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 ‘φανεταí 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 metrica
l 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 αντøωνα). 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 phraseol
ogy 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.’
Poems and Ballads and Atalanta in Calydon Page 40