner nor Baudelaire’s comment were direct sources for Swinburne; at most he could have read about the opera, and he received Baudelaire’s pamphlet only after he had written the poem. (See, however, Anne Walder, Swinburne’s Flowers of Evil, 1976, p. 88.) Swinburne may have known William Morris’s ‘The Hill of Venus’ (published in 1870 in The Earthly Paradise but according to his daughter written in the early sixties).

Clyde Hyder in ‘Swinburne’s Laus Veneris and the Tannhäuser Legend’ (PMLA, 45:4, December 1930, 1202–13) sorts out the different cases for influences and sources, one of which he identifies as a translation of the Tannhäuser ballad that appeared in the newspaper Once a Week on 17 August 1861. For Burne-Jones’s paintings of the subject (the earliest begun in 1861, the most famous painted in 1873–8) and their relation to Swinburne, see Kirsten Powell, ‘Burne-Jones, Swinburne, and Laus Veneris’ (in Pre-Raphaelitism and Medievalism in the Arts, ed. Liana Cheney, 1992). While visiting Fantin-Latour’s studio in Paris in 1863, Swinburne saw a sketch of the Tannhäuser in the Venusberg. J. W. Thomas in Tannhäuser: Man and Legend (1974) provides information about Tannhäuser, the legend, and its later uses.

The poem is a dramatic monologue written in the stanza Edward Fitz-Gerald used to translate the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám (1859); Swinburne, however, links pairs of stanzas by rhyming their third lines. In the poem, Venus has survived into the Middle Ages, but her stature has been diminished; nonetheless, we have glimpses of her former power both in its destructive aspect (lines 117–37, for example, include Adonis, the favourite of Aphrodite, killed by a boar) and in her incarnation as Venus Anadyomene, rising from the sea (lines 389–92).

Swinburne’s vision of hell is indebted to Dante’s second circle of hell, reserved for lustful sinners. Helen, Cleopatra, and Semiramis in lines 193–204 recall the sequence Semiramis, Cleopatra, and Helen in Inferno 5: 52-63. Swinburne’s description of Semiramis draws loosely on Assyrian art, knowledge of which, thanks to Henry Layard and the British Museum, had entered both popular culture and works by Tennyson and Rossetti. The line immediately following the description of the lustful sinners in Swinburne, ‘Yea, with red sin the faces of them shine’ (line 205), is modelled on the line ‘culpa rubet vultus meus’ from ‘Dies Irae’, as Lafourcade points out.

‘Great-chested’ in line 204 does not appear in the OED, but ‘deep-chested’ occurs in Landor, Tennyson and Longfellow. For the ‘long lights’ of line 216, cf. the ‘long light’ of Tennyson’s The Princess (1847; the song between Parts 3 and 4). ‘Doubt’ in line 252 means ‘suspect’, and ‘teen’ in that line means ‘grief’. ‘Slotwise’ in line 267, for which the OED gives Swinburne as the first citation, is derived from ‘slot’, the track of an animal. ‘Springe’ and ‘gin’ in lines 271–2 are both snares, the latter in this case for men. ‘Vair’ in line 278 is fur from squirrel. The elder-tree of line 305 is the European Sambucus nigra and not the American Sambucus canadensis, which does not grow large. ‘To save my soul alive’ (line 331) resembles Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s line ‘To save his dear son’s soul alive’ in ‘Sister Helen’, line 192 (1853, 1857, 1870; see also his translation of Cavalcanti’s sonnet to Pope Boniface VIII, 1861, line 13). It derives from Ezekiel 18:27. ‘Wizard’ in line 338 is an adjective meaning ‘bewitched’ or ‘enchanted’. Lines 369-70 recall James Shirley’s couplet ‘Only the actions of the just / Smell sweet, and blossom in their dust’, from one of his most famous lyrics, ‘The glories of our blood and state’, at the end of The Contention of Ajax and Ulysses.

‘Explicit’ in the closing formula is a medieval Latin word which came to be regarded as a verb in the third person singular, meaning ‘here ends’ (a book, piece, etc.). It was current until the sixteenth century.

See ‘Notes on Poems and Reviews’ (Appendix 1) for Swinburne’s own discussion of the poem. William Empson discusses lines 49–56 in Seven Types of Ambiguity, 3rd ed. 1953, pp. 163–5.

There is a reproduction of the first four stanzas of a manuscript of ‘Laus Veneris’ in Wise’s 1919 Bibliography.

Phædra

Euripides, Seneca and Racine wrote the major extant dramas about Hippolytus and Phaedra, but the combination of masochism and sexual aggressiveness in Swinburne’s Phaedra is not derived from his models. Despite his contempt for Euripides and very limited esteem of Racine, he includes a discriminating comparison of Hippolytus and Phèdre in his essay on Philip Massinger (1889; reprinted in Contemporaries of Shakespeare, pp. 201–2).

Hippolytus, the son of Theseus and the Amazon Hippolyta (line 56), has been raised by Theseus’s grandfather Pittheus (line 176) in Troezen, a town in the Peloponnese. Phaedra is the daughter of King Minos of Crete and Pasiphae (line 35; Pasiphae is the daughter of the sun, line 53). She is the wife of Theseus, who marries her after his most famous exploit: killing the minotaur, the offspring of Pasiphae by a handsome bull, and thus the half-brother of Phaedra (line 181). King Minos had regularly fed it a tribute of Athenian youth (cf. lines 179–81), but Theseus defeats it and escapes from the labyrinth that contained it with the help of Ariadne, Phaedra’s sister; he leaves Crete with Ariadne but later abandons her and marries Phaedra. He rules in Athens but is obliged to move temporarily to Troezen, where Aphrodite, revenging herself on Hippolytus for his excessive devotion to Artemis, inspires Phaedra to love her stepson passionately. In most versions of the story, Theseus has been away from Troezen for a time (consulting an oracle or waiting for Heracles to release him from hell).

‘Have’ in line 5 is in the subjunctive mood. The comparison of grass and the colour of flesh (line 27) recalls Sappho (φαimageνεταí μοι), and the periphrastic address to divinity in lines 29–30 is like Aeschylus, Agamemnon, lines 160–2. Line 47 echoes Christ’s words ‘Woman, what have I to do with thee?’ (John 2:4). The evil born with all its teeth (line 73) recalls Richard III (see Shakespeare, Henry VI, Part 3, Act 5, Scene 6). ‘Ate’ (line 139) is the passionate derangement of the mind and senses that leads to ruin. Amathus (line 139), on Cyprus, is the site of a famous shrine to Aphrodite. ‘Lies’ (line 155) are strata or layers, masses that lie, according to the OED, which cites Swinburne’s usage. The sea is hollow (line 165) when the troughs between waves are very deep.

Swinburne’s note to line 97 signals that the next six lines are a translation of a fragment of Niobe, a lost play by Aeschylus:

image

(‘Death alone of all gods does not love gifts, neither by sacrifice nor by libation would you accomplish anything, he has no altar nor is he praised; from him alone among gods, does Persuasion stand apart.’ The text is taken from Dindorf’s 1851 Poetae Scenici Graeci.)

For possible echoes from Beaumont and Fletcher’s Maid’s Tragedy, see Mario Praz, ‘Le Tragedie “Greche” di A. C. Swinburne’, Atene e Roma, No. 7–8–9 (July–August–September 1922), p. 185n2.

The poem, in blank verse, is an imitation of an episode of Greek tragedy; the use of stikhomythia (one- or two-line exchanges between characters) and the oblique naming of a divinity (lines 29–30) are characteristic of Greek tragedy.

The Triumph of Time

Recent biographers have interpreted ‘The Triumph of Time’ as a cri de coeur provoked by the engagement of Swinburne’s greatest romantic interest, his cousin Mary Gordon, to Colonel Robert Disney Leith, who was twenty-one years older than she was.

The ‘sea-daisies’ (line 56) are also known as sea-pinks. The ‘third wave’ (line 83) derives from the Greek τρικνμimageα, originally meaning a group of three waves; later it comes to mean a large or irresistible wave (cf. Prometheus Bound, line 1015, Euripides’ Hippolytus, line 1213, Plato’s Republic, 472a). The OED credits Swinburne with the first citation for this meaning of ‘third’. ‘Flesh of his flesh’ (line 102) is an adaptation of Genesis 2:23. The narrow gate of line 168 recalls Matthew 7:13–14 and Luke 13:24, where it leads to life. The pleonastic phrase ‘royal king’s’ (line 220) may be an echo of ‘royal kings’ in Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra (Act V, Scene 2, line 326). Line 223 may recall ‘What hath night to do with sleep’ of Milton’s ‘Comus’ (line 122). The quotation in line 237 is from Hamlet’s lines to Ophelia beginning ‘Get thee to a nunnery’ (Act 3, Scene 1). Line 253 is indebted to Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s ‘The Blessed Damozel’ (1850, 1856, 1870), ‘And the stars in her hair were seven’ (line 6). Line 273 is similar to Tennyson’s Maud (1855), ‘But only moves with the moving eye’ (Part II, line 85). The ‘midland sea’ (line 322) is the Mediterranean. ‘Or ever’ (line 332) is emphatic for ‘before’. ‘Overwatching’ (line 374) can mean both ‘keeping watch over’ and ‘fatiguing by excessive watching’.

The ‘singer in France of old’ (line 321) is the troubadour Jaufre Rudel, who lived in the south of France in the twelfth century. His thirteenth-century vida explains:

Jaufre Rudel, Prince of Blaye, was a very noble man. And he fell in love with the Countess of Tripoli, without having seen her, because of the great goodness and courtliness which he heard tell of her from the pilgrims who came from Antioch. And he wrote many good songs about her, with good melodies and poor words. And because of his desire, he took the cross and set sail to go to see her. But in the ship he fell very ill, to the point where those who were with him thought he was dead. However, they got him – a dead man, as they thought – to Tripoli, to an inn. And it was made known to the Countess, and she came to his bedside, and took him in her arms. And he knew she was the Countess, and recovered sight [or, hearing] and smell, and praised God because He had kept him alive until he had seen her. And so he died in the arms of the lady. And she had him buried with honour in the Temple at Tripoli. Then, the same day, she became a nun because of the grief which she felt for him and for his death.

(George Wolf and Roy Rosenstein, The Poetry of Cercamon and Jaufre Rudel, 1983. See also The Vidas of the Troubadours, Margarita Egan, 1984.)

The story of this troubadour is present elsewhere in nineteenth-century literature; we find it in Stendhal (in De l’amour, 1822), Heine (in Romanzero, 1851), and Browning (‘Rudel and the Lady of Tripoli’, 1842). The story remains current after Swinburne: Carducci, Rostand, Pound and Döblin were drawn to it. Swinburne’s ‘The Death of Rudel’, apparently written during his college years, is printed in the first volume of the Bonchurch edition of his works.

The stanza consists of tetrameter lines of both iambs and anapests and rhymes ababccab; it is the same stanza used for the first choral ode of Atalanta in Calydon. George Saintsbury, in A History of English Prosody (1906, Vol. 3, p. 233), sees ‘The Triumph of Time’ as an improvement, prosodically and otherwise, on Browning’s ‘The Worst of It’ (1864). The title derives ultimately from Petrarch’s allegorical Trionfi (his ‘Triumph of Love’ mentions Rudel). There are triumphs of time by Robert Greene (Swinburne praised his prose romance Pandosto, The Triumph of Time in 1908), Beaumont and Fletcher, and Handel.

Cecil Lang, in ‘A Manuscript, a Mare’s-Nest, and a Mystery’ (Yale University Library Gazette, Vol. 31, 1957, pp. 163–71), prints an early fragment of the poem. The first page of the poem in manuscript is reproduced in Rooksby, p. 104.

Les Noyades

For a time, the noyade was as famous as the guillotine, both being methods of mass execution introduced during the French Revolution. Jean-Baptiste Carrier arrived in Nantes in October 1793 as the representative of the Committee of Public Safety to control the insurrection in the Vendée. He soon introduced the mass drownings of prisoners, who were confined to boats that were then sunk in the Loire. He was recalled to Paris in February 1795 and eventually tried and executed. Among the charges he faced were ‘republican marriages’, the binding of a naked man and woman together before they were drowned. Some historians have subsequently disputed that any republican marriages actually occurred, but at the time it was sensational news. James Schmidt, in a discussion of the noyade in the development of Hegel’s thought (‘Cabbage Heads and Gulps of Water’, Political Theory, 26:1, February 1998, pp. 4–32), sets out the historical background of Carrier’s activities and also reproduces a contemporary illustration of the republican marriages.

Swinburne probably knew Carlyle’s French Revolution (1837), Part 3, Book 5, Chapter 3:

Nantes town is sunk in sleep; but Représentant Carrier is not sleeping, the wool-capped Company of Marat is not sleeping. Why unmoors that flatbottomed craft, that gabarre; about eleven at night; with Ninety Priests under hatches? They are going to Belle Isle? In the middle of the Loire stream, on signal given, the gabarre is scuttled; she sinks with all her cargo. ‘Sentence of deportation’, writes Carrier, ‘was executed vertically’. The Ninety Priests, with their gabarre-coffin lie deep! It is the first of the Noyades, what we may call Drownages, of Carrier; which have become famous forever…

Or why waste a gabarre, sinking it with them? Fling them out; fling them out, with their hands tied; pour a continual hail of lead over all the space, till the last struggler of them be sunk! Unsound sleepers of Nantes, and the Sea-Villages thereabouts, hear the musketry amid the night-winds; wonder what the meaning of it is. And women were in that gabarre; whom the Red Nightcaps were stripping naked; who begged, in their agony, that their smocks not be stript from them…

By degrees, daylight itself witnesses Noyades: woman and men are tied together, feet and feet, hands and hands; and flung in: this they call Manage Républicain, Republican Marriage.

‘Mean’ (line 53) refers to the speaker’s inferior social rank. The poem is in rhyming quatrains (abab) of tetrameter lines of both iambs and anapests.

A Leave-Taking

‘All we’ (lines 5 and 20): formerly used for ‘we all’ or ‘all of us’ (OED, ‘all’, 2c). ‘Thrust in thy sickle and reap’ (line 18) echoes Revelation 14:15.

Cecil Lang (‘A Manuscript, A Mare’s-Nest, and A Mystery’, Yale University Library Gazette, Vol. 31, 1957, pp. 163–71) publishes early drafts of the poem.

Each stanza rhymes aababaa; the a rhyme of one stanza becomes the b rhyme of the next. Swinburne modifies such forms as the rondeau and its relatives or the villanelle, which have the same two rhymes throughout an entire poem. In other ways, too, the poem recalls early French stanza forms: it has a refrain, like the ballade or chant royal (though the last word of the refrain changes), and the shortness of the refrain is like the rentrement of a rondeau, though here it responds to the second half of the first line of the stanza rather than the first half. It is suggestive of the French formes fixes without being directly imitative of them.

Itylus

The poem is a monologue by Philomela, the sister of Procne, who is the wife of Tereus, the king of Thrace (line 48). He lusts after Philomela, rapes her, and then cuts off her tongue and hides her. Philomela tells her story by weaving the events in the design of a tapestry (line 52), which she sends to Procne. The sisters revenge themselves by killing Itylus, the son of Tereus and Procne, and cooking him. Procne feeds him to Tereus and afterwards reveals what they have done; Tereus pursues them in a rage, but they are saved by the gods, who turn Philomela into a nightingale (line 19) and Procne into a swallow.

In Daulis (line 48), in central Greece, the women murdered Itylus, according to Thucydides (ii. 29). Swinburne appears to locate it on the Thracian coast, perhaps mistaking a detail from Matthew Arnold’s ‘Philomela’ (1853). The wet roofs and lintels (line 51) may suggest the blood of Itylus; cf. Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Book 6, line 646 (‘manant penetralia tabo’, ‘the room drips with gore’). ‘Itylus’ is the name in Homer; ‘Itys’ is more common. In Greek poetry, it is Procne who becomes the nightingale.

Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Book 6, is the major source of the story. There are references to it in Homer (Odyssey, Book 19, lines 518–523), Aeschylus (Agamemnon, lines 1140–9 and Suppliants, lines 58–67), and Apollodorus. In addition to Matthew Arnold, Catulle Mendès was inspired by the legend; see ‘Le Rossignol’ in Philoméla (1863), which appeared shortly before Swinburne wrote his poem.

Swinburne combines iambs and anapests in stanzas of six tetrameters rhyming abcabc. ‘Swallow’ is a constant feminine rhyme in each stanza.

Anactoria

Swinburne’s admiration for Sappho was unbounded. In a posthumously published appreciation (‘Sappho’, The Saturday Review, 21 February 1914, p. 228) he wrote:

Judging even from the mutilated fragments fallen within our reach from the broken altar of her sacrifice of song, I for one have always agreed with all Grecian tradition in thinking Sappho to be beyond all question and comparison the very greatest poet that ever lived. Æschylus is the greatest poet who ever was also a prophet; Shakespeare is the greatest dramatist who ever was also a poet; but Sappho is simply nothing less – as she is certainly nothing more – than the greatest poet who ever was at all. Such at least is the simple and sincere profession of my lifelong faith.

(See also Lang, 4, 124 and Swinburne’s defence of the poem in ‘Notes on Poems and Reviews’, Appendix 1.)

Her ode beginning ‘φαimageνεταí μοι’, known to Swinburne as the ‘Ode to Anactoria’, provides the context of this poem: Sappho suffers intense erotic jealousy because of Anactoria’s infidelity to her. In Swinburne’s dramatic monologue, Sappho addresses Anactoria in an attempt to win her back. He works some of Sappho’s own words into the address. (The standard text of Sappho at the time was Theodor Bergk’s Poetae Lyrici Graeci, revised in 1853; citations to Bergk’s edition are accompanied by those to the Loeb text, edited and translated by David A. Campbell, Greek Lyric, volume 1.)

line 63: ‘For I beheld in sleep’; cf. ‘In a dream I spoke with the Cyprus-born’ (Bergk 86; Campbell 134).

line 70: ‘a mind of many colours’; translates πoικíλοφρov, found in the first line of some texts of the Aphrodite ode.

lines 73–4: ‘Who doth thee wrong, Sappho?’ translates lines 19–20 of the Aphrodite ode.

lines 81–4 are a translation of the sixth stanza of the Aphrodite ode.

lines 189–200 are an expansion of Bergk 68, Campbell 55.

line 221: ‘sleepless moon’ conflates the moon and the sleepless speaker of one of the most famous fragments, though now denied by many to Sappho; Bergk 52, Campbell 168B.

In addition, Sappho’s boasts that she will be remembered after death have been amplified in lines 203–14. The names Erinna (line 22) and Atthis (line 286) occur in some fragments. The name ‘Erotion’ (line 22) presumably refers to a male lover; see the note to Swinburne’s poem ‘Erotion’. Lines 260–5 allude to the legend of Sappho’s suicide by drowning as the result of an unhappy love affair with Phaon.

The epigraph is an emendation, perhaps Swinburne’s own, of a corrupt line in the Aphrodite ode; Swinburne’s version means ‘Whose love have you caught in vain by persuasion?’ (Sappho calls Persuasion the daughter of Aphrodite; see Bergk 133, Campbell 200.)

‘Reluctation’ (line 33) means ‘struggle, resistance, opposition’ (OED: ‘somewhat rare’; ‘obsolete’ with reference to bodily organs). Aphrodite’s ‘amorous girdle’ (line 45) makes her irresistible; in lines 49–50, we are given the account of her birth from the ocean (Aphrodite Anadyomene); Paphos, line 64, is the site of her famous sanctuary on Cyprus. ‘Storied’ (line 68) means either ‘ornamented with scenes from history or legend’ or ‘celebrated in history or story’. ‘Flies’ (line 81) means ‘flees’. Swinburne activates the etymology of ‘disastrous’ in ‘disastrous stars’ (line 164); ‘comet’ and ‘hair’ (lines 161–2) are also connected etymologically. Pieria is a district in Thessaly associated with the Muses, and so the ‘high Pierian flower’ (line 195) is a poem as well as the garland for the victorious poet. ‘Reflex’ (line 198) is a reflection of light. In line 302, the lotus produces dreamy forgetfulness, and Lethe is the river of oblivion.

Timothy A. J. Burnett, in ‘Swinburne at Work: The First Page of “Anactoria” ’ (in The Whole Music of Passion, eds Rikky Rooksby and Nicholas Shrimpton, 1993), discusses and reproduces a draft of the first page of the poem. It is also reproduced in Yopie Prins, Victorian Sappho (1999), p. 118. Edmund Gosse discusses a first version of the poem in ‘The First Draft of Swinburne’s “Anactoria” ’ (Modern Language Review, 14, 1919, pp. 271–7).

The poem is in heroic couplets; all sentences come to a stop at the end of a line.

Hymn to Proserpine

Constantine I, the first Christian Roman emperor, issued the Edict of Milan in 313 with the Eastern Roman emperor Licinus; it established religious toleration of Christians and protected their legal rights. Constantine’s policy went further than official toleration, and he began to establish Rome as a Christian state. His nephew Julian (emperor from 361 to 363) announced his conversion to paganism in 361 and hence is known as Julian the Apostate (see L. M. Findlay, ‘The Art of Apostasy’, Victorian Poetry 28:1, Spring 1990, pp. 69–78, for the Victorian controversies over ‘national apostasy’ and the image of Julian). He became a fierce opponent of Christians, but his opposition had no lasting effect; his legendary dying words (‘Vicisti, Galilaee’, ‘Thou hast conquered, Galilean’) were reported in Greek by Theodoret, the Bishop of Cyrrhus, in the fifth century.

Proserpine, or Persephone, is the wife of Hades and the queen (lines 2, 92) of the underworld; the river Lethe (line 36) and poppies (line 97) are associated with the oblivion of death. She is also Kore, a maiden (lines 2, 92) and the daughter of Demeter, the earth (line 93). She and Demeter are the subject of the mysteries at Eleusis. Swinburne contrasts the new queen of heaven (line 76), the Jewish (line 85, ‘slave among slaves’) virgin (lines 75, 81) mother of Christ, with Venus, the former queen. Venus is described as she rose from the sea (lines 78, 86–9); she is the ‘mother of Rome’ (line 80) both as Aeneas’s mother and as Venus Genetrix; and she is called Cytherean (line 73) after her birthplace in Cythera.

‘I have lived long enough’ (line 1) quotes Macbeth’s line from Act V, Scene 3, line 22. ‘Galilean’ (lines 23, 35, 74) is ‘used by pagans as a contemptuous designation for Christ’ (OED). In Greek ‘unspeakable things’ (line 52, άρρητα) can refer to the Eleusinian mysteries. L. M. Findlay (Swinburne, Selected Poems, 1982, pp. 257–8) suggests that the description of the wave of the world (line 54) is indebted to Turner’s painting The Slave Ship (1834) and Ruskin’s defence of the painting in Modern Painters (1843). ‘Viewless ways’ (line 87) may have been influenced by Shakespeare’s ‘viewless winds’ (Measure for Measure, Act III, Scene 1, line 124) or Keats’s ‘viewless wings’ (‘Ode to a Nightingale’, line 33, 1820). The footnote in Greek by Epictetus is the source of Swinburne’s line 108; the remark survives in Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations, 4.41.

Robert Peters (‘A. C. Swinburne’s “Hymn to Proserpine”: The Work Sheets’, PMLA 83, October 1968, pp. 1400–6) discusses the work sheets to the poem and reproduces some of the manuscripts. Bernard Richards (English Verse: 1830–1890, 1980, p. 465) warns that there are errors in Peters’s transcription.

The metre is hexameter with both iambs and anapests. The rhyme is in couplets, and there is an internal rhyme at the end of the third foot. All sentences come to a full stop at the end of a metrical line except for line 105.

Ilicet

‘Ilicet’ is a Latin exclamation of dismay, ‘It’s all over.’

The stooped urn (line 49) is tilted, inclined (the only OED citation for this meaning); to ‘flash’ is to rise and dash, as with the tide. ‘Date’ (line 105) is the ‘limit, term or end of a period of time’ (obsolete or archaic, OED).

For ‘No memory, no memorial’ (line 39), cf. Milton, Paradise Lost Book 1, line 362 and Nehemiah 2:20. ‘Blood-red’ (line 74) is a common colour in Shelley, Tennyson, and Morris. For watching and not sleeping (line 123), cf. 1 Thessalonians 5:6 and recall Gethsemane.

The metre is iambic tetrameter; the six-line stanza rhymes aabccb, where ‘a’ and ‘c’ are feminine rhymes.

Hermaphroditus

Swinburne’s appended note ‘At Museum of the Louvre, March 1863’ indicates that the poem is a response to the Hellenistic sculpture of the sleeping Hermaphrodite, in the Louvre. On the topic of the androgyne and hermaphrodite in this period, see A. J. L. Busst, ‘The Image of the Androgyne in the Nineteenth Century’ in Ian Fletcher’s Romantic Mythologies (1967), and Franca Franchi’s Le Metamorfosi di Zambinella (1991). Busst contrasts the theme of hermaphrodite as the perfection of human existence (the androgynous universal man of the Saint-Simonians and others), current in the first half of the nineteenth century, with the decadent hermaphrodite of the later nineteenth century. The latter was popularized by Henri de Latouche’s once famous Fragoletta (1829); Gautier (Mademoiselle de Maupin, 1836, and ‘Contralto’, 1852), Balzac (Séraphîta, 1835, and La Fille aux yeux d’or, 1835), and Baudelaire (‘Les Bijoux’, 1857) were also influenced by it.

In defence of his choice of subject, Swinburne quotes from Shelley’s description in ‘The Witch of Atlas’ (1820) of the Louvre sculpture; see ‘Notes on Poems and Reviews’ (Appendix 1). For hermaphroditism in Swinburne’s early unpublished Laugh and Lie Down, see Edward Philip Schuldt, Four Early Unpublished Plays of Algernon Charles Swinburne (doctoral dissertation from the University of Reading, 1976), pp. 206–10; he corrects all previous discussions. In Lesbia Brandon, begun in 1864, Swinburne emphasizes the feminine aspects of Herbert Seyton’s appearance and his likeness to his sister (see, for example, pp. 3, 16, 30, 34 and 164 in Hughes’s edition, 1952).

Ovid (Metamorphoses, Book 4) is the main source for the story of Hermaphroditus. Salamacis (line 53), the nymph of a spring, falls in love with him, but he rejects her. She prays that the gods will unite them; the gods do so, forming one being.

For the figurative use of ‘pleasure-house’ (line 24), contrast Tennyson, ‘The Palace of Art’ (1832, 1842): ‘I built my soul a lordly pleasure-house, / Wherein at ease for aye to dwell’ (lines 1–2).

The four sonnets are of the Italian kind, with two quatrains and two tercets. Note that Swinburne only uses four rhymes per sonnet, as Rossetti does occasionally in A House of Love (including several early sonnets). The first three sonnets rhyme abba abba cdc dcd; the last rhymes abba abba cdd ccd.

Fragoletta

William Rossetti writes that the poem ‘has to be guessed at, and is guessed at with varying degrees of horror and repugnance: it is only readers of De Latouche’s novel of the same name who can be certain that they see how much it does, and how much else it does in no wise, mean.’ Latouche’s novel (1829) narrates the story of the hermaphrodite Fragoletta (the name is a diminutive of the Italian word for strawberry and occurs in Casanova and elsewhere); much of the plot is concerned with the complications of bisexual love. Swinburne was dismissive of Latouche’s art, and in A Note on Charlotte Brontë, 1877, he referred to the ‘Rhadamanthine author of “Fragoletta”; who certainly, to judge by his own examples of construction, had some right to pronounce with authority how a novel ought not to be written’; nonetheless, he was more excited in private, as when he wrote that he dare not trust another work of Latouche’s out of his sight (Lang, 1, 46). Swinburne read Gautier’s 1839 review of a drama of the same name as Latouche’s novel, in which he wrote that the ‘Fragoletta est un titre pimpant, égrillard, croustilleux, qui promet beaucoup de choses très-difficile à dire, et surtout à représenter’ (‘Fragoletta is a chic, ribald, spicy title which promises many things very difficult to say and above all to represent’).

The five-line iambic stanza consists of two tetrameters, two trimeters, and a dimeter, rhyming abaab.

Rondel

The rondel is Swinburne’s naturalization of the French rondeau, a fixed form that nonetheless has had many variations. Clément Marot and others established the most common formula: a poem in octosyllabic or decasyllabic lines, consisting of three stanzas made of five, three and five lines respectively. There are only two rhymes, and a refrain (called the rentrement) made from the first half of the first line is added, unrhymed, to the end of the second and third stanzas. Much of the skill of the rondeau is in placing the rentrement in new contexts. The form was popular in the first half of the sixteenth century in France, but was disdained by the Pléiade and long thereafter. Alfred de Musset used it for some of his light verse in the nineteenth century. Théodore de Banville included four rondeaux in his first book, Les Cariatides (1842); Swinburne referred to Banville’s ‘most flexible and brilliant style’ (though one which ‘hardly carries weight enough to tell across the Channel’) in his 1862 essay on Baudelaire.

‘These many years’ is a biblical phrase; see Ezra 5:11, Luke 15:29 (the parable of the prodigal son) and Romans 15:23.

Swinburne adapts the form by using one constant rhyme throughout the poem (in iambic pentameter) and one new rhyme per stanza. The rentrement becomes a rhymed iambic dimeter at the end of each stanza. Two manuscripts of the poem are reproduced in John S. Mayfield’s These Many Years (1947).

Satia Te Sanguine

The title, ‘glut thyself with blood’, derives from the phrase ‘satia te sanguine quem sitisti’ (‘glut thyself with the blood for which thou hast thirsted’), uttered by Queen Tomyris of the Massagetai as she dropped the severed head of Cyrus, the great Persian king who had treacherously killed her son, into a bowl of human blood. The story is recounted by Herodotus (at the end of the first book of his History) and other ancient sources (see Paulys Real-Encyclopädie der Classischen Altertumswissenschaft, second series); the Latin words are derived from medieval authors like Marcus Junianus Justinus or Paulus Orosius. Tomyris eventually evolves into a virtuous heroine, as in Dante’s Purgatorio, the Speculum humanae salvationis, or Rubens’s painting Queen Tomyris with the Head of Cyrus (see Paget Toynbee, A Dictionary of Proper Names and Notable Matters in the Works of Dante, revised by Charles S. Singleton, 1968, p. 596, and Robert W. Berger, ‘Rubens’s “Queen Tomyris with the Head of Cyrus” ’, Bulletin of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Vol. 77, 1979, pp 4–35). Swinburne uses the Latin words without alluding to the story and inverts any virtuous connotation they might have. The title and theme are also reminiscent of Baudelaire’s ‘Sed non Satiata’ (1857). Tomyris appears in the procession of women in ‘The Masque of Queen Bersabe’ (p. 176).

For Sappho’s suicide (third stanza), see note to ‘Anactoria’. For line 16, cf. Ezekiel 2:10, ‘and there was written therein lamentations, and mourning, and woe’.

The poem is in quatrains, rhyming abab; the lines are trimeter and combine iambs and anapests.

A Litany

A litany is ‘an appointed form of public prayer, usually of a penitential character, consisting of a series of supplications, deprecations, or intercessions in which the clergy lead and the people respond, the same formula of response being repeated for several successive clauses’ (OED). The poem consists of antiphones (perhaps Swinburne wrote the older form ‘antiphone’ rather than ‘antiphon’ in a mistaken attempt to reproduce the Greek form of the term; the medieval Latin singular ‘antiphona’ comes in fact from the Greek plural τα αντimageøωνα). That is, it is to be sung by two voices or choirs. William Rossetti calls the poem ‘a cross between the antiphonal hymnal form and the ideas and phraseology of the Old Testament’. To the influence of the Old Testament, we should add the ideas and phraseology of Revelation. The wine-press of lines 62 and 78 (and likewise ‘that hour’ of line 81) refers to the wrath of God at the Last Judgement; cf. Revelation 14:19–20: ‘And the angel thrust in his sickle into the earth, and gathered the vine of the earth, and cast it into the great winepress of the wrath of God. And the winepress was trodden without the city, and blood came out of the winepress, even unto the horse bridles, by the space of a thousand and six hundred furlongs.’

The Anthologia Sacra appears to be Swinburne’s invention; his Greek means ‘the shining lights in heaven I shall hide from you, for one night you will have seven, etc.’ Metrically, the first line consists of an iamb and a bacchiac; the second line appears to be a variant of the first. The third line is iambic trimeter.

‘Skirts’ (line 4) are ‘the beginning or end of a period of time’ (OED 9b). ‘Thick darkness’ (line 36) is a recurrent phrase in the Old Testament. For ‘before’ and ‘behind’ (lines 37 and 38), cf. Psalms 139:5, ‘Thou hast beset me behind and before.’ ‘Remnant’ (line 39), according to the OED, can mean by allusion to Isaiah 10:22, ‘a small number of Jews that survives persecution, in whom future hope is vested’. ‘Put away’ (line 87) commonly means ‘divorce’ in the Bible. Line 127 derives from Ezekiel 34:16, ‘I… will bind up that which was broken.’

The poem consists of alternating trimeter and dimeter lines of both iambs and anapests. The stanza rhymes ababcdcd; note the double and triple rhymes ‘over thee’, ‘cover thee’ / ‘over us’, ‘cover us’; ‘love thee’, ‘above thee’ / ‘love us’, ‘above us’; ‘sunder thee’, ‘under thee’ / ‘sunder us’, ‘under us’; ‘reach me’, ‘beseech me’ / ‘reach thee’, ‘beseech thee’; ‘gold on you’, ‘hold on you’ / ‘gold on us’, ‘hold on us’. The antiphony is both semantic (as even-numbered antiphones recall the wording of the previous odd-numbered antiphones) and rhythmic (many of the rhyme-words are repeated in the pairs of antiphones, with one or two new rhymes introduced in the successor).

A Lamentation

The poem invokes the lamentation of Thetis (line 114) over her dead son Achilles, which Homer recounts in the Odyssey (at the beginning of Book 24), and also the dead Heracles (line 122), killed unintentionally by his wife Deianira; the chorus in Sophocles’s Women of Trachis laments both Heracles and Deianira. (Matthew Arnold’s ‘Fragment of a Chorus of a “Dejaneira” ’, though probably written much earlier, was published only in 1867.) Lamentations, one of the books of the Old Testament, is Jeremiah’s lament over the destruction of Jerusalem; the Lamentation, one of the lessons read during Holy Week, is taken from it.

The phrase ‘the desire of mine eyes’ (line 56) is related to the phrases ‘the desire of thine eyes’, ‘the desire of your eyes’, and ‘the desire of their eyes’, which all occur in Ezekiel 24 (and nowhere else in the Bible).

The metre and the rhyme scheme vary among the sections. The three stanzas of the first section are all trimeter lines of both iambs and anapests. Note the abcabc rhymes in the first stanza and the abcdabcd rhymes in the second. The second section consists of several stanzas. The first rhymes abaab and consists of tetrameters (iambo-anapestic); ‘travail’ (line 48) is stressed on the first syllable. The second stanza consists of alternating trimeter and dimeter lines, each consisting of both iambs and anapests. It is composed of nine quatrains with cross rhymes. The remaining stanzas of the section are made of tetrameter lines of both iambs and anapests rhyming abcabc. The third section consists of iambic trimeter lines in stanzas rhyming abcabcabc.

Anima Anceps

The title means literally ‘two-fold soul’. The source is a formula which Victor Hugo is likely to have invented, in Book 8, Chapter 6 of Notre-Dame de Paris (1831):

Alors levant la main sur l’égyptienne il s’écria d’une voix funèbre: «I nunc, anima anceps, et sit tibi Deus misericors!»

C’était la redoutable formule dont on avait coutume de clore ces sombres cérémonies. C’était le signal convenu du prêtre au bourreau.

[Then he raised his hand over the gypsy girl and pronounced sombrely: ‘Go therefore, divided soul, and may God be merciful to you.’ It was the awful formula by which it was customary to conclude these grim ceremonies. It was the appointed signal of the priest to the hangman.]

Parts of Arthur Clough’s Dipsychus (1865; the title means ‘double-minded’ or ‘double-souled’) were published in 1862 and 1863; Swinburne frequently quotes from the poem in his later letters, while maintaining reservations about Clough’s merits.

For the address to the soul, cf. Hadrian’s lines ‘Animula, vagula, blandula’, translated by Matthew Prior, Byron and others. For the rhyme ‘rafter’ and ‘laughter’ (lines 34 and 35), cf. Shelley’s ‘Lines (“When the lamp is shattered”)’ (1824), lines 29 and 31.

It is written in iambic dimeter; the rhyme scheme is aaabcccbdddbeeeb. All rhymes except for b are feminine.

In the Orchard

The poem is inspired by an anonymous Provençal alba, or dawn-song (a genre without a fixed metre or form in which a lover laments the imminent separation from the other lover at the break of day). It begins ‘En un vergier’ (‘In an orchard’) and consists of six stanzas of four lines each; the last line of each stanza is the refrain ‘Oy Dieus, oy Dieus, de l’abla!, tan tost ve’ (‘Ah God, ah God, the dawn! it comes so fast’). The text was available in editions like F. J. M. Raynouard’s Choix des poésies originales des troubadours (1821) and C. A. F. Mahn’s Gedichte der Troubadours (1856). A convenient modern edition is R. T. Hill and T. C. Bergin, Anthology of the Provençal Troubadours (2nd ed., 1973). For more information about the genre, see Eos: An Enquiry into the Theme of Lovers’ Meetings and Partings at Dawn in Poetry, ed. Arthur T. Hatto, 1965. Pound translated the alba as ‘Alba Innominata’ in 1910. By ‘Provençal burden’ Swinburne indicates that he is adopting the music or undersong of Provençal lyric, rather than offering a translation. ‘Burden’, in addition, refers to the refrain at the end of each stanza.

The OED gives no instance of ‘plenilune’ (line 23) between c. 1600 and Swinburne in 1878.

The poem is in iambic pentameter and rhymes aabab; the b rhyme (‘soon’ in the refrain) is constant throughout.

A Match

‘Closes’ (line 5) are enclosures. The reference in lines 35–6 is to dice and cards, respectively.

The metre is iambic trimeter, the rhyme scheme is abccabab. The a and c rhymes are feminine.

Swinburne writes several lyrics in iambic trimeter octaves: ‘A Match’, ‘Rococo’, ‘Before Dawn’, ‘The Garden of Proserpine’; cf. ‘Madonna Mia’. Katherine Williams (in her 1986 doctoral dissertation from CUNY, ‘Song New-Born’: Renaissance Forms in Swinburne’s Lyrics) adduces Keats’s poem beginning ‘In a drear nighted December’ (1829) and Shelley’s poem ‘The Indian Serenade’ (1824) as other examples of iambic trimeter octaves.

Faustine

Published in the Spectator, 31 May 1862.

In Notes on Poems and Reviews (Appendix 1) Swinburne explains that ‘the idea that gives [these verses] such life as they have is simple enough: the transmigration of a single soul, doomed as though by accident from the first to all evil and no good, through many ages and forms, but clad always in the same type of fleshly beauty. The chance which suggested to me this poem was one which may happen any day to any man – the sudden sight of a living face which recalled the well-known likeness of another dead for centuries: in this instance, the noble and faultless type of the elder Faustina, as seen in coin and bust.’ (According to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, the elder Faustina’s coiffure is depicted with a coronal of plaits on top; the younger Faustina’s with rippling side waves and a small bun at the nape of the neck.)

The elder Faustina is Annia Galeria Faustina, who married the future emperor Antoninus Pius. She was the aunt of Marcus Aurelius, whom her daughter, also named Annia Galeria Faustina, married. Ancient historians like Cassius Dio and the authors of the Historia Augusta established the reputation of both women for treachery and licentiousness. The latter work reports many amours of the younger Faustina (including an affair with her son-in-law, whom it says she may have poisoned). The discrepancy between the characters of Marcus Aurelius and his son was explained by postulating a liaison between Faustina and a gladiator; she is said to have preferred sailors and gladiators. Gibbon summarizes: ‘the grave simplicity of the philosopher was ill calculated to engage her wanton levity, or to fix that unbounded passion for variety, which often discovered personal merit in the meanest of mankind. The Cupid of the ancients was, in general, a very sensual deity; and the amours of an empress, as they exact on her side the plainest advances, are seldom susceptible of much sentimental delicacy’ (The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Chapter 4). Neither Gibbon nor Swinburne was aware of the fictitious nature of much of the Historia Augusta, which was revealed by Hermann Dessau in 1889. According to Dio, she died either of the gout or by suicide.

Satan won the contest with God over Faustina’s soul ‘this time’ (line 25); the contest over Job was the previous time. The combats of gladiators are described in lines 65–80; the words ‘morituri te salutant’ of the epigraph (in full, ‘Hail, empress Faustina, they who are about to die salute you’) are the traditional greeting of gladiators (see H. J. Leon, ‘Morituri Te Salutamus’, Transactions of the American Philological Association 70, 1939, pp. 46–50; cf. Jean Gérôme’s painting Ave Cœsar, Morituri Te Salutant exhibited in 1859). She is a Bacchanal (line 99), a votary of Bacchus and so a drunken reveller, but she is also a votary of Priapus, the ithyphallic god whose cult diffused from the region of Lampsacus (line 146), as well as a lesbian like Sappho of Mitylene (lines 117–24). Priapus ‘metes the gardens with his rod’ (line 147) because, as a garden god, his image was usually situated in the garden; cf. Catullus’s ‘Priapean’ poems (18, 19, and 20), usually regarded as spurious; Swinburne read Catullus with ‘delight and wonder’ at Eton (unpublished letter quoted in Rooksby, p. 30).

‘Dust and din’ (line 82) is a Victorian collocation: cf. Tennyson, In Memoriam (1850) LXXXIX.8, and Arnold, Empedocles on Etna (1852) Act 1, Scene 2, line 206. ‘Dashed with dew’ (line 103) recalls Tennyson’s ‘Dashed together in blinding dew’, from ‘A Vision of Sin’ (1842), line 42. ‘Serene’ (line 114), in reference to heavenly bodies, means ‘shining with a clear and tranquil light’ (OED, 1b). ‘Pulseless’ (line 115) can mean ‘unfeeling, pitiless’ as well as ‘devoid of life’.

The metre is iambic; ‘devil’ in line 19 ought to be scanned as a monosyllable. The four-line quatrains rhyme abab and alternate between tetrameter and dimeter lines. The last word of each quatrain is ‘Faustine’, for which Swinburne finds forty-one rhymes.

A Cameo

A description of a cameo, with the allegorical figures of Desire, Pain, Pleasure, Satiety, Hate and Death, as well as a crowd of senses, sorrows, sins and strange loves. Strictly speaking, cameos are not painted (line 2). For the title, compare Gautier’s Émaux et Camées (1852) and his intention that ‘chaque pièce [of that collection] devait être un médaillon’. For contemporary sonnets on works of art, recall Rossetti’s ‘Sonnets for Pictures’, published in 1850. For the topic of ekphrasis in general, see John Hollander’s The Gazer’s Spirit (1995).

‘Pash’ (line 8), to smash violently, may be influenced by the intransitive use of the word ‘said of the dashing action of sudden heavy rain… and of the action of beating or striking water as by the feet of the horse’ (OED).

The sonnet is of the Italian sort; it rhymes abba abba cde cde.

Song Before Death

The poem is a translation from a song in Letter 68 of Sade’s Aline et Valcour, his philosophical epistolary novel published in 1795:

Air: Romance de Nina.

Mère adorée, en un moment

La mort t’enlève à ma tendresse!

Toi qui survis, ô mon amant!

Reviens consoler ta maîtresse.

Ah! qu’il revienne (bis), hélas! hélas!

Mais le bien-aimé ne vient pas.

Comme la rose au doux printemps

S’entrouvre au souffle du zéphyre,

Mon âme à ces tendres accents

S’ouvrirait de même au délire.

En vain, j’écoute: hélas! hélas!

Le bien-aimé ne parle pas.

Vous qui viendrez verser des pleurs

Sur ce cercueil où je repose,

En gémissant sur mes douleurs,

Dites a l’amant qui les cause

Qu’il fut sans cesse, hélas! hélas!

Le bien-aimé jusqu’au trépas.

In a letter of 1862 (Lang, 1, 58), Swinburne describes the song as ‘about the most exquisite piece of simple finished language and musical effect in all 18th century French literature’. On Swinburne’s initial reading of Sade, see Rooksby, pp. 75–7. For his abiding interest, consult the index to the letters.

The title and the date ‘1795’ indicate that the speaker is anticipating execution during the French Revolution.

Swinburne translates into iambic tetrameter lines in stanzas that rhyme ababcc.

Wise reproduces the manuscript of the poem in the 1919 Bibliography (p. 110).

Rococo

In the nineteenth century the term could mean merely ‘old-fashioned’, and even when applied to French decoration, it did not specifically refer to the florid, light style conceived in reaction to the official baroque of Louis XIV. The OED’s first citation for ‘rococo’ is dated 1836. Swinburne invokes Juliette (line 62), whose name recalls the depraved heroine of Sade’s novel, published in 1797.

On the newly recovered fashion for the rococo in French culture in the nineteenth century, see the chapter ‘Age of Rococo’ in Maxine G. Cutler’s Evocations of the Eighteenth Century in French Poetry, 1800–1869 (1970). Gautier was central in the new appreciation for it; see his poems ‘Rocaille’, ‘Pastel’ (originally called ‘Roccoco’), ‘Watteau’, etc. Banville and Hugo (‘La Fête chez Thérèse’) were also important in its recovery, as were Baudelaire and the Goncourt brothers.

‘Sanguine’ (line 8) means ‘of blood-red colour’, but the sense ‘bloodthirsty, delighting in bloodshed’ is not absent. Both meanings were literary uses of the word when Swinburne wrote the poem.

The poem is written in iambic trimeter; the stanzas rhyme ababcdcd, where a and c have feminine endings. The last two rhymes of each stanza alternate between ‘pleasure/pain’ and ‘remember/forget’. On iambic trimeter octaves, see the note to ‘A Match’.

Wise reproduces a manuscript of the poem in the 1919 Bibliography (p. 113).

Stage Love

Bacon, in his essay on love, offers one of the classical contrasts between stage love and love in life: ‘The stage is more beholding to love, than the life of man. For as to the stage, love is ever matter of comedies, and now and then of tragedies; but in life it doth much mischief: sometimes like a siren; sometimes like a fury.’

The poem is written in trochaics with six stresses (the last unstressed syllable is sometimes omitted, as often in trochaic verse); the stanzas rhyme aabb, where b is feminine. Trochaics are among the most enduring metres of classical poetry: Archilochus wrote in trochaics, the metre occurred regularly in Greek and Latin tragedy and comedy and also in late works like the Pervigilium Veneris, and it was used in goliardic verse. In English, by the eighteenth century, the trochaic had typically been used for lighter purposes. William Blake’s songs in trochees, like ‘The Tyger’, introduced a new weight and flexibility to the metre. Tennyson’s ‘Locksley Hall’ (1842), Longfellow’s ‘The Song of Hiawatha’ (1855), and Browning’s ‘A Toccata of Galuppi’s’ (1855) were recent poems in trochaics.

Wise prints a manuscript of the poem in his 1919 Bibliography (p. 113) and in A Swinburne Library, facing page 25.

The Leper

Swinburne invents a French source for the story, which he offers in a note at the end: ‘At that time there was in this land a great number of lepers, which greatly displeased the king, seeing that because of them the Lord must have been grievously wroth. Now it happened that a noble lady named Yolande de Sallières was afflicted and utterly ravaged by this base sickness; all her friends and relatives, with the fear of the Lord before their eyes, made her quit their houses and would never receive or help a thing cursed of God, stinking and abominable to all men. This lady had been very beautiful and graceful of figure; she was generous of body and lascivious in her life. However, none of the lovers who had often embraced and kissed her very tenderly would shelter any longer such an ugly woman and such a detestable sinner. One clerk alone who had been at first her servant and her intermediary in the matter of love took her in, hiding her in a small hut. There the villainous woman died of great misery and an evil death: and after her, the aforesaid clerk died, who had of his great love for six months tended, washed, dressed and undressed her with his own hands every day. They even say that this wicked man and cursed clerk, calling to mind the great beauty of this woman, now gone by and ravaged, delighted many times to kiss her on her foul, leprous mouth and to embrace her gently with loving hands. Thus, he died of the same abominable malady. This happened near Fontainebellant in Gastinois. And when King Philip heard this story, he was greatly astonished.’

Clyde K. Hyder (‘The Medieval Background of Swinburne’s The Leper’, PMLA 46, December 1931, pp. 1280–8) identifies a source behind various details of Swinburne’s archaic French; he also notes correspondences between the poem and the medieval poem Amis and Amiloun, which Swinburne read in Henry Weber’s Metrical Romances (1810).

William Empson discusses the word ‘delicate’ (line 3) in The Structure of Complex Words (1951, p. 78), where he writes that in this poem ‘the sadism is adequately absorbed or dramatised into a story where both characters are humane, and indeed behave better than they think; Swinburne nowhere else (that I have read him) succeeds in imagining two people.’

The metre is iambic tetrameter; the stanza is a quatrain rhyming abab.

An early version of the poem, entitled ‘A Vigil’, was transcribed by T. J. Wise in A Swinburne Library (p. 2) and by Lafourcade (Vol. 2, pp. 63–4 and 573). Cecil Lang warns that the transcriptions are inaccurate (The Pre-Raphaelites and their Circle, 1975, p. 521). There is a reproduction of the first four stanzas of ‘A Vigil’ in T. Earle Welby’s A Study of Swinburne (1976), p. 60.

A Ballad of Burdens

‘Ballad’ indicates that the poem is a ballade, the form of which was standardized by Guillaume de Machaut and Eustache Deschamps in the fourteenth century: three stanzas of either eight octosyllabic lines or ten decasyllabic lines; usually with an envoy at the end; having a refrain or rebriche as the last line of each stanza and of the envoy; and maintaining the same rhymes for each stanza. The greatest ballades were written by Villon in the fifteenth century and by Charles d’Orléans in the sixteenth. Despite efforts by Chaucer and Gower, the form was never naturalized in English; in France it fell into disuse in the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Gautier’s essay on Villon in Les Grotesques (1844) was influential in establishing Villon’s reputation in the nineteenth century. (Although Banville was composing ballades ‘after the manner of Villon’ at the same time as Swinburne, they were not published until 1873; his polemical Petit traité de poésie française, insisting on the necessity of returning to forms like the rondeau, triolet, and ballade, appeared in 1872.) Swinburne’s enthusiasm for the fifteenth-century French poet was longstanding; in the early 1860s, he and Rossetti planned to translate all of Villon’s work. His translation from this period entitled ‘The Ballad of Villon and Fat Madge’, like ‘A Ballad of Burdens’, does not preserve the same rhymes in each stanza; in contrast, his translations of Villon’s ballades published in Poems and Ballads, Second Series (1878) adhere to the stricter rhyme scheme. ‘A Ballad of Burdens’ is a triple ballade; the stanza rhymes ababbcbc, and c is constant in each stanza.

‘Burden’, besides meaning ‘refrain’ and ‘accompanying song’, is used in the English Bible (like onus in the Vulgate) to render Hebrew massa, which was generally taken in English to mean a ‘burdensome or heavy lot or fate’. See Isaiah 13:1 and OED, ‘burden’ 8. Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s ‘The Burden of Nineveh’, as printed in 1856, added below the title ‘ “Burden. Heavy calamity; the chorus of a song.” – Dictionary.’

For ‘the burden of fair women’ (line 1), cf. Tennyson’s title, ‘A Dream of Fair Women’ (1832). Compare the repeated line ‘I would that I were dead’ of Tennyson’s ‘Mariana’ (1830) with line 28.

Rondel

See note to the first rondel (p. 337), and recall that the form of the rondeau was very fluid before the time of Marot. The poem is in two stanzas, like Villon’s rondeau on death, which Rossetti translated in 1869. The metre is iambic pentameter, the rhyme scheme is aabbcc (c is the same rhyme in both stanzas), the rentrement is iambic dimeter.

‘White death’ (line 11) occurs twice in Shelley, in Prometheus Unbound (1820) Act 4, line 424 and Adonais (1821), line 66. It is most likely an equivalent to the more common poetic phrase ‘pale death’.

Wise prints a manuscript of the poem in his 1919 Bibliography (p. 109) and in A Swinburne Library, facing page 24.

Before the Mirror

The poem was written for Whistler’s The Little White Girl: Symphony in White no. 2 (1864), now in the Tate Gallery, the second of the series Whistler only later called ‘symphonies in white’. (Whistler may have taken his synaesthetic title from Gautier’s ‘Symphonie en blanc majeur’, or perhaps from a critic’s description of The White Girl: Symphony in White, no. 1, 1862.) A girl in white leans on a white mantelpiece, extending one arm along it, holds a fan in the hand of her other arm, and looks at a Japanese vase at the end of the mantelpiece. Her head is inclined to the mirror above the mantel; her reflection is sadder than her face. Swinburne wrote to Whistler in 1865 (Lang, 1, 118–20): ‘I know [the idea of the poem] was entirely and only suggested to me by the picture, where I found at once the metaphor of the rose and the notion of sad and glad mystery in the face languidly contemplative of its own phantom and all other things seen by their phantoms.’ Whistler liked the verses; the fourth and sixth stanzas were printed in the Royal Academy catalogue of 1865; and he had the poem printed on gold paper and fastened to the frame (Frederick A. Sweet, James McNeill Whistler, 1968, p. 57). John Hollander (The Gazer’s Spirit, 1995) suggests that this last fact may account for the poem’s subtitle. See also Linda Merrill, The Peacock Room: A Cultural Biography (1998), pp. 62–6, 357.

‘Behind the veil’ (line 8) recalls Tennyson’s In Memoriam (1850) LVI, 28 (‘Behind the veil, behind the veil’), as well as the metaphysical veils of Coleridge and Shelley, and also Hebrews 6:19.

The poem is iambic; the length of the lines varies. The rhyme scheme is a3b2a3b2c3c3b5. Note that there is an internal c rhyme after the third foot in the last line of each stanza. Hollander remarks on the third section of the poem: ‘The poem now moves inside the girl’s reveries to the traces of the past that must inevitably emerge from its depths, even as – in Swinburne’s verse throughout this poem – the internal rhymes emerge in the ultimate line of each stanza.’

Erotion

Swinburne explained that he wrote this poem as a comment on Simeon Solomon’s painting Damon and Aglae:

a picture of two young lovers in fresh fullness of first love crossed and troubled visibly by the mere shadow and the mere breath of doubt, the dream of inevitable change to come which dims the longing eyes of the girl with a ghostly foreknowledge that this too shall pass away, as with arms half clinging and half repellent she seems at once to hold off and to hold fast the lover whose bright youth for the moment is smiling back in the face of hers – a face full of the soft fear and secret certitude of future things which I have tried elsewhere to render in the verse called ‘Erotion’ written as a comment on this picture, with design to express the subtle passionate sense of mortality in love itself which wells up from ‘the middle spring of pleasure’, yet cannot quite kill the day’s delight or eat away with the bitter poison of doubt the burning faith and self-abandoned fondness of the hour; since, at least, though the future be for others, and the love now here turn elsewhere to seek pasture in fresh fields from other flowers, the vows and kisses of these present lips are not theirs but hers, as the memory of his love and the shadow of his youth shall be hers for ever.

(Swinburne, ‘Simeon Solomon: Notes on His “Vision of Love” and Other Studies’, The Dark Blue, July 1871, p. 574)

The first eight lines of Swinburne’s poem were printed in the 1866 exhibition catalogue of the Royal Academy of Arts under the entry for Damon and Aglae. The painting was sold at Sotheby’s in 1978.

‘Erotion’ is a Greek name, a diminutive of ‘Eros’. Although here and in ‘Anactoria’ the name is presumably applied to a man, in Martial, for example, it is applied to a young slave girl (5.34, 5.37, 10.61).

Swinburne ended his close association and friendship with Solomon after Solomon was arrested in 1873 for soliciting outside a public lavatory.

The poem is in heroic couplets. Complete sentences fit into either couplets or quatrains. There is little enjambment.

A facsimile of a manuscript of the poem is provided in Harry B. Smith’s A Sentimental Library (1914), facing p. 202.

In Memory of Walter Savage Landor

Swinburne’s veneration of Landor began in his Eton days (Rooksby, p. 30). He admired Landor’s classicism and republicanism. They met in Florence (‘flower-town’, line 1) in March 1864. Landor accepted the dedication of Atalanta in Calydon but died before it could reach him in print. In the article he contributed to the ninth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1882), Swinburne praised Landor’s ideal of civic and heroic life, his ‘passionate compassion, his bitter and burning pity for all wrongs endured in all the world’, and his loyalty and liberality; and he particularly admired his Hellenics (1847) and Imaginary Conversations of Greeks and Romans (1853).

Landor was eighty-nine years old when they met, and Swinburne was about to turn twenty-seven (line 23). The address ‘Look earthward now’ (line 34) recalls Milton’s ‘Lycidas’, line 163, ‘Look homeward Angel now’, and it may also be influenced by Christina Rossetti, ‘Your eyes look earthward’, in ‘The Convent Threshold’ (1862), line 17. ‘Dedicated’ (line 47) means ‘consecrated’.

The poem is written in quatrains consisting of alternate iambic tetrameter and iambic dimeter lines; they rhyme abab.

A Song in Time of Order. 1852 and A Song in Time of Revolution. 1860

‘A Song in Time of Order. 1852’ was published in the Spectator, 26 April 1862, and ‘A Song in Time of Revolution. 1860’ in the Spectator, 28 June 1862.

Both poems are expressions of Swinburne’s republican convictions. The date appended to the title of the first poem indicates that his target is Louis Napoleon, who became emperor of France in 1852. He had been elected president of France in 1848, backed by the newly founded ‘Party of Order’; ‘order’ was one of his political slogans. In 1851, when his term as president expired, he staged a successful coup d’état; the next year he began to deport his enemies to Algeria and French Guiana; later that year, he was proclaimed emperor. He also sent convicts with long sentences to French Guiana; Cayenne (line 50) became known as the ‘city of the condemned’. See Hugo’s ‘Hymne des Transportés’ (1853). Austria (line 50) dominated the disunited Italian states (until 1859). Louis Napoleon’s parentage had been a topic of contemporary gossip (line 39, ‘Buonaparte the bastard’). The revolution that Swinburne praises in the second poem is Garibaldi’s successful offensive into Italy: capturing first Sicily and then Naples in 1860, he handed both over to Victor Emmanuel and greeted him as the king of a united Italy.

Contrast the title with the occasional prayers of the Book of Common Prayer, for example, ‘In the Time of War and Tumults’. Lines 29–30 of the first poem and lines 19–20 of the second are reminiscent of God’s power in Job; see, for example, Job 38:8 and 41:1. See, too, Hugo’s ‘Lux’ (1853) line 202–6. ‘Reins’ (line 27, ‘A Song in Time of Revolution’) means ‘loins’.

For Swinburne, Victor Hugo’s collection of poems denouncing Louis Napoleon, Les Châtiments (1853), was a crucial example of republicanism in poetry. (Much of Swinburne’s critical work on Hugo, including comments on Les Châtiments, is reprinted in the Bonchurch edition of his works, volume 13. However, that volume includes works now known not to have been written by Swinburne, and it is misleading in other respects, too; see Clyde Hyder, Swinburne as Critic, 1972.) Lafourcade points to the influence of Hugo’s ‘Ultima Verba’ in particular. Consider Hugo’s last stanza in relation to the lines ‘While three men hold together, The kingdoms are less by three’ (‘A Song in Time of Order’):

Si l’on n’est plus que mille, eh bien, j’en suis! Si même

Ils ne sont plus que cent, je brave encor Sylla;

S’il en demeure dix, je serai le dixième;

Et s’il n’en reste qu’un, je serai celui-là!

(Sylla, or Sulla, the Roman tyrant, is one of Hugo’s names for Louis Napoleon.)

‘A Song in Time of Order’ is in quatrains of trimeter lines that combine iambs and anapests; ‘gunwale’ (line 12) is pronounced as a strong trochee, not as a spondee. The quatrains rhyme abab. ‘A Song in Time of Revolution’ is in hexameter rhyming couplets, combining anapests and iambs; there is a rhyme after the third foot as well as at the end of the line.

To Victor Hugo

Throughout his life Swinburne was passionately enthusiastic about Victor Hugo. In this poem, he recalls Hugo’s childhood during the Napoleonic period and pays tribute to Hugo’s self-enforced, principled exile (forced into exile after he resisted Louis Napoleon’s coup d’état, he refused to enter France after the general amnesty of 1859). In his prose works of 1852, Napoléon le Petit and Histoire d’un crime, he indicted Napoleon III, and in 1853 he wrote a book of satirical poems condemning him, Les Châtiments. Swinburne praises the principles of the French Revolution (line 99) and the democratic uprisings of 1848, while lamenting their apparent political failure. He contrasts the political pessimism of his generation (lines 124-6) with Hugo’s optimism (line 153). The tenth stanza recalls the exile of Swinburne’s ancestors during the English Civil War. The eighteenth stanza invokes Prometheus.

Contrast the opening two lines with Tennyson, ‘Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington’ (1852), line 266: ‘On God and Godlike men we build our trust.’ ‘Uplift’ in lines 50 and 128 is an older form of ‘uplifted’; it survived in nineteenth-century poetry. Compare line 99 with Genesis 1:3, ‘And God said, Let there be light; and there was light.’ Swinburne refers to ‘the vast and various universe created by the fiat lux of Victor Hugo’ (Studies in Prose and Poetry, [1889] 1894, p. 277). Line 166 recalls Shakespeare’s Macbeth, ‘I gin to be a-weary of the sun’ (Act V, Scene 5, line 49).

Swinburne sent a copy of Poems and Ballads to Hugo, who could not read English but who asked a friend to translate this poem. He wrote graciously to Swinburne about ‘les nobles et magnifiques strophes que vous m’adressez’ (Lang, 1, 248n2).

The poem is written in iambics; the eight-line stanza consists of two trimeter lines, a pentameter, two trimeters, a pentameter, a tetrameter, and a pentameter; rhyming aabccbdd. The stanza is very like that of Milton’s hymn in ‘On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity’, except that Milton’s last line is a hexameter.

Before Dawn

The metre is iambic trimeter. The stanza rhymes aaabcccb, where a and c have feminine endings. On rhyming triplets, see Swinburne’s discussion of Robert Herrick (1891; reprinted in Studies in Prose and Poetry, 1894). With ‘no abiding’ (line 71), compare 1 Chronicles 29:15, ‘our days on the earth are as a shadow, and there is none abiding’.

Dolores

Dolores is Swinburne’s anti-madonna; her name derives from the phrase ‘Our Lady of the Seven Sorrows’ (which, in French, is Swinburne’s sub-title). ‘Our Lady of Pain’, Swinburne’s pagan darker Venus, is his answer to the Christian ‘Our Lady of Sorrows’, although his paganism is tinged with his own interest in sadomasochism (see Lang, 1, 123). Words and phrases from the Bible (lines 10 and 439: Matthew 18:21–2; line 137: Matthew 9:17 and elsewhere; lines 371–2: Exodus 7:9–12; line 328: Matthew 13:24–40), the Loreto Litany of the Blessed Virgin (line 19 and ‘tower of ivory’; line 21 and ‘mystical rose’; line 22 and ‘house of gold’), the prayers of the Mass (e.g. lines 133–4 and the taking of communion), the ‘Ave Maria’ (line 39 and ‘blessed among women’), and the Lord’s Prayer (lines 279 and 391) are blasphemously deployed. Baudelaire’s poems ‘À une Madonne’ and ‘Les Litanies de Satan’ (1857) are models for Swinburne; he writes admiringly about these two poems in particular in his 1862 Spectator review of Les Fleurs du Mal.

Libitina (lines 51, 423) is the Roman goddess of burials, misidentified since antiquity with Venus; Priapus (lines 51, 423) is the ithyphallic god of gardens (lines 303, 313), whose cult was centred in Lampsacus (line 405). The prayer to Dolores to intercede with her father Priapus on our behalf (line 311) is a parody of Catholic prayer. Priapus is the subject of three poems once attributed to Catullus (line 340); Swinburne quotes two lines of one of these in a note to line 307: ‘for in its cities the coast of the Hellespont, more oysterous than most, honours you particularly’. One of his lyrics (Carmina 32) is addressed to the girl Ipsitilla (cf. Swinburne’s line 326).

Swinburne reverses the usual associations of cypress and myrtle in lines 175–6. The Thalassian in line 223 is Aphrodite Anadyomene, risen again in Roman cruelty. The gladiatorial combats follow in the next stanzas, for which Lafourcade adduces the preface to Gautier’s Mademoiselle de Maupin (1835) as an influence. Nero is introduced in lines 249–56 (see Linda Dowling, ‘Nero and the Aesthetics of Torture’, The Victorian Newsletter, Fall 1984, pp. 2–5, on the aestheticized Nero in the nineteenth century). Alciphron and Arisbe (line 299) are names that occur in Greek history and mythology, but Swinburne is most likely using them simply as the names of a male and a female lover.

The stanzas beginning at line 329 describe Cybele, the ‘Great Mother of the Gods’, whose worship, characterized by ecstatic states and insensibility to pain, arose in Phrygia (line 330), where her main cult was located on Mount Dindymus (line 345). It later spread to Greece and Rome, where one of her Latin names was the ‘Idaean Mother’ (line 333). Her priests castrated themselves as Cybele’s lover, Attis, did; Catullus, Carmina 63, relates that legend (line 340). In ‘Notes on Poems and Reviews’ (Appendix 1), Swinburne contrasts Dolores, ‘the darker Venus’, with both the Virgin Mary and Cybele.

Cotys or Cotyto (line 409, Cotytto) was a Thracian goddess later worshipped orgiastically in Corinth and Sicily as well as in Thrace. Astarte (in Greek) or Ashtaroth (in the Bible) are names for Ishtar, the Mesopotamian goddess of love and war. Privately, Swinburne associates the ‘Europian Cotytto’ and the ‘Asiatic Aphrodite of Aphaca’ (Lang, 1, 406) with Sade and with sadomasochistic indulgence (see Lang, 1, 312).

‘Seventy times seven’ (lines 10 and 439) recalls Matthew 18:22. J. C. Maxwell (Notes and Queries, Vol. 21, January 1974, p. 15) offers a parallel to and possible source of line 159 in Thackeray’s The Newcomes (1855), Chapter 65, ‘before marriages and cares and divisions had separated us’. Perhaps ‘live torches’ (line 245) refer to humans burnt alive; however, the OED offers no example of such a usage. A ‘visible God’ (line 320) echoes Timon of Athens, Act 4, Scene 3. The rod in lines 371–2 recalls Aaron’s rod in Exodus 7. Line 379 may invoke Sade, and line 380 alludes to the allegory of sin and death in Paradise Lost, Book 2; the OED records an obsolete usage of ‘incestuous’ meaning ‘begotten of incest’. The tares and grain of line 438 recall Christ’s parable in Matthew 13.

The metre combines iambs and anapests in seven trimeter lines concluded by the dimeter eighth line, which always consists of an iamb followed by an anapest; in every other stanza, the refrain is ‘Our Lady of Pain’. The rhyme scheme is ababcdcd, where a and c are regularly feminine; ‘Dolores’ appears nine times in this position. The metre and stanza is very close to those of some poems by William Praed, such as ‘Song for the Fourteenth of February’ (1827), except that Swinburne’s last line is shorter by a foot than Praed’s and so clinches each stanza. Swinburne read Praed at school and respected his work (Lang, 3, 314), though coolly (Studies in Prose and Poetry [1891] 1894, p. 100). Byron used the same versification (that is, with the trimeter final line) in ‘Stanzas to [Augusta]’ (1816); however, Swinburne was critical of Byron for ‘having… so bad an ear for metre’ (Essays and Studies, [1866] 1875, p. 251). Saintsbury, in A History of English Prosody (1906, Vol. 3, p. 344), reviews Swinburne’s antecedents:

The initial ‘rumtity-tumtity-tum’ of Shenstone and Cowper; the comic improvements of Gay and others; the apparently casual inspiration which made Byron get rid of the jolt and jingle, by the simple expedient of alternative double rhyme, in Haidée’s ‘Garden of Roses’; the perfecting of this form by Praed – these surely form a genealogical tree of sufficient interest as they stand.

A. E. Housman refers to this stanza ‘which Swinburne dignified and strengthened till it yielded a combination of speed and magnificence which nothing in English had possessed before’ (lecture on Swinburne delivered in 1910).

There is a reproduction of two stanzas of ‘Dolores’ in Wise’s 1919 Bibliography, p. 160.

The Garden of Proserpine

See ‘Hymn to Proserpine’ (page 334) for the figure of Proserpine, who in this poem stands at the garden-entrance to the world of the dead, wearing a crown of poppies and having prepared a wine of oblivion from the poppies.

At a dinner party in the 1870s, while speaking about Poems and Ballads in relation to his experiences, Swinburne said that there were three poems

which beyond all the rest were autobiographical – ‘The Triumph of Time’, ‘Dolores’, and ‘The Garden of Proserpine’. ‘The Triumph of Time’ was a monument to the sole real love of his life – a love which had been the tragic destruction of all his faith in women. ‘Dolores’ expressed the passion with which he had sought relief, in the madnesses of the fleshly Venus, from his ruined dreams of the heavenly. ‘The Garden of Proserpine’ expressed his revolt against the flesh and its fevers, and his longing to find a refuge from them in a haven of undisturbed rest…

(W. H. Mallock, Memoirs of Life and Literature, 1920; quoted in Rooksby, p. 102.)

Wordsworth’s ‘A slumber did my spirit seal’ (1800) and Keats’s ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ (1819) famously invoke the easeful or restful condition of death. Tennyson’s ‘The Lotos-Eaters’ (1832), Matthew Arnold’s ‘Requiescat’ (1853), and Christina Rossetti’s sonnet ‘Rest’ (1862) continue this Romantic theme.

The imagery of line 76 derives from falconry. ‘Diurnal’ (line 94) may recall Wordsworth (‘A slumber did my spirit seal’).

The metre is iambic trimeter, and the rhyme scheme is ababcccb, where b is the only masculine rhyme. Christina Rossetti frequently used three consecutive rhymes in poems, though not with feminine endings; cf. a poem in a similar mood, ‘Dream-Land’ (1862). Swinburne discusses the triplet rhyme in a short piece on Robert Herrick (Studies in Prose and Poetry, [1891] 1894, p. 46), where he praises an instance of it in Herrick as ‘worthy of Miss Rossetti herself; and praise of such work can go no higher’. See the note to ‘A Match’ for examples of iambic trimeter octaves. The octave of ‘The Garden of Proserpine’ is identical to the stanza of Dryden’s song ‘Farewell ungrateful traitor’ from Act 5 of The Spanish Fryar. Saintsbury, in A History of English Prosody (1906, Vol. 2, p. 379), writes that Dryden’s song ‘joins the music of the seventeenth century to that of the nineteenth, and Dryden to Swinburne’.

Hesperia

Hesperia, the west, is the location of the Fortunatae Insulae (line 35), the ‘Islands of the Blest’, home of the happy dead; see Atalanta in Calydon, lines 510–25. Both Dolores, ‘Our Lady of Pain’ (line 60), and Proserpine, ‘Our Lady of Sleep’ (line 72), are invoked here.

In 1887, Swinburne opposed the inclusion of ‘Hesperia’ in a selection of his poems on the ground that it was ‘too long, too vague, and too dependent on the two preceding poems’ (Lang, 5, 208); William Rossetti, in his criticism of 1866, made similar comments.

The metre may be described as a modification of accentual dactylic hexameter /xx /xx /xx /xx /xx //. However, Swinburne had a strong antipathy to the dactyl. In an essay on Coleridge, he disparaged the ‘feeble and tuneless form of metre called hexameters in English; if form of metre that may be called which has neither metre nor form’ (Essays and Studies, [1869] 1875, p. 272). In his preface to his translation in anapests of the ‘Grand Chorus of Birds’ from Aristophanes (1880), he famously declared that in English ‘all variations and combinations of anapæstic, iambic, or trochaic metre are as natural and pliable as all dactylic and spondaic forms of verse are unnatural and abhorrent’.

In this poem he modified the classical metre in two ways: first, his verses rhyme ababcdcd…, where feminine and masculine endings, respectively, alternate. Thus, in every other line, the last foot consists of a single stressed syllable, rather than of two syllables (i.e., it is catalectic). Second, Swinburne introduced ‘anacrustic’ syllables, as the term then was; that is, he added to the beginning of a line one or two unstressed syllables which precede the six metrical feet and which are not part of the scansion. Otherwise, Swinburne stayed close to the classical metre: he substituted spondees for dactyls, and his caesuras, sometimes more than one in a line, never coincide with the end of a metrical foot. Here are the first eight lines scanned; anacrustic words are italicized:

image

(‘Passionate’, line 30, presents a problem; perhaps it is to be scanned with three stresses. ‘Sonorous’, line 80, is stressed on the second syllable, like Latin sonōrus, and as it is pronounced in Milton and Pope. Note that consecutive vowels are sometimes elided and that the last syllable counts as stressed by convention, regardless of its intrinsic accent.)

The poem can be understood as dactylic hexameter with these two modifications. However, these innovations make the lines scan much more anapestically. Every other line has a masculine ending, and so in half the lines the last three syllables can be heard as an anapest. When two unstressed anacrustic syllables are added to the beginning of a line with a masculine ending, that line can be scanned as an exact anapestic hexameter (with spondaic substitution); there are thirteen such lines in ‘Hesperia’.

However, the confusion of dactylic and anapestic metres is exactly what Swinburne complained of in Arnold’s hexameters (Essays and Studies, [1867] 1875, pp. 163–4), which, he writes, he has ‘tried in vain to reduce by scansion into any metrical feet at all’:

They look like nothing on earth, and sound like anapæsts broken up and driven wrong; neither by ear nor by finger can I bring them to any reckoning. I am sure of one thing, that some of them begin with a pure and absolute anapæst; and how a hexameter can do this it passes my power to conceive. And at best what ugly bastards of verse are these self-styled hexameters! how human tongues or hands could utter or write them except by way of burlesque improvisation I could never imagine, and never shall. Once only, to be candid – and I will for once show all possible loyalty and reverence to past authority – once only, as far as I know, in Dr. Hawtrey’s delicate and fluent verse, has the riddle been resolved; the verses are faultless, are English; are hexametric; but this is simply a graceful interlude of pastime, a well-played stroke in a game of skill played with language. Such as pass elsewhere for English hexameters I do hope and suppose impossible at Eton. Mr. Clough’s I will not presume to be serious attempts or studies in any manner of metre; they are admirable studies in graduated prose, full of fine sound and effect. Even Mr. Kingsley’s ‘Andromeda’, the one good poem extant in that pernicious metre, for all its spirit and splendour, for all the grace and glory and exultation of its rushing and ringing words, has not made possible the impossible thing. Nothing but loose rhymeless anapæsts can be made of the language in that way; and we hardly want these, having infinite command and resource of metre without them, and rhyme thrown in to turn the overweighted scale.

The scansion has been controversial. I believe that it is best to identify the metre as modified dactylic hexameter because the opening lines of the poem are straightforwardly scanned as such (the anacrustic syllables become much more frequent later in the poem) and because the caesuras occur in the middle of the metrical feet when so scanned; the metrical taxonomy, however, is less important than the movement of the verse, which is both dactylic and anapestic.

Love at Sea

The poem is a free imitation of Gautier’s ‘Barcarolle’ (originally a song sung by Venetian barcaruoli, gondoliers, the barcarole was featured in a number of operas and other musical compositions in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries):

Dites, la jeune belle,

Où voulez-vous aller?

La voile ouvre son aile,

La brise va souffler!

L’aviron est d’ivoire,

Le pavillon de moire,

Le gouvernail d’or fin;

J’ai pour lest une orange,

Pour voile une aile d’ange,

10

Pour mousse un séraphin.

Dites, la jeune belle,

Où voulez-vous aller?

La voile ouvre son aile,

La brise va souffler!

Est-ce dans la Baltique,

Sur la mer Pacifique,

Dans l’île de Java?

Ou bien dans la Norwège,

Cueillir la fleur de neige,

20

Ou la fleur d’Angsoka?

Dites, la jeune belle,

Où voulez-vous aller?

La voile ouvre son aile,

La brise va souffler!

Menez-moi, dit la belle,

A la rive fidèle

Où l’on aime toujours.

– Cette rive, ma chère,

On ne la connaît guère

30

Au pays des amours.

Gautier published the lyric in 1835. (It was one of the six lyrics by Gautier that Berlioz set to music in his song cycle ‘Les Nuits d’Été’, 1841; according to Philip Henderson, Swinburne: Portrait of a Poet, 1974, p. 140, Swinburne felt a special affinity to Berlioz.) ‘Angsoka’ (line 20) is the Malay word for the flower Pavetta indica, of the Rubiaceae family; it makes another appearance in Banville’s poem ‘À Auguste Supersac’ in Les Cariatides, 1842. For Swinburne’s ‘fire-flowers’ (line 26, evidently his translation of ‘la fleur d’Angsoka’) cf. Hugo’s ‘fleur de feu’ in ‘Mille Chemins, Un Sel But’ (1840).

Swinburne’s third stanza may recall the cancelled opening stanza of Keats’s ‘Ode on Melancholy’ (published in 1848).

The stanza and metre of ‘Love at Sea’ are more intricate than those of Gautier’s ‘Barcarolle’. Swinburne’s basic form, used for all the stanzas but the first, consists of six lines: a3a3b2c3c3b2. The three middle stanzas add a refrain which either repeats or offers slight variations of the first line of the poem. The metre is iambic.

The first stanza rhymes ABabaaAB, where the capital letters indicate that the whole line is repeated (sometimes with slight variation in subsequent stanzas). Line A later serves as the refrain. The repetition of the first two lines at the end of a stanza recalls the rondel and the triolet; the use of the first line as a refrain recalls the villanelle. Swinburne, however, is not employing a forme fixe but suggesting the musical repetitions that lie behind such forms.

April

A vidame was a feudal officer, originally appointed by a bishop but later hereditary, who held lands from a bishop and was his representative in secular matters. This thirteenth-century vidame of Chartres (died c. 1219) was Guillaume de Ferrières, whose works were edited and published by Louis Lacour in 1856. Swinburne translates the seventh poem in that collection, from the section Saluts d’Amour (amatory epistles):

Quant florissent li boscage,

Que pré sont vert et flori

Et cil oisellon sauvage

Chantent au dous tems seri,

Et je plus plaing mon damage.

Quant plus je et chant et ri,

Moins ai joie en mon corage

Et si me muir por celi

Qui n’en daigne avoir merci:

10

Si ne me tieng pas à sage.

Seur tous connois mon folage

Moi que chant, je sai de si

Qu’amer à tel seignorage,

Qu’il le m’estuet fere ainsi.

Si servirai mon eage

Tant qu’elle ait de moi merci

La belle, la preus, la sage,

Pour qui j’ai soulas guerpi;

Dont fine amour m’a traï

20

Qui m’occhist en son hommage.

Amours en vostre servise

Me suis mis en non chaloir:

Si sai bien qu’en nule guise

Ne me porroie mouvoir;

Ains me convient à devise

Quanque vous voulés voloir.

Mis sui en vostre franchise

Loiaument, sans decevoir,

Mais ne me puis apercevoir

30

Que pitiés vous en soit prise.

Moult ai en vous pitié quise

C’onques ne li poi véoir.

S’en cele ne l’avés mise

Qui tout le mont set voloir:

Bien avès ma mort emprise

Ne le ne puet remanoir;

Car trop ai m’entente mise

En ce qui me fet doloir,

Et quant plus me desespoir

40

Plus me truis en sa justice.

Dame de valour est la moie,

Car tant en ai le mal chier,

Que tout le mont n’en prendroie

S’il me convenoit changier.

Las! qu’ai dit? Je ne porroie,

Ne jà volenté n’en quier,

Et ne porquant toute voie

Me fait penser et veillier;

Mais ne me puis esloignier

50

De li, se morir devoie.

Dame, voir, tous i morroie,

Quant je ne vous os prier,

S’en chantant ne vos disoie

Ce dont j’ai greignor mestier.

Belle à qui mes cuers s’outroie

Tuit mi celei de si errier

Sont de vous, où que je soie,

Seulement tant vous requier

Que me feissiez cuidier,

60

La votre amour avanroie.

Maint felon et losengier

Auront fait maint destorbier

A ces qui amours maiscroie.

Swinburne translates into ten-line stanzas plus an envoy, but the metre and rhyme scheme of his stanzas vary. The metre consists of iambs and anapests in lines either dimeter or trimeter, or occasionally tetrameter. The basic rhyme scheme is ababbcdcdc, with variations in stanza one and three. The envoy rhymes ddc (its rhyme are those of the previous stanza) and consists of a trimeter, dimeter and trimeter line, each combining one anapest with one or two iambs.

Before Parting

Published in the Spectator, 17 May 1862.

On purple-coloured hair (line 32), see Ahinoam in ‘The Masque of Queen Bersabe’ and Alexander Theroux, The Secondary Colors (1996), pp. 138–9, who mentions purple hair in works by Marvell and Ovid and in the wigs of fashionable ladies under Napoleon. We should add Baudelaire and Swinburne to Theroux’s list of ‘very purple poets’, including Keats, Edgar Allan Poe and Tennyson. See also Vladimir Nabokov, Eugene Onegin (rev. ed., 1975) volume 2, pp. 520–21, on the confusion among kinds of purple.

In 1878, Swinburne published the poem ‘At Parting’ and boasted to Joseph Knight about it: ‘I pique myself on its moral tone; in an age when all other lyrists, from Tennyson to Rossetti, go in (metrically) for constancy and eternity of attachment and reunion in future lives, etc., etc., I limit love, honestly and candidly, to 24 hours’ (Lang, 3, 44).

There existed a Provençal tradition of ‘reverse albas’; see, for example, Guiraut Riquier’s poem with the refrain ‘e dezir vezer l’alba’.

The six-line stanza rhymes abbacc. The lines are iambic pentameter except for the fifth or sixth line of each stanza, one of which is iambic trimeter.

The Sundew

Published in the Spectator, 20 June 1862.

‘Sundew’ commonly refers to the members of the Drosera genus; Vernon Rendall, in Wild Flowers in Literature (1934), identifies it as Drosera rotundifolia. It is an insectivore; its leaves, covered with red glandular hairs, exude a sticky substance that attracts and traps insects. It is small and glistens in the sun; it has a small, five-petalled white flower. The sundew is a perennial that grows in boggy regions. In ‘Winter in Northumberland’ (1878) Swinburne recalls the sundew hiding under the heather in winter; he also associates the flower with the borders in Lang, 4, 121.

Rendall notes the appearance of the sundew in George Crabbe, The Borough (Letter 1); Swinburne respected Crabbe (Lang, 5, 135). Rendall also reminds us that the traditional contrast between flowers that revive every year and man for whom death is final (stanza 3) is found in Moschus’s ‘Lament for Bion’:

Alas the mallows, when they wither in the garden, and the green parsley and the flourishing curled dill, they live anew and grow another year; but we men, great and mighty in our wisdom, when once we die, unhearing in the hollow earth we sleep the long long sleep that knows no waking.

In his review ‘The Poems of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’, Swinburne admired the ‘keen truthfulness and subtle sincerity’ of Rossetti’s ‘A Young Fir-Wood’, ‘The Honeysuckle’, and ‘The Woodspurge’, poems written by 1856 (Essays and Studies, [1870] 1875, pp. 70–1). In 1880, he protested against Henry Arthur Bright’s too exclusive commendation of Tennyson’s floriculture and cited the flower called by its Spanish name in Browning’s ‘Garden Fancies’ (1845) and the ‘plant… yielding a three-leaved bell’ in Sordello (1840, Book 2, line 290), Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s ‘The Woodspurge’ and ‘The Honeysuckle’, Morris’s good words for the sunflower (perhaps in ‘A Good Knight in Prison’, 1858, but cf. ‘The Gilliflower of Gold’, 1858), as well as his own ‘Sundew’ (see Lang, 4, 121). For the French background, see Philip Knight’s Flower Poetics in Nineteenth-Century France (1986). Swinburne disparaged his poem later in life (Lang, 5, 40, 70; 6, 153).

The metre is iambic tetrameter; the stanza rhymes abbab.

Félise

The epigraph is the refrain (rebriche) of Villon’s ‘Ballade des dames du temps jadis’ from Le Testament: Rossetti translates it in 1869 as ‘But where are the snows of yester-year.’ (‘Antan’ derives from ante annum.)

Line 61, ‘You loved me and you loved me not’, might recall the formula used in children’s divining-games, but the OED gives as the earliest written reference to it the 1909 Old Hampshire Singing Games. The OED gives no instance of ‘fledge’ used intransitively after 1637 except for line 69. Line 76 recalls Shakespeare, The Tempest, ‘deeper than e’er plummet sounded’ (Act III, Scene 3, line 101) and ‘deeper than did ever plummet sound’ (Act V, Scene 1, line 56). Line 134 may have been influenced by Keats’s remark in a letter to Benjamin Bailey dated 22 November 1817: ‘The Imagination may be compared to Adam’s dream – he awoke and found it truth.’ Lines 136–7 recall Isaiah 6:6–7. Lines 234–5 are reminiscent of Shakespeare, King Lear, Act I, Scene 4, ‘beat at this gate that let thy folly in’. Lines 229 and 236 recall Matthew 23:17 and 19. Line 244 echoes Shakespeare, Macbeth, Act II, Scene 2, line 60 (‘making the green one red’) and line 245 recalls one of the temptations of Christ in the desert, Matthew 4:3.

Swinburne defends ‘Félise’ in a letter to John Ruskin in 1866 (Lang, 1, 160):

See also his letter to William Rossetti, Lang, 1, 193.

The stanza consists of four iambic tetrameter lines followed by an iambic dimeter, rhyming ababb. However, the two stanzas starting at line 116 rhyme abaab, where the lines in b are iambic trimeter. Swinburne occasionally substitutes an anapest for an iamb or elides consecutive vowels. ‘Félise’ is used six times as a rhyme (three times with ‘seas’).

An Interlude

The ‘flag-flowers’ of line 11 belong to the yellow flag (Iris pseudacorus), common in wet meadows. Vernon Rendall in Wild Flowers in Literature (1934) records the appearance of flag-flowers in John Clare’s ‘Recollections after a Ramble’ (1821) and Tennyson’s ‘The Miller’s Daughter’ (1832), to which we might add Southey’s Thalaba (1801, Book 11, line 431), John Clare’s ‘Summer Evening’ (1821) and ‘The Wild Flower Nosegay’ (1821), and Shelley’s ‘The Question’ (1824). The meadow-sweet (line 12) is Spiraea ulmaria, of the same order as roses; it grows to about two feet and has creamy-white, strongly scented flowers; it is common in damp ground such as in moist meadows or along river-banks. It is not the species Spiraea salicifolia, which the name denotes in the United States. Rendall notes the meadow-sweets in Clare, Tennyson, Meredith and Arnold.

The lines are trimeter, and the metre consists of both iambs and anapests. The rhyme is abab, where a has a feminine ending.

Hendecasyllabics

The name (‘eleven syllables’) refers to the metre of the line:

image

with two possible variations, each occurring within the first two syllables:

image

The metre was favoured by Catullus, who used it in about two-thirds of his lyric poems. In English, the stress replaces the quantity of classical verse, though quantity must still be reckoned with. Coleridge’s ‘Catullian Hendecasyllabics’ (a reworking of the hendecasyllabic line into twelve syllables and running / xx / xx / x / x / /) was first published in 1834; Tennyson’s ‘Hendecasyllabics’ (‘all in quantity’) in 1863.

George M. Ridenour (‘Swinburne’s Imitations of Catullus’, Victorian Newsletter 74, Fall 1998, pp. 51–7) sees the poem’s welcome to autumn in relation to Catullus’s poem 46, which welcomes spring and is written in hendecasyllabics; he also takes lines 19–25 to be a reversal of the welcome to the beloved in the spring (‘For, lo, the winter is past…’), in the Song of Solomon 2:11–13. The metaphorical use of eyelids (line 6) perhaps recalls Milton, ‘Lycidas’ (line 26), ‘under the opening eyelids of the morn’.

In 1875, Swinburne objected to Gosse’s reference to the ‘laborious versification’ of Catullus, ‘whom I should have called the least laborious, and the most spontaneous in his godlike and birdlike melody, of all lyrists known to me except Sappho and Shelley: I should as soon call a lark’s note laboured as his’ (Lang, 3, 1).

Sapphics

Sappho’s stanza was modified by Horace, and the modified form became the basis for most English sapphics before Swinburne. Among the Elizabethan experiments with the sapphic, Philip Sidney’s and Thomas Campion’s are the most famous. Sidney’s most successful effort, ‘If mine eyes can speak,’ like Campion’s paraphrase of Psalm 19 (‘Come, let us sound’), adopts the scansion of the Horatian sapphic:

image

A caesura is mandatory after the fifth or sixth syllable. In English, stress replaces quantity; nonetheless, Swinburne, like Tennyson, was attentive to quantity and would not have demurred at Cowper’s admonition: ‘without close attention to syllabic quantity in the construction of our verse, we can give it neither melody nor dignity.’

In his Observations in the Art of English Poesie, Campion offers freer versions of the stanza, so that it consists of trochaics with an initial spondee, ‘to make the number more grave’. Although these freer versions had little subsequent influence, the insistence on gravity was important. Later sapphic stanzas were frequently weighty, as for example poems by Isaac Watts (‘The Day of Judgment’) and William Cowper (‘Lines Written During a Period of Insanity’). Robert Southey employed it to describe the death of an abandoned, homeless woman in ‘The Widow’ (1795). In Shelley’s ‘The Crisis’ (in the Esdaile Notebook, not published until the twentieth century) the theme is political injustice.

Swinburne bypasses this way of treating the metre, and returns to its form in Sappho rather than Horace. The scansion (marked in terms of accent rather than quantity, where x indicates a variable syllable) is

/ x / image / xx / x / /

/ x / image / xx / x / /

/ x / image / xx / x / /

/ xx / /.

The Greek form differs from the Latin in having a variable fourth foot (in Horace it is always long) and in not requiring a caesura after the fifth or sixth syllable, so that the line flows more freely.

Théodore de Banville did not break with the traditional French form in his two sapphic poems ‘Idolâtrie’ and ‘À Victor Hugo’ in Les Cariatides (1842), but the first is an attempt to return to Sappho via sapphics:

Mètre divin, mètre de bonne race,

Que nous rapporte un poëte nouveau,

Toi qui jadis combattais pour Horace,

Rhythme de Sappho!

Sappho, of Mitylene (line 16) in Lesbos (lines 15, 30, 49), was called the ‘Tenth Muse’ (lines 26–30) in antiquity (Greek Anthology, 9.506; the expression is used by Shakespeare in Sonnet 38).

One of the interlocutors in Jerome J. McGann’s Swinburne: An Experiment in Criticism (1972) sees the poem as a conscious imitation with a reversal and further development of the ‘Ode to Aphrodite’, in which Aphrodite implores Sappho’s attention, not vice versa, etc. (p. 112).

At Eleusis

With some changes of detail, the poem keeps close to the story of Demeter as it is told in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter (which had been translated by Shelley around 1818 and published in 1839): after Hades abducts Persephone, her mother Demeter, hearing the echo of her voice, goes to seek her. No one will tell Demeter what happened until she meets Hecate, who takes her to the sun, who explains that Zeus gave her daughter to Hades. She is angry and distraught; disguised as an old woman, she wanders the earth until she meets the daughters of Celeus, a ruler of Eleusis. They are respectful and kind to her, and she becomes a nurse to Demophon, the infant son of Celeus and Metaneira. She tries to make him immortal by burning away his mortality; however, she is interrupted by Metaneira. (In later versions, Demophon is replaced by Triptolemus, as in Swinburne.) In the hymn, Demeter then reveals herself and begins to instruct the Eleusinians in her worship. She leaves then and instigates a year-long universal famine to force Zeus and Hades to release her daughter. A compromise is reached: Persephone is to spend part of each year with her mother. Demeter then renews the earth and teaches the Eleusinians to perform her mysteries.

Swinburne adopted some of the Greek phrases of the original: ‘τimageς image’αimageτimageκα γοimageνατ’ imageλυvτο’ (line 281), ‘and right away her knees were loosened’; compare this with Swinburne’s lines 23 and 91. ‘Cope’ (line 101) is obsolete for ‘to meet’ or ‘to have a relation with’; it is used with this meaning in Shakespeare. ‘Competence’ (line 115) means sufficiency. The kingfisher (line 132) is the Greek mythical bird, the Halcyon. ‘Pleached’ (line 209) means interlaced. Lines 214–15 are an absolute construction, ‘when Celeus is dead and swathed…’

William Rossetti wrote that ‘ “At Eleusis” is an exceptionally long speech spoken by Demeter, as from a Greek tragedy – recalling also such modern work as some of Landor’s Hellenics [1847], or Browning’s so-called “Artemis Prologizes” [1842].’ It is written in blank verse. ‘Perfecting’ (line 136) and ‘perfected’ (line 201) are stressed on the first syllable.

Two pages from a manuscript are reproduced and discussed in John Hollander, ‘Algernon Charles Swinburne’s “At Eleusis” ’, in the Paris Review 154 (Spring 2000) 246–51.

August

Published in the Spectator, 6 September 1862.

For a discussion of the motif of the orchard, ‘the favourite Pre-Raphaelite refuge after 1850’, see Lothar Hönnighausen’s The Symbolist Tradition in English Literature (1988), pp. 141–2.

Keats in ‘To Autumn’ (1820) is Swinburne’s great predecessor in descriptions of ripeness.

The metre is iambic tetrameter; the stanza rhymes aabbab. Lines 1–2, 13–14, and 55–6 are repetitions with variations.

A manuscript is reproduced in P. J. Croft’s Autograph Poetry in the English Language (1973), pp. 139–40 (and facing pages).

A Christmas Carol

There was a revival of interest in Christmas carols in the mid-nineteenth century. Davies Gilbert published the first modern collection of carols in 1822; the next collector, William Sandys, published his in 1833; both men anticipated that carol singing would become extinct (see the preface to The Oxford Book of Carols, 1928). But scholarly interest in them, which would prompt Thomas Wright to publish several collections of early carols; romantic medievalism, which would inspire William Morris’s carols published in 1860; and the rise of Anglo-Catholicism following the decline of the Evangelical movement, all helped to revive the form as part of the ‘Victorian “reinvention” of Christmas’ (see the introduction to The New Oxford Book of Carols, 1992).

In 1884, in response to a request to reprint the poem, Swinburne indicated that his three favourite carols were William Morris’s ‘Masters in this hall’ (published around 1860 in Edmund Sedding’s Nine Antient and Goodly Carols for the Merry Tide of Christmass; Swinburne said it was worth ‘1,000,000,000 of mine’); ‘As Joseph was a-walking’ (‘which everybody knows’); and ‘I sing a mayden’ (published in 1856 by Thomas Wright; ‘I picked up the pamphlet by accident years ago’); see Lang, 5, 74–5).

The drawing by Rossetti which suggested the poem is presumably related to the watercolour A Christmas Carol, dated on the upper left side ‘Xmas 1857–58’, which shows a young woman playing a clavicord decorated with Christmas scenes and having her hair combed by two women.

The metre is predominantly iambic. The rhyme scheme is a4b3a4b3c3c3. The last two lines of each stanza form a variable refrain.

The Masque of Queen Bersabe

Although the story of David’s adultery with Bathsheba, his sending her husband Uriah to death in war, and the public exposure of his sins by Nathan (2 Samuel 11–12), does not seem to be among the extant miracle plays in English, the subject nonetheless is part of the sacred history upon which the cycle of miracle plays is based. However, since David was seen typologically as a figure of Christ in the Middle Ages, the story tended to be evaded or allegorized. Even in later English literature, George Peele’s The Love of King David and Fair Bethsabe has few parallels. (The drama was the subject of qualified praise by Swinburne in his essay ‘Christopher Marlowe in Relation to Greene, Peele, and Lodge’, Contemporaries of Shakespeare, [1916] 1919.) Nothing like the procession of the twenty-two women occurs in the extant miracle plays (not even the names of the women, including Bersabe, appear in the York, Chester or Towneley plays, at least). Still the cycles usually included a procession of prophets, sometimes including David. Bathsheba had a greater vogue in medieval and later art and in continental drama. For further information, see Elmer Blistein, ‘David in the Drama before 1600’, The Dramatic Works of George Peele, 1970, pp. 165–76.

The renewed appreciation and publication of medieval dramas was a recent phenomenon. The Shakespeare Society published some of the first modern editions of miracle plays (‘mysteries’) in 1841 (Coventry plays) and 1843–7 (Chester plays). John Hall in his Chronicles dated the introduction of the masque in England to 1513, and the word itself, according to the OED, first appears in print in 1514.

The Latin names of characters and stage directions are typical of such plays:

PRIMUS [etc.] MILES’ = ‘first [etc.] soldier’; ‘Paganus quidam’ = ‘a pagan.’

Et percutiat eum in capite = And let him strike him in the head.

Tunc dicat NATHAN propheta = Then let the prophet Nathan speak.

Hìc Diabolus capiat eum = Here let the Devil take him.

Et hìc omnes cantabunt = And here everyone will sing.

Et hìc exeant, et dicat Bersabe regina = And here let them leave, and let Queen Bersabe say.

Et tunc dicant Laudamus = And then let them say the ‘Laudamus’.

The vocabulary is often archaic: ‘patens’ (line 13) = shallow dishes; ‘brast’ (line 16) = burst; ‘chirk’ (line 28) = chirp; ‘By Mahound’ (line 32; cf. line 116) = By Mahomet, an oath common in miracle plays, where Mahomet is taken to be a pagan god; ‘spill’ (line 33) = kill; ‘Poulis’ (line 38) = Paul’s; ‘I wis’ (lines 47, 56, 102) = certainly; ‘rede’ (lines 53, 111) = suppose; ‘sow of lead’ (line 67) = ‘large oblong mass of metal, as obtained from the smelting-surface’ (OED ‘sow’ 6a; cf. ‘pig’ sb. 1.7); ‘latoun’ (line 84) = made of latten, a metal like brass; ‘shot-windows’ (line 84) = windows opened on a hinge; ‘scant’ (line 85) = scanty supply; ‘basnets’ (line 86) = small, light headpiece; ‘stancheons’ (line 92) = upright supports; ‘kirtle’ (line 104) = skirt or outer petticoat; ‘Termagaunt’ (line 113) = ‘name of an imaginary deity held in medieval Christendom to be worshipped by Muslims’ (OED); ‘to-bete’ (line 114) = beat violently; ‘perfay’ (line 115) = by my faith (the OED gives this example as the first since the sixteenth century); ‘it is no boot’ (line 125) = it is no use.

‘As red as any’ (line 8) is an old comparison; it occurs, for example, in Langland, Piers Plowman B, Passus II, line 12. Lines 127–8 echo John 16:19.

The procession of women includes both classical and biblical names, sometimes with no particular reference or allusion implied:

HERODIAS. The wife of Herod Antipas (the son of Herod I), she seems in Swinburne’s poem to have performed herself the dance that the gospels attribute to her daughter Salome, for which Herod agreed to give her the severed head of John the Baptist. The subject was very popular in the second half of the nineteenth century; Heinrich Heine’s Atta Troll (1843) helped to introduce it.

CLEOPATRA. Also the subject of Swinburne’s poem ‘Cleopatra’ (1866); she committed suicide rather than be taken captive. Cf. Gautier’s Une Nuit de Cléopâtre (1845 ).

ABIHAIL. The name occurs in the Old Testament (e.g. the mother of Esther, among others). Isaiah 23 contains ‘the burden of Tyre’.

AZUBAH. An Old Testament name; Amorites were enemies of the Jews.

AHOLAH. See Aholibah. The city of Amalek was hostile to the Jews; see 1 Samuel 15.

AHINOAM. Two women in the Bible shared the name, a wife of Saul and a wife of David.

ATARAH. One mention in the Old Testament (1 Chronicles 2:26). Sidon is a Phoenician city.

SEMIRAMIS. Assyrian queen and heroine. See note to ‘Laus Veneris’. ‘Chrysophras’ (line 6): ‘the ancient name of a golden-green precious stone… It was one of the stones to which in the Middle Ages was attributed the faculty of shining in the dark’ (OED).

HESIONE. Daughter of Laomedon, king of Troy; saved by Heracles from a sea monster. Among various medieval accounts, there is Gower’s in Confessio Amantis.

CHRYSOTHEMIS. Daughter of Agamemnon. Samothrace is an island in the Aegean.

THOMYRIS OF SCYTHIANS. Queen who defeated Cyrus of Persia; see note to ‘Satia Te Sanguine’.

HARHAS. Mentioned once at 2 Kings 22:14. The Anakim are traditionally the surviving descendants of the giants of Genesis 6. (Tennyson: ‘I felt the thews of Anakim’, In Memoriam, 1850, CIII, 31.)

MYRRHA. Daughter and lover of Cinyras, of Panchaia, fabulous island between Arabia and India. The story is told in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Book 10.

PASIPHAE. Cretan queen. See note to ‘Phædra’.

SAPPHO. Poet from Lesbos. See notes to ‘Anactoria’ and ‘Sapphics’.

MESSALINA. Wife of the Roman emperor Claudius; licentious and ambitious; one of the targets of Juvenal’s Satires 6 and 10.

EPHRATH. In 1 Chronicles 2:19, Ephrath replaces Azubah after her death. The valley of Rephaim makes several appearances in the Old Testament.

PASITHEA. The name of one of the Graces.

ALACIEL. The daughter of the Sultan of Babylon and eventual wife of the King of Algarve, who slept with nine men but was still taken for a virgin. The story is in Boccaccio’s Decameron, the seventh story of the second day. She also figures in Banville’s ‘Nadar’ of 1859.

ERIGONE. Daughter of Icarius, who was taught by Dionysus how to make wine. She killed herself when she found the body of her father, whom shepherds murdered in their drunken confusion. The story is told by Landor in the Hellenics (1847); it also influenced a composition by Berlioz (1841) and is represented in a painting by Gustave Moreau (1855).

Although the verse of the miracle plays is not iambic – instead interspersing an irregular number of unstressed syllables among the stressed syllables – Swinburne’s verse is mainly iambic. The stanza forms of the miracle plays are numerous and include the rime coué of this poem (and of Tennyson’s ‘The Lady of Shalott’, 1832).