Poems and Ballads and Atalanta in Calydon
Page 43
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:
(‘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’ (orig
inally 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.