The poem consists of alternating trimeter and dimeter lines of both iambs and anapests. The stanza rhymes ababcdcd; note the double and triple rhymes ‘over thee’, ‘cover thee’ / ‘over us’, ‘cover us’; ‘love thee’, ‘above thee’ / ‘love us’, ‘above us’; ‘sunder thee’, ‘under thee’ / ‘sunder us’, ‘under us’; ‘reach me’, ‘beseech me’ / ‘reach thee’, ‘beseech thee’; ‘gold on you’, ‘hold on you’ / ‘gold on us’, ‘hold on us’. The antiphony is both semantic (as even-numbered antiphones recall the wording of the previous odd-numbered antiphones) and rhythmic (many of the rhyme-words are repeated in the pairs of antiphones, with one or two new rhymes introduced in the successor).
A Lamentation
The poem invokes the lamentation of Thetis (line 114) over her dead son Achilles, which Homer recounts in the Odyssey (at the beginning of Book 24), and also the dead Heracles (line 122), killed unintentionally by his wife Deianira; the chorus in Sophocles’s Women of Trachis laments both Heracles and Deianira. (Matthew Arnold’s ‘Fragment of a Chorus of a “Dejaneira” ’, though probably written much earlier, was published only in 1867.) Lamentations, one of the books of the Old Testament, is Jeremiah’s lament over the destruction of Jerusalem; the Lamentation, one of the lessons read during Holy Week, is taken from it.
The phrase ‘the desire of mine eyes’ (line 56) is related to the phrases ‘the desire of thine eyes’, ‘the desire of your eyes’, and ‘the desire of their eyes’, which all occur in Ezekiel 24 (and nowhere else in the Bible).
The metre and the rhyme scheme vary among the sections. The three stanzas of the first section are all trimeter lines of both iambs and anapests. Note the abcabc rhymes in the first stanza and the abcdabcd rhymes in the second. The second section consists of several stanzas. The first rhymes abaab and consists of tetrameters (iambo-anapestic); ‘travail’ (line 48) is stressed on the first syllable. The second stanza consists of alternating trimeter and dimeter lines, each consisting of both iambs and anapests. It is composed of nine quatrains with cross rhymes. The remaining stanzas of the section are made of tetrameter lines of both iambs and anapests rhyming abcabc. The third section consists of iambic trimeter lines in stanzas rhyming abcabcabc.
Anima Anceps
The title means literally ‘two-fold soul’. The source is a formula which Victor Hugo is likely to have invented, in Book 8, Chapter 6 of Notre-Dame de Paris (1831):
Alors levant la main sur l’égyptienne il s’écria d’une voix funèbre: «I nunc, anima anceps, et sit tibi Deus misericors!»
C’était la redoutable formule dont on avait coutume de clore ces sombres cérémonies. C’était le signal convenu du prêtre au bourreau.
[Then he raised his hand over the gypsy girl and pronounced sombrely: ‘Go therefore, divided soul, and may God be merciful to you.’ It was the awful formula by which it was customary to conclude these grim ceremonies. It was the appointed signal of the priest to the hangman.]
Parts of Arthur Clough’s Dipsychus (1865; the title means ‘double-minded’ or ‘double-souled’) were published in 1862 and 1863; Swinburne frequently quotes from the poem in his later letters, while maintaining reservations about Clough’s merits.
For the address to the soul, cf. Hadrian’s lines ‘Animula, vagula, blandula’, translated by Matthew Prior, Byron and others. For the rhyme ‘rafter’ and ‘laughter’ (lines 34 and 35), cf. Shelley’s ‘Lines (“When the lamp is shattered”)’ (1824), lines 29 and 31.
It is written in iambic dimeter; the rhyme scheme is aaabcccbdddbeeeb. All rhymes except for b are feminine.
In the Orchard
The poem is inspired by an anonymous Provençal alba, or dawn-song (a genre without a fixed metre or form in which a lover laments the imminent separation from the other lover at the break of day). It begins ‘En un vergier’ (‘In an orchard’) and consists of six stanzas of four lines each; the last line of each stanza is the refrain ‘Oy Dieus, oy Dieus, de l’abla!, tan tost ve’ (‘Ah God, ah God, the dawn! it comes so fast’). The text was available in editions like F. J. M. Raynouard’s Choix des poésies originales des troubadours (1821) and C. A. F. Mahn’s Gedichte der Troubadours (1856). A convenient modern edition is R. T. Hill and T. C. Bergin, Anthology of the Provençal Troubadours (2nd ed., 1973). For more information about the genre, see Eos: An Enquiry into the Theme of Lovers’ Meetings and Partings at Dawn in Poetry, ed. Arthur T. Hatto, 1965. Pound translated the alba as ‘Alba Innominata’ in 1910. By ‘Provençal burden’ Swinburne indicates that he is adopting the music or undersong of Provençal lyric, rather than offering a translation. ‘Burden’, in addition, refers to the refrain at the end of each stanza.
The OED gives no instance of ‘plenilune’ (line 23) between c. 1600 and Swinburne in 1878.
The poem is in iambic pentameter and rhymes aabab; the b rhyme (‘soon’ in the refrain) is constant throughout.
A Match
‘Closes’ (line 5) are enclosures. The reference in lines 35–6 is to dice and cards, respectively.
The metre is iambic trimeter, the rhyme scheme is abccabab. The a and c rhymes are feminine.
Swinburne writes several lyrics in iambic trimeter octaves: ‘A Match’, ‘Rococo’, ‘Before Dawn’, ‘The Garden of Proserpine’; cf. ‘Madonna Mia’. Katherine Williams (in her 1986 doctoral dissertation from CUNY, ‘Song New-Born’: Renaissance Forms in Swinburne’s Lyrics) adduces Keats’s poem beginning ‘In a drear nighted December’ (1829) and Shelley’s poem ‘The Indian Serenade’ (1824) as other examples of iambic trimeter octaves.
Faustine
Published in the Spectator, 31 May 1862.
In Notes on Poems and Reviews (Appendix 1) Swinburne explains that ‘the idea that gives [these verses] such life as they have is simple enough: the transmigration of a single soul, doomed as though by accident from the first to all evil and no good, through many ages and forms, but clad always in the same type of fleshly beauty. The chance which suggested to me this poem was one which may happen any day to any man – the sudden sight of a living face which recalled the well-known likeness of another dead for centuries: in this instance, the noble and faultless type of the elder Faustina, as seen in coin and bust.’ (According to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, the elder Faustina’s coiffure is depicted with a coronal of plaits on top; the younger Faustina’s with rippling side waves and a small bun at the nape of the neck.)
The elder Faustina is Annia Galeria Faustina, who married the future emperor Antoninus Pius. She was the aunt of Marcus Aurelius, whom her daughter, also named Annia Galeria Faustina, married. Ancient historians like Cassius Dio and the authors of the Historia Augusta established the reputation of both women for treachery and licentiousness. The latter work reports many amours of the younger Faustina (including an affair with her son-in-law, whom it says she may have poisoned). The discrepancy between the characters of Marcus Aurelius and his son was explained by postulating a liaison between Faustina and a gladiator; she is said to have preferred sailors and gladiators. Gibbon summarizes: ‘the grave simplicity of the philosopher was ill calculated to engage her wanton levity, or to fix that unbounded passion for variety, which often discovered personal merit in the meanest of mankind. The Cupid of the ancients was, in general, a very sensual deity; and the amours of an empress, as they exact on her side the plainest advances, are seldom susceptible of much sentimental delicacy’ (The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Chapter 4). Neither Gibbon nor Swinburne was aware of the fictitious nature of much of the Historia Augusta, which was revealed by Hermann Dessau in 1889. According to Dio, she died either of the gout or by suicide.
Satan won the contest with God over Faustina’s soul ‘this time’ (line 25); the contest over Job was the previous time. The combats of gladiators are described in lines 65–80; the words ‘morituri te salutant’ of the epigraph (in full, ‘Hail, empress Faustina, they who are about to die salute you’) are the traditional greeting of gladiators (see H. J. Leon,
‘Morituri Te Salutamus’, Transactions of the American Philological Association 70, 1939, pp. 46–50; cf. Jean Gérôme’s painting Ave Cœsar, Morituri Te Salutant exhibited in 1859). She is a Bacchanal (line 99), a votary of Bacchus and so a drunken reveller, but she is also a votary of Priapus, the ithyphallic god whose cult diffused from the region of Lampsacus (line 146), as well as a lesbian like Sappho of Mitylene (lines 117–24). Priapus ‘metes the gardens with his rod’ (line 147) because, as a garden god, his image was usually situated in the garden; cf. Catullus’s ‘Priapean’ poems (18, 19, and 20), usually regarded as spurious; Swinburne read Catullus with ‘delight and wonder’ at Eton (unpublished letter quoted in Rooksby, p. 30).
‘Dust and din’ (line 82) is a Victorian collocation: cf. Tennyson, In Memoriam (1850) LXXXIX.8, and Arnold, Empedocles on Etna (1852) Act 1, Scene 2, line 206. ‘Dashed with dew’ (line 103) recalls Tennyson’s ‘Dashed together in blinding dew’, from ‘A Vision of Sin’ (1842), line 42. ‘Serene’ (line 114), in reference to heavenly bodies, means ‘shining with a clear and tranquil light’ (OED, 1b). ‘Pulseless’ (line 115) can mean ‘unfeeling, pitiless’ as well as ‘devoid of life’.
The metre is iambic; ‘devil’ in line 19 ought to be scanned as a monosyllable. The four-line quatrains rhyme abab and alternate between tetrameter and dimeter lines. The last word of each quatrain is ‘Faustine’, for which Swinburne finds forty-one rhymes.
A Cameo
A description of a cameo, with the allegorical figures of Desire, Pain, Pleasure, Satiety, Hate and Death, as well as a crowd of senses, sorrows, sins and strange loves. Strictly speaking, cameos are not painted (line 2). For the title, compare Gautier’s Émaux et Camées (1852) and his intention that ‘chaque pièce [of that collection] devait être un médaillon’. For contemporary sonnets on works of art, recall Rossetti’s ‘Sonnets for Pictures’, published in 1850. For the topic of ekphrasis in general, see John Hollander’s The Gazer’s Spirit (1995).
‘Pash’ (line 8), to smash violently, may be influenced by the intransitive use of the word ‘said of the dashing action of sudden heavy rain… and of the action of beating or striking water as by the feet of the horse’ (OED).
The sonnet is of the Italian sort; it rhymes abba abba cde cde.
Song Before Death
The poem is a translation from a song in Letter 68 of Sade’s Aline et Valcour, his philosophical epistolary novel published in 1795:
Air: Romance de Nina.
Mère adorée, en un moment
La mort t’enlève à ma tendresse!
Toi qui survis, ô mon amant!
Reviens consoler ta maîtresse.
Ah! qu’il revienne (bis), hélas! hélas!
Mais le bien-aimé ne vient pas.
Comme la rose au doux printemps
S’entrouvre au souffle du zéphyre,
Mon âme à ces tendres accents
S’ouvrirait de même au délire.
En vain, j’écoute: hélas! hélas!
Le bien-aimé ne parle pas.
Vous qui viendrez verser des pleurs
Sur ce cercueil où je repose,
En gémissant sur mes douleurs,
Dites a l’amant qui les cause
Qu’il fut sans cesse, hélas! hélas!
Le bien-aimé jusqu’au trépas.
In a letter of 1862 (Lang, 1, 58), Swinburne describes the song as ‘about the most exquisite piece of simple finished language and musical effect in all 18th century French literature’. On Swinburne’s initial reading of Sade, see Rooksby, pp. 75–7. For his abiding interest, consult the index to the letters.
The title and the date ‘1795’ indicate that the speaker is anticipating execution during the French Revolution.
Swinburne translates into iambic tetrameter lines in stanzas that rhyme ababcc.
Wise reproduces the manuscript of the poem in the 1919 Bibliography (p. 110).
Rococo
In the nineteenth century the term could mean merely ‘old-fashioned’, and even when applied to French decoration, it did not specifically refer to the florid, light style conceived in reaction to the official baroque of Louis XIV. The OED’s first citation for ‘rococo’ is dated 1836. Swinburne invokes Juliette (line 62), whose name recalls the depraved heroine of Sade’s novel, published in 1797.
On the newly recovered fashion for the rococo in French culture in the nineteenth century, see the chapter ‘Age of Rococo’ in Maxine G. Cutler’s Evocations of the Eighteenth Century in French Poetry, 1800–1869 (1970). Gautier was central in the new appreciation for it; see his poems ‘Rocaille’, ‘Pastel’ (originally called ‘Roccoco’), ‘Watteau’, etc. Banville and Hugo (‘La Fête chez Thérèse’) were also important in its recovery, as were Baudelaire and the Goncourt brothers.
‘Sanguine’ (line 8) means ‘of blood-red colour’, but the sense ‘bloodthirsty, delighting in bloodshed’ is not absent. Both meanings were literary uses of the word when Swinburne wrote the poem.
The poem is written in iambic trimeter; the stanzas rhyme ababcdcd, where a and c have feminine endings. The last two rhymes of each stanza alternate between ‘pleasure/pain’ and ‘remember/forget’. On iambic trimeter octaves, see the note to ‘A Match’.
Wise reproduces a manuscript of the poem in the 1919 Bibliography (p. 113).
Stage Love
Bacon, in his essay on love, offers one of the classical contrasts between stage love and love in life: ‘The stage is more beholding to love, than the life of man. For as to the stage, love is ever matter of comedies, and now and then of tragedies; but in life it doth much mischief: sometimes like a siren; sometimes like a fury.’
The poem is written in trochaics with six stresses (the last unstressed syllable is sometimes omitted, as often in trochaic verse); the stanzas rhyme aabb, where b is feminine. Trochaics are among the most enduring metres of classical poetry: Archilochus wrote in trochaics, the metre occurred regularly in Greek and Latin tragedy and comedy and also in late works like the Pervigilium Veneris, and it was used in goliardic verse. In English, by the eighteenth century, the trochaic had typically been used for lighter purposes. William Blake’s songs in trochees, like ‘The Tyger’, introduced a new weight and flexibility to the metre. Tennyson’s ‘Locksley Hall’ (1842), Longfellow’s ‘The Song of Hiawatha’ (1855), and Browning’s ‘A Toccata of Galuppi’s’ (1855) were recent poems in trochaics.
Wise prints a manuscript of the poem in his 1919 Bibliography (p. 113) and in A Swinburne Library, facing page 25.
The Leper
Swinburne invents a French source for the story, which he offers in a note at the end: ‘At that time there was in this land a great number of lepers, which greatly displeased the king, seeing that because of them the Lord must have been grievously wroth. Now it happened that a noble lady named Yolande de Sallières was afflicted and utterly ravaged by this base sickness; all her friends and relatives, with the fear of the Lord before their eyes, made her quit their houses and would never receive or help a thing cursed of God, stinking and abominable to all men. This lady had been very beautiful and graceful of figure; she was generous of body and lascivious in her life. However, none of the lovers who had often embraced and kissed her very tenderly would shelter any longer such an ugly woman and such a detestable sinner. One clerk alone who had been at first her servant and her intermediary in the matter of love took her in, hiding her in a small hut. There the villainous woman died of great misery and an evil death: and after her, the aforesaid clerk died, who had of his great love for six months tended, washed, dressed and undressed her with his own hands every day. They even say that this wicked man and cursed clerk, calling to mind the great beauty of this woman, now gone by and ravaged, delighted many times to kiss her on her foul, leprous mouth and to embrace her gently with loving hands. Thus, he died of the same abominable malady. This happened near Fontainebellant in Gastinois. And when King Philip heard this story, he was greatly astonished.’
Clyde
K. Hyder (‘The Medieval Background of Swinburne’s The Leper’, PMLA 46, December 1931, pp. 1280–8) identifies a source behind various details of Swinburne’s archaic French; he also notes correspondences between the poem and the medieval poem Amis and Amiloun, which Swinburne read in Henry Weber’s Metrical Romances (1810).
William Empson discusses the word ‘delicate’ (line 3) in The Structure of Complex Words (1951, p. 78), where he writes that in this poem ‘the sadism is adequately absorbed or dramatised into a story where both characters are humane, and indeed behave better than they think; Swinburne nowhere else (that I have read him) succeeds in imagining two people.’
The metre is iambic tetrameter; the stanza is a quatrain rhyming abab.
An early version of the poem, entitled ‘A Vigil’, was transcribed by T. J. Wise in A Swinburne Library (p. 2) and by Lafourcade (Vol. 2, pp. 63–4 and 573). Cecil Lang warns that the transcriptions are inaccurate (The Pre-Raphaelites and their Circle, 1975, p. 521). There is a reproduction of the first four stanzas of ‘A Vigil’ in T. Earle Welby’s A Study of Swinburne (1976), p. 60.
A Ballad of Burdens
‘Ballad’ indicates that the poem is a ballade, the form of which was standardized by Guillaume de Machaut and Eustache Deschamps in the fourteenth century: three stanzas of either eight octosyllabic lines or ten decasyllabic lines; usually with an envoy at the end; having a refrain or rebriche as the last line of each stanza and of the envoy; and maintaining the same rhymes for each stanza. The greatest ballades were written by Villon in the fifteenth century and by Charles d’Orléans in the sixteenth. Despite efforts by Chaucer and Gower, the form was never naturalized in English; in France it fell into disuse in the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Gautier’s essay on Villon in Les Grotesques (1844) was influential in establishing Villon’s reputation in the nineteenth century. (Although Banville was composing ballades ‘after the manner of Villon’ at the same time as Swinburne, they were not published until 1873; his polemical Petit traité de poésie française, insisting on the necessity of returning to forms like the rondeau, triolet, and ballade, appeared in 1872.) Swinburne’s enthusiasm for the fifteenth-century French poet was longstanding; in the early 1860s, he and Rossetti planned to translate all of Villon’s work. His translation from this period entitled ‘The Ballad of Villon and Fat Madge’, like ‘A Ballad of Burdens’, does not preserve the same rhymes in each stanza; in contrast, his translations of Villon’s ballades published in Poems and Ballads, Second Series (1878) adhere to the stricter rhyme scheme. ‘A Ballad of Burdens’ is a triple ballade; the stanza rhymes ababbcbc, and c is constant in each stanza.
Poems and Ballads and Atalanta in Calydon Page 41