Poems and Ballads and Atalanta in Calydon

by Algernon Swinburne

  In her anthology, Ehrenpreis writes of ‘The King’s Daughter’:

  The most interesting contribution of literary balladists is what might be called the modulated refrain. As the plot unfolds, the wording of the accompanying refrain changes from stanza to stanza. The tedium of straight repetition is replaced by a shifting commentary on the action. This effect, which is not found in the traditional ballads, is generally associated with the Pre-Raphaelites, but there are earlier instances of it given in these pages, the first that I have found being in Tennyson’s ballad ‘The Sisters’…

  More complicated is Swinburne’s internal refrain in ‘The King’s Daughter’, where the objects ‘in the mill-water’ and ‘for the king’s daughter’ change significantly with each stanza. The coming disaster is heralded by ‘A little wind in the mill-water’ on the arrival of the king’s son; when incest is disclosed there is ‘Running rain in the mill-water’. The catalogue of bright objects associated with the king’s daughter – rings of red, golden gloves, a crown of red, etc. – is abruptly interrupted in the final refrain by ‘The pains of hell for the king’s daughter’. The refrain does far more than help to create atmosphere; it is as essential to the story as to the sound.

  For the theme of incest, compare this poem with ‘The Bonny Hind’, which Scott introduced apologetically in his collection as ‘a fair sample of a certain class of songs and tales, turning upon incidents the most horrible and unnatural’. ‘Castle Ha’s Daughter’ in Peter Buchan’s anthology is another example.

  Compare the poem’s first line with the opening of Tennyson’s ‘The Sisters’ (1832), ‘We were two daughters of one race’. ‘May’ (lines 11, 15, 23, 33) is maiden; ‘streek’ (line 55) is to lay out (as a corpse).

  The lines have four stresses, and the quatrains rhyme abab. The b rhymes are constant: ‘mill-water’ and ‘king’s daughter’.

  After Death

  Published in the Spectator, 24 May 1862.

  Clyde K. Hyder, in ‘Swinburne and the Popular Ballad’, PMLA, 49 (March 1934), pp. 302–3, compares the language of the poem to riddling ballads; he also compares the spirit of the poem to ‘The Twa Corbies’. Compare it also with that of ‘The Lyke-Wake Dirge’; both ballads are in Scott’s Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border.

  Lafourcade compares the poem to Hugo, Les Contemplations (1856), Book 6, lines 382–90, in which the four boards of the coffin address the dead man. Recall, too, ‘les quatres planches du cercueil’ in which Jean Valjean is confined in Les Misérables (1862), Part 2, Book 8, Chapters 6 (‘Entre quatre planches’) and 7.

  Quatrains are by far the most common ballad stanza, but couplets with refrains are not uncommon, and Francis Child has a few examples of ballads in couplets without refrains. The lines have three or four stresses.

  May Janet

  Brittany took on the role of a French Scotland for French Romantics, its antiquities and oral tradition providing the subject of imagination and research. Théodore-Claude-Henri Hersart de la Villemarqué’s bilingual edition of Breton ballads, Barzaz-Breiz (1840, 1845, 1867), translated into German in 1859 and English in 1865, was enthusiastically received. See Mary-Ann Constantine’s Breton Ballads (1996). When ‘After Death’ was first published in the Spectator (24 May 1862), its title was ‘After Death (Breton)’ and a footnote indicated a bogus source: ‘From the Recueil de Chants Bretons, edited by Félicien Cossu, première série (no more published), p. 89. Paris, 1858.’ In 1865, Swinburne dropped the indication of a Breton source for ‘After Death’; ‘May Janet’ now has it instead.

  Clyde K. Hyder, in ‘Swinburne and the Popular Ballad’, PMLA, 49 (March 1934), p. 305, offers the following comments on the poem:

  The poem tells of two lovers who have been forbidden to marry. The girl’s impetuous father, hearing of the young man’s determination to have her, tears off his daughter’s gown and casts her in the water. Her lover rescues her. Their subsequent journey together becomes a triumphal procession. They travel to four different towns, and at each the lover purchases something for the bride’s wardrobe. The series of statements, ‘The first town they came to’, ‘The second town they came to’, is similar to a commonplace which occurs, for example, in Johnie Scot and The Fause Lover.

  The quatrains consist of lines rhyming abcb, of either three or four stresses.

  The Bloody Son

  Published as ‘The Fratricide’ in Once a Week, 15 February 1862.

  Clyde K. Hyder, in ‘Swinburne and the Popular Ballad’, PMLA, 49 (March 1934), p. 303, identified the original of the poem: a Finnish ballad had been translated into German in H. R. van Schröter’s Finnische Runen (1834), and the German was then translated in all editions of Francis Child’s English and Scottish Ballads. He also points to the influence of the versification of the ballad ‘Edward, Edward’ (2, 25 in the 1861 edition of Child). Compare the opening of ‘The Bloody Son’ with the first line of ‘Lord Randal’, ‘ “O where hae ye been, Lord Randal, my son?” ’ (in Scott’s Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border).

  ‘Make’ (line 49) is mate or companion; ‘garred’ (lines 57, 64), the OED states, is ‘wrongly used for: to be amiss with, to ail’. ‘Chuckie-stanes’ (line 76) are rounded pebbles used in a game.

  The stanzas are six and sometimes seven lines long. The second, fourth and last lines are constant. The number of stresses per line varies from two to six, and the first line of each stanza is repeated as the third. The stanzas rhyme ababab or ababaab.

  The Sea-Swallows

  The Till and the Tyne are rivers in Northumberland. ‘Bearing-bread’ and ‘washing-wine’ (lines 37–8, 45–6), according to Anne Henry Ehrenpreis (The Literary Ballad, 1966, p. 174) are ‘bread and wine ritually connected with childbearing’. Weed (line 23) is a triple pun: the plant, an article of clothing and a mourning garment.

  It is not always obvious who is speaking. Lines 13–14, 19, 23, 27, 31, 35, 37–40, 49–57 and 59 belong to the father, who predicts his own death when the sea-swallows return and plans to be buried with his dead grandson. Lines 15–18, 21, 25, 29, 33, 41–8, 61 and 63 belong to the daughter, who predicts her own death at the same time and plans to join her father and her son.

  Ehrenpreis compares the ‘revelation of a macabre situation through question and answer between parent and child’ to the popular ballads ‘Edward, Edward’ and ‘Lord Randal’.

  The lines have four stresses; the quatrain rhymes abab.

  The Year of Love

  In 1860, William Caldwell Roscoe published a poem entitled ‘The Year of Love’ in his Poems and Essays.

  The stanza consists of three iambic tetrameters and one iambic trimeter, rhyming aabb.

  Dedication, 1865

  Swinburne dedicated Poems and Ballads to his friend Edward Burne Jones (later Burne-Jones), whom he had met at Oxford where Burne-Jones, Morris, Rossetti, and others were painting Arthurian murals. When he was living in London in 1861, he saw Burne-Jones and his wife frequently (‘sometimes twice or three times a day he would come in’, Georgiana Burne-Jones recalled in 1905). They remained friends until Burne-Jones’s death in 1898.

  Yolande (line 28) appears in the French text appended to ‘The Leper’. Banville in ‘Loys’ (1842) refers to a Yolande ‘dans un ancien poëme’, and there is a Yolande in Gautier’s Le Capitaine Fracasse (1863), set in the time of Louis XIII. Juliette (line 28) appears in ‘Rococo’.

  The stanza and metre here are the same as those of ‘Dolores’.

  ATALANTA IN CALYDON

  Published in March 1865 by Edward Moxon & Co., probably in an edition of 500 copies (see Lang, 2, 213). ‘It was a small quarto of 125 pages (xiv + 111), bound in cream-coloured buckram boards, bevelled edges, with three gold roundels on the front cover designed by Dante Gabriel Rossetti’ (John S. Mayfield, Swinburneiana, 1974, p. 157). The cost of the first edition was defrayed by Swinburne’s father (Lang, 2, 213). A commercial second edition was published in the same year.

  Composition. Swinburne seems to have begu
n the play in the autumn of 1863, around the time of the death of his sister Edith. He paused in his work on it when he went abroad in February 1864 (he visited Landor in Florence in late March), returning in August. Towards the end of August he went to North Cornwall for a three-month stay and finished the play there. He was reading proofs in February 1865. See Lang, 1, 114–15, Philip Henderson, Swinburne: Portrait of a Poet (1974), pp. 106–7, and Rooksby, pp. 88–91, 94–7.

  Sources of the story. Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book 8, lines 273–544 and Apollodorus 1.7.7–1.8.3. Swinburne also drew on fragments of the lost tragedy Meleager by Euripides (included in Dindorf’s 1851 Poetae Scenici Graeci) and fables of Hyginus, 171–4. In an appendix to Swinburne: A Nineteenth-Century Hellene (1931), William R. Rutland collected the principal ancient sources of the Meleager story.

  The story of Atalanta’s race is well known and has been the subject of paintings and works of literature, including Walter Savage Landor’s ‘Hippomenes and Atalanta’ (1863) and William Morris’s ‘Atalanta’s Race’ (1868, though written earlier), for which Edward Burne-Jones drew eight illustrations; however, the story of the Calydonian hunt has much less frequently inspired artists or writers.

  Manuscripts. Studies of the manuscripts include: Georges Lafourcade, ‘Atalanta in Calydon: Le Manuscrit. – Les Sources’, Revue anglo-américaine 3 (October 1925), pp. 34–47 and 3 (December 1925), pp. 128–33; Mario Praz, ‘Il manoscritto dell’ “Atalanta in Calydon” ’, La Cultura 8 (July 1929), pp. 405–15; Cecil Y. Lang, ‘The First Chorus of Swinburne’s Atalanta’, Yale University Library Gazette 27 (January 1953), pp. 119–22; Cecil Y. Lang, ‘Some Swinburne Manuscripts’, Journal of the Rutgers University Library 18 (December 1954), pp. 1—11; Paull F. Baum, ‘The Fitzwilliam Manuscript of Swinburne’s “Atalanta”, Verses 1038–1204’, Modern Language Review 54 (1959); Cecil Y. Lang, ‘Atalanta in Manuscript’, Yale University Library Gazette 37 (July 1962), pp. 19–24.

  Commentary. Bruno Herlet, Versuch eines Kommentars zu Swinburnes Atalanta (1909) and Mario Praz, ‘Le tragedie “Greche” di A. C. Swinburne e le fonti dell’ “Atalanta in Calydon” ’, Atene e Roma n.s. 3 (July–August–September 1922), pp. 157–89 are the most complete.

  Influences. Handel: Lang, 1, 93: ‘My greatest pleasure just now is when [Mary Gordon] practises Handel on the organ… It crams and crowds me with old and new verses, half-remembered and half-made, which new ones will hardly come straight afterwards: but under their influence I have done some more of my Atalanta…’

  The sea: Atalanta was begun and later finished by the sea. Rooksby quotes Lafourcade, ‘a keen sea breeze blows through the lines of Atalanta’, and discusses the marine influences on pages 110–11 of his biography.

  Sade: Lang, 1, 125: ‘[Sade was] the poet, thinker, and man of the world from whom the theology of my poem is derived.’ (Swinburne’s theology also derives from Blake; his critical study of Blake was begun in the early 1860s, though not published until 1867.)

  Shelley: Atalanta is, in part, Swinburne’s response to Prometheus Unbound. The Greek structure of his drama contrasts with acts and scenes of Shelley’s drama in English form, and his dark antitheism contrasts with Shelley’s ‘philanthropic doctrinaire views’ (Lang, 1, 115). See also Terry L. Meyers, ‘Shelley’s Influence on Atalanta in Calydon’, Victorian Poetry 14 (1976), pp. 150–4.

  Elizabethan tragedy and the Bible: Much of Swinburne’s diction, in Atalanta in Calydon as elsewhere, is archaic. One indication of this is how often the OED offers no citation between a seventeenth-century (or earlier) use of word in a particular sense and Swinburne’s similar use. For instance, ‘fleet-foot’, line 106; ‘perspicuous’, line 221; ‘disfleshed’, line 301; ‘disallied’, line 301 (cf. Milton, Samson Agonistes, line 1022); ‘native’, line 504 (cf. Hamlet, Act I, Scene 2, line 47); ‘loosed’, line 1061; ‘water-floods’, line 1375; ‘privy’, line 1630 (cf. Milton, ‘Lycidas’, line 128); ‘unholpen’, line 1668; ‘sect’, line 1680 (cf. Othello, Act I, Scene 3); ‘consuming’, line 1945; ‘unfasten’, line 1947; ‘crumblings’, line 2225. Generally, allusions from Shakespeare and the Bible have been glossed, but not Shakespearean or biblical language.

  Greek tragedy: The most important influences are the language, conventions and structure of Greek tragedy. As an anonymous reviewer wrote in the Saturday Review, ‘A careful study of the Attic dramatists has enabled him to catch their manner, and to reproduce felicitously many of their terms of expression. The scholar is struck, every few lines, by some phrase which he can fancy a direct translation from the Greek…’ (Critical Heritage, ed. Clyde Hyder, 1970, p. 10). Swinburne’s frequent compound epithets and adjectives in ‘un-’ and ‘dis-’, use of litotes, inversions of word order, complex syntax, long periods, and omissions of subject or verb are consistent with the elevated language of Greek tragedy. Moreover, his use of the participle (e.g., ‘sin done’, ‘things done’, ‘men born’, ‘children born’, ‘men dead’, etc.), his naturalization of the distinctive Greek usage in which two nouns appear connected by ‘of’ rather than more idiomatically as an adjective with a noun (as in ‘bind on thy sandals… over the… speed of thy feet’ rather than ‘over thy speedy feet’, lines 77–8), and other features, continually suggest the influence of Greek.

  Swinburne also adopts the conventions of Greek tragedy. For the kommos, see the note to the fifth episode. He employs stikhomythia, that is, dialogue delivered in alternate lines, which is frequently compressed and oblique. Elaborate invocation to deities and a messenger’s speech recounting violent actions that took place offstage are also features of both Atalanta and Greek tragedy. However, Swinburne modifies Greek conventions when it suits him. The choral odes do not follow the Greek structure of strophe, antistrophe, and epode; he introduces more characters on stage than Greek drama allows; and his tragedy is significantly longer than the longest extant Greek tragedy.

  The structure of Greek tragedy is unlike English drama, which is divided into acts and scenes. To use the traditional terms for the parts of Greek drama, Atalanta consists of the following sections:

  Prologue (1–64)

  Parodos (65–120)

  First episode (121–313)

  First stasimon (314–61)

  Second episode (362–718)

  Second stasimon (719–866)

  Third episode (867–1037)

  Third stasimon (1038–1204)

  Fourth episode (1205–1373)

  Fourth stasimon (1374–1468)

  Fifth episode (1469–1808)

  Fifth stasimon (1809–55)

  Exodus (1856–2317).

  TITLE PAGE

  The Greek is taken from Euripides’ Meleager, which survives only in fragments. The text is identical to that in Dindorf’s Poetae Scenici Graeci (1851), where it is number 537 of Euripides’ fragments and number 20 of the fragments of Meleager. (Rooksby notes that Dindorf’s collection was given to Swinburne by schoolfriends when he left Eton. The full title is Poetarum Scenicorum Græcorum, Aeschyli, Sophoclis, Euripidis et Aristophanis, Fabulæ Superstites et Perditarum Fragmenta.)

  The fragment does not provide enough context to be certain of the translation. Perhaps: ‘The living fare well, but every man when he is dead is earth and shade: nothingness turns to nothing.’ The first clause might also be translated as ‘do good to them that live’.

  DEDICATORY GREEK VERSES

  As Swinburne writes in the dedication, he had written the first of his Greek elegies while Landor was still alive and had shown it to him; he wrote the second after his death. In the 1904 Poems the Greek verses are arranged on the page so that they appear to be three elegies, rather than two. This arrangement on the page is reproduced here. The few minor errors introduced into the Greek of the 1904 edition have been corrected by restoring the 1865 text.

  Arthur Beatty (Swinburne’s Dramas, 1909), William R. Rutland (Swinburne: A Nineteenth-Century Hellene, 1931) and Apostolos and Lilika Marmaras (in Aeolian Harps, ed. Fricke, 1976) have translated
the Greek poems, Beatty the most accurately.

  Although Swinburne’s Greek has often been praised, John Churton Collins, who knew both Swinburne and Greek, describes his knowledge of Greek as very imperfect (Life and Memoirs, p. 49). H. Bryan Donkin recalls the story that before publication Swinburne sent the Greek elegiacs to Richard Shilleto at Cambridge, who admired them but thought them filled with errors (letter to the Spectator, 14 October 1911). Other classicists have found the grammar unobjectionable but the verses repetitious and empty of content, as Greek verse is not.

  First page of Greek (page 242):

  You have gone, turned away from the north, but the Nymphs with their sweet breath led you over the welcoming sea, filling your mouth with divine honey, lest Poseidon, hearing your melodious voice, harm you. So great a singer were you. We still mourn for you now that you are gone and long for you always. One of the Muses turning to another said, ‘Look, he has gone, the best loved of all men has gone. He gathered fresh-budding garlands with his old hands and he covered his grey head with laurel, to sing some sweet song upon Sicilian harps and strings. For he varied the tunes he played on his great lyre, and often Apollo found him seated in a glen and crowned him with flowers, and gave him delightful things to say: Pan never to be forgotten and Pitys, and unhappy Corythos, and the goddess Hamadryad whom a mortal loved. He lulled Cymodameia to sleep in the chambers of the sea; he restored Agamemnon’s daughter to her father; and to sacred Delphi he sent Orestes, stricken by god, distressed here and there by the hateful goddesses.’

  Commentary: ‘Turned away from the North’ refers to Landor’s residence in Italy; ‘fresh-budding garlands’ refer to Heroic Idylls, which appeared in 1863, when Landor was eighty-eight. Landor tells the story of Pan and Pitys, Corythos, the Hamadryad, and Cymodameia respectively in ‘Pan and Pitys’ (Latin, 1815, English, 1847), ‘Corythos’ (Latin, 1815, English, 1847), ‘The Hamadryad’ (1842), and ‘Enallos and Cymodameia’ (1846). Iphigenia is restored to her father Agamemnon in the afterlife in ‘Shades of Agamemnon and Iphigeneia’ (1836). The Furies’ assault upon Orestes and his recovery are described in ‘The Madness of Orestes’ (1837) and ‘The Prayer of Orestes’ (1846). See also the commentary to ‘In Memory of Walter Savage Landor’.