13 Algernon Charles Swinburne

Dr Anjita Singh,

Module structure

12.1. Introduction

12.2. Biographical Sketch

12.3. Early works

12.4. Poems and Ballads: First Series

12.5. Middle period works

12.6. After the Interval

12.7. Point to Ponder

12.8. Literary criticism

12.9. Narrative technique

12.10 Did you know?

12.11. Critics’ opinion

12.12. Hymn to Proserpine

12.13. Hermaphroditus

12.14. Works cited

12.15. Test yourself

12.16. Self-assessment

12.17. Bibliography

12.1 Introduction

Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837-1909), poet, dramatist and critic was a remarkable blend of both romantic and classical traditions and may be credited for heralding a revolutionary break-through in English literature in poetic substance and its expression. He is perhaps the only English poet to be nominated for the Nobel Prize for five years consecutively from 1903 to 1907 and again in 1909 and in the awe he inspired in the public when he first appeared upon the literary scene he is compared to the charismatic Byron.

12.2 Biographical Sketch

Swinburne boasted of a royal lineage, his father being an admiral tracing descent to an old Northumberland family and his mother the daughter of the Earl of Ashburnham. As a child Swinburne spent his holidays in Northumberland at the house of his grandfather, 6th Baronet, Sir John Swinburne. Sir John Swinburne was also the President of the Literary and Philosophical Society therefore his grandson had access to a huge library. Swinburne also grew to consider Northumberland as his native land. He thus developed at an early age two influences which leave a marked imprint upon him and his work. He attended Eton and Balliol College, Oxford but finally had to leave the university without a degree as he was rusticated for participating in the assassination attempt of Napoleon III. Swinburne was intelligent and while at college he showed great interest in mastering Latin and Greek verse as well as French and Italian and took part in literary competitions eagerly. He started writing poetry at a young age at Eton and imitated Pope in a poem but these early writings did not draw much notice. Swinburne is initially identified as one of the Pre-Raphaelite group of writers as he was drawn into the circle when at Oxford and for sometime was greatly under their influence especially that of the unfathomable Rossetti and Morris but he broke away soon. The influences upon Swinburne were several- literary (classical as well national), nationalist, the Bible, all of which contributed to make him the poet he became-upheld as the greatest lyrical poet after Shelley. As a person Swinburne was of a highly excitable temperament which was further damaged by his habit of excessive drinking. He deliberately tried to create a pseudo impression of himself of being a homosexual and a bestializer and is described as an algolagnic. He was persuaded by his legal advisor Theodore Watts-Dunton to improve his lifestyle and in 1879 Dunstan took him under his personal care, lodging him in his own house, The Pines, near London where Swinburne stayed till 1909 when he died at the age of 72 of influenza. In the later part of his life Swinburne was also afflicted with deafness which further cut him off from the degenerate company he used to be in. Thus his later life became more sedate and he himself much sobered down. The rebelliousness was subdued and was replaced by a new air of social responsibility

12.3 Early works

Two plays, The Queen Mother and Rosamund were published in 1860 and the first play of a trilogy on Mary Queen of Scots Chasteland was published in 1865.These works passed by without attracting attention. The next work Atlanta in Calydon, a lyrical drama was published in 1865 and closely followed the form of a Greek tragedy in its deliberately developed pagan notions which were made to stand in anti-thesis to conventional religious ideas. The manipulation of form with the content was intended to create a show of scepticism and was understood to be no more than a reproduction of Greek tragedy in the manner of Aeschylus and Sophocles. The actual appeal of the poem is not in its spirit but in the masterful style and the variety of meter which creates a whole new world of sensuality and suggestiveness. Swinburne’s pre-occupation with Greek literature echoed Keats’ plea for the pagan ideal of beauty which was to be revealed in it. This work has been unanimously praised as Swinburne’s best.

12.4 Poems and Ballads: First Series

The publication of Swinburne’s next collection of poems in 1866, Poems and Ballads: First Series created a furore in literary circles by its unconventional and boldly frank expression of passion and sensuality. It had a scandalizing but hypnotic effect on the Victorian readers, presenting a never before challenge of rebellion against concepts of religion and morality. The poet seemed to be in deliberate revolt against the contemporary themes and attitudes in the presentation of an entirely untouched aspect of love where unrestrained passion, cruelty and ruthlessness expressed a sadomasochistic approach. Travesty triumphed over the till then expressed delicate sentimentalism of Victorian poetry. The subject matter was explicitly sexual, perverted and blasphemous. This daring frankness of the poet was met with mixed response but did not go unnoticed. Swinburne had truly arrived upon the literary scene with a bang. This publication made his name reverberate through its shock value and at the same time established his singular lyrical and metrical genius. Poems such as Anactoria and Sapphics which were written in homage of Sappho of Lesbos were sensational in effect while some poems such as The Leper, St.Dorothy and Laus Veneris carry the readers to a medieval world through their style and tone. Garden of Proserpine and Hymn to Proserpine also appeared in this volume. The Triumph of Time which is one of the longest poems in Poems and Ballads uses the sea imagery in a powerful manner and reflects the genuine love Swinburne had for the sea of which he thought as ‘the Great sweet mother’. Swinburne was severely criticised by the Victorian readers for his immorally explicit treatment of his subject matter but these poems unmistakeably deserve credit for heralding a revolution in expression and announce a march away from the delicate narrations of contemporary poems.

12.5. Middle period works

Swinburne’s poetic genius was established and he was soon recognised as a possible successor to the great Victorian poets Tennyson and Browning. On the basis of his two early works Atlanta in Calydon and Poems and Ballads: First Series he was lauded as the foremost poet of England. Whether he was capable and worthy of such a responsibility remains a matter of debate among critics. However Swinburne wrote prolifically turning to politics and philosophy for his subject. Ave Atque Vale a tribute to Baudelaire in the elegiac form appeared in 1868 following Song of Italy in 1867 which was a poem with a political flavour exalting his admiration for Mazzini and was characterised by the same excess of passion and expression as seen in his earlier works. Songs before Sunrise was published in 1871 and was chiefly a collection of smaller poems composed at different times, some of which had also been published earlier separately. These poems were on a different note, articulating the poet’s celebration of liberty and his encouragement to the fighters for independence in Italy. Though some of the poems contain a philosophical strain, philosophy was never Swinburne’s forte and he relapses into the same declamatory and rhetorical frame which is his strength. The poems that are more on the personal level where the poet is discussing his own mood (poems like Hertha) and those where he is extolling the theme of humanism in general (The Hymn of Man) are more interesting than those which are devoted to the ideal of Italian independence in particular. As mentioned earlier Swinburne had become associated with the Pre-Raphaelites when at Oxford and had been a part of their impractical schemes for some time. Therefore when Dante Gabriel Rossetti was attacked for sensuality in Robert Buchanan’s The Fleshly School of Poetry, Swinburne took up cudgels and retaliated with Under the Microscope (1872), a defence in prose. In 1872 Swinburne wrote and published Erectheus which was again based on Greek models. Poems and Ballads: Second Series was published in 1876 which retain the paganism of his earlier works in an elegiac tone. During this period Swinburne also wrote two novels, Love’s Cross-Currents:A Year’s Letters published in 1877 and Lesbia Brandon which was published in 1952 posthumously.

12.6. After the interval

By the time Swinburne reached the age of forty he had become an alcohol addict and his condition was bad enough to have brought his life to an end if he had not been taken charge of by Watson-Duntan and housed at the latter’s residence for the remaining part of his life. Theodore Watson-Duntan who was to become his legal and financial advisor kept him under his personal care and established such vigilance over him that Swinburne soon recovered his faculties and there came about a great resurgence in creative powers in him. He returned to the literary world with The Hepatologia or The Seven against Sense in 1880 which were a series of parodies albeit published anonymously. In the same year were also published Songs of the Springtides and Studies in Song where he sang of the sea. The metrical ingenuity remains the same and the flood of language is also unfaltering through which he churns out a heap of suggestive imagery but as Swinburne grew older his language underwent a gradual transformation becoming less crude though losing some of its strong flavour and becoming diffuse. Tristram of Lyonesse (1882) is a retelling of the story as he interpreted it and he made it deliberately different from Tennyson’s version or any other version by skirting past all the tedious moralisation of the passionate love stories which he abhorred. In A Century of Roundels (1883) Swinburne developed a new form called roundels. Poems and Ballads: Third Series appeared in 1889 but did not match up to the first series. Other poetic works of the period were A Midsummer Holiday (1884), Astrophel (1894),The Tale of Balen(1896) and A  Channel Passage(1904).several verse plays also appeared such as Marino Faliero(1885),Locrine(1887),The Sisters(1892),Rosamund Queen of the Lombards(1899) and the Duke of Gandia(1908)

12.7. Point to Ponder

Why was A.C. Swinburne not awarded the Nobel Prize even after being nominated so many times?

12.8. Literary Criticism

Swinburne also delved into the sphere of literary criticism and had a discerning eye though he was inconsistent and somewhat impulsive. Thus he wrote in fits and starts on various poets and men of letters like Baudelaire, Byron, Hugo, Webster, Shakespeare, Blake, Rossetti, Dickens and many others. His manner of criticism was unpredictable as he would at times display great erudition and zeal reflecting his mastery over assessment of technical aspects while at times he would go overboard with praise or denunciation so as to lose seriousness of tone and credibility

12.9. Narrative Technique

Swinburne was the master of bombast and rhetoric. His sensibility rotated on the two poles of sensuality and exaggeration of passion. He suffered a lack of control over his verbal outbursts and gushed on without stopping to give proper shape to his stream of lyricism failing to structure it into an intelligible and sustained whole. As a consequence his works appear more as rant, being deficient in the gradual building up to the pinnacle or the gradual subsiding from it to the closing. For him it all began and ended in climax. Swinburne had a genius for using alarmingly suggestive descriptions and cadenced chanting meant to seduce the reader verbally. He was a poet of suggestion rather than exploration and carried the tendency of sensuality that was implicit in romantic poetry to an explicit extreme. Critics have criticized Swinburne for being sensual to the brink of vulgarity and verbose to the point of frenzied deliriousness.

Swinburne has been openly criticized for the florid style he has adopted and is condemned for being superficial in that his diction is intended only for the sake of rhyme of which he was a master rather than having any profoundness or depth of meaning. Critics have summed up his contribution to literature as nothing and are of the opinion that after the success of his early works like Atlanta in Calydon he was burdened with the responsibility of becoming the national poet of England for which he lacked ability. He is regarded as no more than a decadent poet. But his mastery of vocabulary, metre and rhyme is undeniable and he is grudgingly given this credit by severe critics like A.E. Houseman. He finds a prominent place in George Saintsbury’s History of English Prosody. Credit does go to him for the enrichment of English verse by his brilliant and effortless command over rhyme. Credit also goes to Swinburne for developing a new poetic form called ‘roundel’ which is a variant of the French ‘rondeau’ and is a short poem consisting of three stanzas, each of three lines with alternating rhyme [aba(r);bab;aba(r)] ,with an identical refrain at the end of the first stanza and the last stanza. Swinburne dedicated his book of roundels to Christina Rossetti who too began writing roundels herself. Most of these roundels were about babies or young children. He boldly experimented with new forms and is regarded as one of the few writers who took up arms against the literary prudery of the Victorian age

12.10. Did you know

The poem Hymn to Proserpine is quoted by Sue Bridehead in Thomas Hardy’s novel Jude the Obscure

12.11. Critics’ opinion

Swinburne is a braggart in matters of vice who had done everything he could to convince his fellow citizens of his homosexuality and bestiality without being in the slightest degree a homosexual or a bestialiser. Oscar Wilde

To Swinburne the sonnet was child’s play: the task of providing four rhymes was not hard enough and he wrote long poems in which each stanza required eight or ten rhymes, and wrote them so that he never seemed to be saying anything for the rhyme’s sake. A. E. Houseman

12.12. Hymn to Proserpine

The poem Hymn to Proserpine with a dual title in parentheses, After the Proclamation in Rome of the Christian Faith was published in 1866 in Poems and Ballads: First Series and in form is a dramatic monologue. The image or name of Proserpine who is the Roman goddess of death has been used in a metaphorical manner as she features in the entire narrative only twice, once in the beginning and the second time at the end. Proserpine is not invoked by the poet as a muse though the title of the poem may imply so. The poem revolves around the assertion of the impending death of Christianity and is a lament upon the passing away of Paganism and its replacement by the rise of Christianity. The speaker in the poem observes the triumph of Christianity over the ancient pagan gods as Christianity is proclaimed in Rome as the new religion but being a follower of Proserpine he insists that the Christian religion and its gods will die out in the same way as its predecessors. The poem begins with the words, ‘Vicisti, Galilaee’, a Latin quote meaning ‘You have conquered O Galilean’ which are the dying words of Julian the Apostate who opposed the imposition of Christianity as the official religion of the Roman Empire in 313 A.D. by Constantine the Great and made his best efforts to undo the damage when he became the emperor. Realizing the futility of his attempt he prays to Proserpine to take him away from the world as he thinks he is the last pagan and death is better than this anguish. The speaker says he is tired of life and now wants to embrace death. This is also his way of offering tribute to Prosepine by giving himself up to her and accepting what she has to dole out. Here he compares her powers to the other gods and concludes that there is no god stronger than death. The reference to Prosperine creates the symbolic structure of the poem where the speaker’s wish for death relates to the mythology of the goddess who is ‘Goddess and maiden and queen’, the goddess of the seasons (when she duplicates the role of her mother Demeter),the maiden ‘Kore’ gathering flowers in the field (as daughter of Jupiter when she was kidnapped by Pluto, king of the under-world and taken to Hades) and Queen (as wife of Pluto).Thus, the image of Proserpine remains in the background as the structural and thematic line while the poem is more about the inescapable demise of Christianity and the death wish of the pagan follower. As a last determined bid to save paganism from total obliteration, Julian had dismissed all Christians from his government and had advised his country-men to adopt the compassionate and moral way of life as that of the new religion to compete with it though the implication here is that Paganism has already surrendered to Christianity. Swinburne is on the threshold of irreverence when through the mouth of the Pagan emperor he criticises Jesus (Galilean) for turning the world grey, for having made them feed on death by taking away the passion of life. Julian laments that the zest of the world left with the old gods and he himself will cease to live at the same time as when the end of Paganism will occur. The dying emperor is resolute that he will never bow down to Christ but will continue his undying reverence to the pagan gods. The poem contains descriptions and eulogies of a number of pagan gods and goddesses and pays tributes to them especially to Apollo the God of medicine who can bring on the plague and Venus the goddess of love after whom is named the city of Rome (Rome spelt backwards isamor which means love).Swinburne makes a comparison between Venus (the mother of Aeneas who founded the city of Rome) and Mary (mother of Christ) and in comparison the glory of Mary pales. Swinburne also makes excellent use of the image of the sea while describing the fate of religions and the doom of Christianity. In this verbal debate about the polytheistic tradition of the pagan religion vs. the monotheistic tradition of religion like Christianity, Swinburne’s chief argument is about the transitory fate of any religion therefore his imagery from the sea as well as the cycle of seasons (symbolized by Proserpine) aptly reflects the idea of flux and change. This concept of the destructive power of the sea seems to have been taken from Christianity itself (Genesis 6:17) though in this poem Swinburne has made it absolute, not controlled by any greater power and having the ability to drown out the gods themselves. The end of the poem reaches a height of blasphemy with Swinburne’s almost godly declaration of the complete obliteration of Christianity by the sea waves which are not under any control even that of the gods.

The poem consisting of a hundred and ten lines depends technically on the evident use of paradox in individual lines as well as in thought. Swinburne’s use of the paradoxical image of Proserpine who occupies both the world of the dead and the living and is the goddess of cyclic seasonal change is significant and a clever way of ordering the thematic structure of the poem whereby he stresses on the passage of time and the transience of every worldly order. He has deliberately placed the figure of Proserpine at the beginning and end of the poem making her a symbolic pattern for the poem which concentrates in general on the cycle of nature and life and in particular on the conversion from a pagan to a Christian Rome. Swinburne’s diction and versification is typically characterised by pomposity and grandiosity He has been overtly irreligious and irreverent towards the religion practised by half the world and the furore that his sacrilegious attitude created in the Victorian mind is understandable and justified.

12.13. Hermaphroditus

Swinburne’s Hermaphroditus was one of the poems included in Poems and Ballads and was probably written in 1863.Poems and Ballads: First Series on its publication was condemned as the most immoral and the most obscene book on poetry in the English language. Swinburne uses themes of sexual deviation without any equivocation which was enough to shock the prudish readers of the age. The immediate inspiration for Swinburne was the statue of the Borghese Hermaphroditus in the Louvre which belonged to the 2nd century AD. Swinburne dated his poem Au Musee du Louvre 1863 and dedicated it to the same statue by Giovanni Lorenzo Bernini. The legend of Hermaphroditus owes its origin to Greek mythology in which Swinburne had a remarkable absorption. The choice of subject matter however owes more to Swinburne’s desire to explore taboo topics like sex, masochism and the lure of the deviating sexual issues. Swinburne was fully aware of the Victorian concept of the perverted and grotesque in sexual and psychological terms. The sexual ambiguity of Hermaphroditus carries a poetic existence completely disconnected from the sexuality of Victorians therefore becomes more furtively gratifying. In Greek mythology the character of Hermaphroditus was believed to be the son of Hermes, messenger of the gods and Aphrodite, goddess of love. Recounting the Hellenistic legend, Ovid narrates how the exceptionally handsome boy attracted the amorous attention of the water nymph Salmacis whose prayers for eternal union with him was granted when she embraced the boy and pulled him under water merging their bodies into one. Consequently Hermaphroditus got transformed into an androgynous creature, a being with the figure and breasts of a female and the sex organs of a male. Thus the term hermaphrodite has come to mean a bi-sexual creature and symbolizes androgyny. It was a favourite subject in Greek art though it did not have much importance as a cult. Swinburne uses the idea in a multi-layered connotative sense.

The poem is written as a sequence of four sonnets in the Petrarchan mould with some variation in the rhyme-scheme to suit the poet’s treatment of subject. In the first sonnet Swinburne has described everlasting internal struggle at the heart of a hermaphrodic experience. In this sonnet the poet gives a hint of the grotesqueness and inadequacy of a hermaphrodite’s love life wherein it becomes suitable only for love that is blind to the sexual bi-polarity and can chose ‘of the two loves and cleave into the best’ (Sonnet 1,6).That this state is a tragic one, physically as well as socially is emphasized in the despair that inevitably befalls the lover of the androgyne. The second sonnet is a continuation of Swinburne’s discourse on the rejection and despair that characterizes the love life of the hermaphrodite. The idealisation of the androgyne’s body as one that is a pleasure house for love of both sexes discovers its actual perversity in the figure which on one side is like a ‘man like death’(Sonnet 2,11-12) and on the other ‘a woman like sin’ which is rejected by love. In the third sonnet the poet attempts to find some redemption in the strange beauty of the hermaphrodite’s body which is like ‘a flower laid upon a flower’. Yet the amazement remains ‘to what strange end hath some strange god made fair/The double blossom of two fruitless flowers?’(Sonnet 3, 9-10) The final stanza ends unresolved: there is a mingled emotion of love and fear for the hermaphrodite, love for the perfect beauty of both sexes unified in one and fear for the resultant frustration of that love. ‘So dreadful, so desirable, so dear?’(Sonnet 4, 8) In the final sestet Swinburne is alluding to the Ovidian myth in Metamorphosis of the curse of hermaphroditism that falls on all men who take a dip in Salmacis’s pool. Thus Swinburne’s poem makes use of the hermaphrodite literally as well as figuratively i.e. in physical form as well as idea. He is deliberately side-stepping the traditional Victorian attitudes towards sexuality which emphasize on incontrovertible compartmentalization of male and female sexual behaviour and desire. The frequent appearance of sexually perverted or ambiguous subject matter in the works of Swinburne is due to the irrepressible fascination he had for it. The concept of the androgyne was greatly justifiable to Swinburne as he ‘imagined a primordial sexlessness in man’ (Landow) and identified with the notion of the ‘eternal androgyne’-the human being who is complete and perfect being undivided into male and female. The poem also contains pre-Raphaelite characteristics in the final rejection of the allure of sexual desire. The poem began with a strong sexual attraction towards the androgenous figure with its front turned away from sight but ends with a sigh of futility.The rhyme scheme in the four sonnets follows the pattern abbaabbacdcdcd. The changed rhyme– pattern of the sested from the traditional cdecde is meant to suggest the sense of entanglement rather than progression.

Reference

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