Poems and Ballads and Atalanta in Calydon

by Algernon Swinburne

  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 P
haedra (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 (φανεταí 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:

  (‘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 τρικνμα, 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 sun
k! 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.