‘Burden’, besides meaning ‘refrain’ and ‘accompanying song’, is used in the English Bible (like onus in the Vulgate) to render Hebrew massa, which was generally taken in English to mean a ‘burdensome or heavy lot or fate’. See Isaiah 13:1 and OED, ‘burden’ 8. Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s ‘The Burden of Nineveh’, as printed in 1856, added below the title ‘ “Burden. Heavy calamity; the chorus of a song.” – Dictionary.’
For ‘the burden of fair women’ (line 1), cf. Tennyson’s title, ‘A Dream of Fair Women’ (1832). Compare the repeated line ‘I would that I were dead’ of Tennyson’s ‘Mariana’ (1830) with line 28.
Rondel
See note to the first rondel (p. 337), and recall that the form of the rondeau was very fluid before the time of Marot. The poem is in two stanzas, like Villon’s rondeau on death, which Rossetti translated in 1869. The metre is iambic pentameter, the rhyme scheme is aabbcc (c is the same rhyme in both stanzas), the rentrement is iambic dimeter.
‘White death’ (line 11) occurs twice in Shelley, in Prometheus Unbound (1820) Act 4, line 424 and Adonais (1821), line 66. It is most likely an equivalent to the more common poetic phrase ‘pale death’.
Wise prints a manuscript of the poem in his 1919 Bibliography (p. 109) and in A Swinburne Library, facing page 24.
Before the Mirror
The poem was written for Whistler’s The Little White Girl: Symphony in White no. 2 (1864), now in the Tate Gallery, the second of the series Whistler only later called ‘symphonies in white’. (Whistler may have taken his synaesthetic title from Gautier’s ‘Symphonie en blanc majeur’, or perhaps from a critic’s description of The White Girl: Symphony in White, no. 1, 1862.) A girl in white leans on a white mantelpiece, extending one arm along it, holds a fan in the hand of her other arm, and looks at a Japanese vase at the end of the mantelpiece. Her head is inclined to the mirror above the mantel; her reflection is sadder than her face. Swinburne wrote to Whistler in 1865 (Lang, 1, 118–20): ‘I know [the idea of the poem] was entirely and only suggested to me by the picture, where I found at once the metaphor of the rose and the notion of sad and glad mystery in the face languidly contemplative of its own phantom and all other things seen by their phantoms.’ Whistler liked the verses; the fourth and sixth stanzas were printed in the Royal Academy catalogue of 1865; and he had the poem printed on gold paper and fastened to the frame (Frederick A. Sweet, James McNeill Whistler, 1968, p. 57). John Hollander (The Gazer’s Spirit, 1995) suggests that this last fact may account for the poem’s subtitle. See also Linda Merrill, The Peacock Room: A Cultural Biography (1998), pp. 62–6, 357.
‘Behind the veil’ (line 8) recalls Tennyson’s In Memoriam (1850) LVI, 28 (‘Behind the veil, behind the veil’), as well as the metaphysical veils of Coleridge and Shelley, and also Hebrews 6:19.
The poem is iambic; the length of the lines varies. The rhyme scheme is a3b2a3b2c3c3b5. Note that there is an internal c rhyme after the third foot in the last line of each stanza. Hollander remarks on the third section of the poem: ‘The poem now moves inside the girl’s reveries to the traces of the past that must inevitably emerge from its depths, even as – in Swinburne’s verse throughout this poem – the internal rhymes emerge in the ultimate line of each stanza.’
Erotion
Swinburne explained that he wrote this poem as a comment on Simeon Solomon’s painting Damon and Aglae:
a picture of two young lovers in fresh fullness of first love crossed and troubled visibly by the mere shadow and the mere breath of doubt, the dream of inevitable change to come which dims the longing eyes of the girl with a ghostly foreknowledge that this too shall pass away, as with arms half clinging and half repellent she seems at once to hold off and to hold fast the lover whose bright youth for the moment is smiling back in the face of hers – a face full of the soft fear and secret certitude of future things which I have tried elsewhere to render in the verse called ‘Erotion’ written as a comment on this picture, with design to express the subtle passionate sense of mortality in love itself which wells up from ‘the middle spring of pleasure’, yet cannot quite kill the day’s delight or eat away with the bitter poison of doubt the burning faith and self-abandoned fondness of the hour; since, at least, though the future be for others, and the love now here turn elsewhere to seek pasture in fresh fields from other flowers, the vows and kisses of these present lips are not theirs but hers, as the memory of his love and the shadow of his youth shall be hers for ever.
(Swinburne, ‘Simeon Solomon: Notes on His “Vision of Love” and Other Studies’, The Dark Blue, July 1871, p. 574)
The first eight lines of Swinburne’s poem were printed in the 1866 exhibition catalogue of the Royal Academy of Arts under the entry for Damon and Aglae. The painting was sold at Sotheby’s in 1978.
‘Erotion’ is a Greek name, a diminutive of ‘Eros’. Although here and in ‘Anactoria’ the name is presumably applied to a man, in Martial, for example, it is applied to a young slave girl (5.34, 5.37, 10.61).
Swinburne ended his close association and friendship with Solomon after Solomon was arrested in 1873 for soliciting outside a public lavatory.
The poem is in heroic couplets. Complete sentences fit into either couplets or quatrains. There is little enjambment.
A facsimile of a manuscript of the poem is provided in Harry B. Smith’s A Sentimental Library (1914), facing p. 202.
In Memory of Walter Savage Landor
Swinburne’s veneration of Landor began in his Eton days (Rooksby, p. 30). He admired Landor’s classicism and republicanism. They met in Florence (‘flower-town’, line 1) in March 1864. Landor accepted the dedication of Atalanta in Calydon but died before it could reach him in print. In the article he contributed to the ninth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1882), Swinburne praised Landor’s ideal of civic and heroic life, his ‘passionate compassion, his bitter and burning pity for all wrongs endured in all the world’, and his loyalty and liberality; and he particularly admired his Hellenics (1847) and Imaginary Conversations of Greeks and Romans (1853).
Landor was eighty-nine years old when they met, and Swinburne was about to turn twenty-seven (line 23). The address ‘Look earthward now’ (line 34) recalls Milton’s ‘Lycidas’, line 163, ‘Look homeward Angel now’, and it may also be influenced by Christina Rossetti, ‘Your eyes look earthward’, in ‘The Convent Threshold’ (1862), line 17. ‘Dedicated’ (line 47) means ‘consecrated’.
The poem is written in quatrains consisting of alternate iambic tetrameter and iambic dimeter lines; they rhyme abab.
A Song in Time of Order. 1852 and A Song in Time of Revolution. 1860
‘A Song in Time of Order. 1852’ was published in the Spectator, 26 April 1862, and ‘A Song in Time of Revolution. 1860’ in the Spectator, 28 June 1862.
Both poems are expressions of Swinburne’s republican convictions. The date appended to the title of the first poem indicates that his target is Louis Napoleon, who became emperor of France in 1852. He had been elected president of France in 1848, backed by the newly founded ‘Party of Order’; ‘order’ was one of his political slogans. In 1851, when his term as president expired, he staged a successful coup d’état; the next year he began to deport his enemies to Algeria and French Guiana; later that year, he was proclaimed emperor. He also sent convicts with long sentences to French Guiana; Cayenne (line 50) became known as the ‘city of the condemned’. See Hugo’s ‘Hymne des Transportés’ (1853). Austria (line 50) dominated the disunited Italian states (until 1859). Louis Napoleon’s parentage had been a topic of contemporary gossip (line 39, ‘Buonaparte the bastard’). The revolution that Swinburne praises in the second poem is Garibaldi’s successful offensive into Italy: capturing first Sicily and then Naples in 1860, he handed both over to Victor Emmanuel and greeted him as the king of a united Italy.
Contrast the title with the occasional prayers of the Book of Common Prayer, for example, ‘In the Time of War and Tumults’. Lines 29–30 of the first
poem and lines 19–20 of the second are reminiscent of God’s power in Job; see, for example, Job 38:8 and 41:1. See, too, Hugo’s ‘Lux’ (1853) line 202–6. ‘Reins’ (line 27, ‘A Song in Time of Revolution’) means ‘loins’.
For Swinburne, Victor Hugo’s collection of poems denouncing Louis Napoleon, Les Châtiments (1853), was a crucial example of republicanism in poetry. (Much of Swinburne’s critical work on Hugo, including comments on Les Châtiments, is reprinted in the Bonchurch edition of his works, volume 13. However, that volume includes works now known not to have been written by Swinburne, and it is misleading in other respects, too; see Clyde Hyder, Swinburne as Critic, 1972.) Lafourcade points to the influence of Hugo’s ‘Ultima Verba’ in particular. Consider Hugo’s last stanza in relation to the lines ‘While three men hold together, The kingdoms are less by three’ (‘A Song in Time of Order’):
Si l’on n’est plus que mille, eh bien, j’en suis! Si même
Ils ne sont plus que cent, je brave encor Sylla;
S’il en demeure dix, je serai le dixième;
Et s’il n’en reste qu’un, je serai celui-là!
(Sylla, or Sulla, the Roman tyrant, is one of Hugo’s names for Louis Napoleon.)
‘A Song in Time of Order’ is in quatrains of trimeter lines that combine iambs and anapests; ‘gunwale’ (line 12) is pronounced as a strong trochee, not as a spondee. The quatrains rhyme abab. ‘A Song in Time of Revolution’ is in hexameter rhyming couplets, combining anapests and iambs; there is a rhyme after the third foot as well as at the end of the line.
To Victor Hugo
Throughout his life Swinburne was passionately enthusiastic about Victor Hugo. In this poem, he recalls Hugo’s childhood during the Napoleonic period and pays tribute to Hugo’s self-enforced, principled exile (forced into exile after he resisted Louis Napoleon’s coup d’état, he refused to enter France after the general amnesty of 1859). In his prose works of 1852, Napoléon le Petit and Histoire d’un crime, he indicted Napoleon III, and in 1853 he wrote a book of satirical poems condemning him, Les Châtiments. Swinburne praises the principles of the French Revolution (line 99) and the democratic uprisings of 1848, while lamenting their apparent political failure. He contrasts the political pessimism of his generation (lines 124-6) with Hugo’s optimism (line 153). The tenth stanza recalls the exile of Swinburne’s ancestors during the English Civil War. The eighteenth stanza invokes Prometheus.
Contrast the opening two lines with Tennyson, ‘Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington’ (1852), line 266: ‘On God and Godlike men we build our trust.’ ‘Uplift’ in lines 50 and 128 is an older form of ‘uplifted’; it survived in nineteenth-century poetry. Compare line 99 with Genesis 1:3, ‘And God said, Let there be light; and there was light.’ Swinburne refers to ‘the vast and various universe created by the fiat lux of Victor Hugo’ (Studies in Prose and Poetry, [1889] 1894, p. 277). Line 166 recalls Shakespeare’s Macbeth, ‘I gin to be a-weary of the sun’ (Act V, Scene 5, line 49).
Swinburne sent a copy of Poems and Ballads to Hugo, who could not read English but who asked a friend to translate this poem. He wrote graciously to Swinburne about ‘les nobles et magnifiques strophes que vous m’adressez’ (Lang, 1, 248n2).
The poem is written in iambics; the eight-line stanza consists of two trimeter lines, a pentameter, two trimeters, a pentameter, a tetrameter, and a pentameter; rhyming aabccbdd. The stanza is very like that of Milton’s hymn in ‘On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity’, except that Milton’s last line is a hexameter.
Before Dawn
The metre is iambic trimeter. The stanza rhymes aaabcccb, where a and c have feminine endings. On rhyming triplets, see Swinburne’s discussion of Robert Herrick (1891; reprinted in Studies in Prose and Poetry, 1894). With ‘no abiding’ (line 71), compare 1 Chronicles 29:15, ‘our days on the earth are as a shadow, and there is none abiding’.
Dolores
Dolores is Swinburne’s anti-madonna; her name derives from the phrase ‘Our Lady of the Seven Sorrows’ (which, in French, is Swinburne’s sub-title). ‘Our Lady of Pain’, Swinburne’s pagan darker Venus, is his answer to the Christian ‘Our Lady of Sorrows’, although his paganism is tinged with his own interest in sadomasochism (see Lang, 1, 123). Words and phrases from the Bible (lines 10 and 439: Matthew 18:21–2; line 137: Matthew 9:17 and elsewhere; lines 371–2: Exodus 7:9–12; line 328: Matthew 13:24–40), the Loreto Litany of the Blessed Virgin (line 19 and ‘tower of ivory’; line 21 and ‘mystical rose’; line 22 and ‘house of gold’), the prayers of the Mass (e.g. lines 133–4 and the taking of communion), the ‘Ave Maria’ (line 39 and ‘blessed among women’), and the Lord’s Prayer (lines 279 and 391) are blasphemously deployed. Baudelaire’s poems ‘À une Madonne’ and ‘Les Litanies de Satan’ (1857) are models for Swinburne; he writes admiringly about these two poems in particular in his 1862 Spectator review of Les Fleurs du Mal.
Libitina (lines 51, 423) is the Roman goddess of burials, misidentified since antiquity with Venus; Priapus (lines 51, 423) is the ithyphallic god of gardens (lines 303, 313), whose cult was centred in Lampsacus (line 405). The prayer to Dolores to intercede with her father Priapus on our behalf (line 311) is a parody of Catholic prayer. Priapus is the subject of three poems once attributed to Catullus (line 340); Swinburne quotes two lines of one of these in a note to line 307: ‘for in its cities the coast of the Hellespont, more oysterous than most, honours you particularly’. One of his lyrics (Carmina 32) is addressed to the girl Ipsitilla (cf. Swinburne’s line 326).
Swinburne reverses the usual associations of cypress and myrtle in lines 175–6. The Thalassian in line 223 is Aphrodite Anadyomene, risen again in Roman cruelty. The gladiatorial combats follow in the next stanzas, for which Lafourcade adduces the preface to Gautier’s Mademoiselle de Maupin (1835) as an influence. Nero is introduced in lines 249–56 (see Linda Dowling, ‘Nero and the Aesthetics of Torture’, The Victorian Newsletter, Fall 1984, pp. 2–5, on the aestheticized Nero in the nineteenth century). Alciphron and Arisbe (line 299) are names that occur in Greek history and mythology, but Swinburne is most likely using them simply as the names of a male and a female lover.
The stanzas beginning at line 329 describe Cybele, the ‘Great Mother of the Gods’, whose worship, characterized by ecstatic states and insensibility to pain, arose in Phrygia (line 330), where her main cult was located on Mount Dindymus (line 345). It later spread to Greece and Rome, where one of her Latin names was the ‘Idaean Mother’ (line 333). Her priests castrated themselves as Cybele’s lover, Attis, did; Catullus, Carmina 63, relates that legend (line 340). In ‘Notes on Poems and Reviews’ (Appendix 1), Swinburne contrasts Dolores, ‘the darker Venus’, with both the Virgin Mary and Cybele.
Cotys or Cotyto (line 409, Cotytto) was a Thracian goddess later worshipped orgiastically in Corinth and Sicily as well as in Thrace. Astarte (in Greek) or Ashtaroth (in the Bible) are names for Ishtar, the Mesopotamian goddess of love and war. Privately, Swinburne associates the ‘Europian Cotytto’ and the ‘Asiatic Aphrodite of Aphaca’ (Lang, 1, 406) with Sade and with sadomasochistic indulgence (see Lang, 1, 312).
‘Seventy times seven’ (lines 10 and 439) recalls Matthew 18:22. J. C. Maxwell (Notes and Queries, Vol. 21, January 1974, p. 15) offers a parallel to and possible source of line 159 in Thackeray’s The Newcomes (1855), Chapter 65, ‘before marriages and cares and divisions had separated us’. Perhaps ‘live torches’ (line 245) refer to humans burnt alive; however, the OED offers no example of such a usage. A ‘visible God’ (line 320) echoes Timon of Athens, Act 4, Scene 3. The rod in lines 371–2 recalls Aaron’s rod in Exodus 7. Line 379 may invoke Sade, and line 380 alludes to the allegory of sin and death in Paradise Lost, Book 2; the OED records an obsolete usage of ‘incestuous’ meaning ‘begotten of incest’. The tares and grain of line 438 recall Christ’s parable in Matthew 13.
The metre combines iambs and anapests in seven trimeter lines concluded by the dimeter eighth line, which always consis
ts of an iamb followed by an anapest; in every other stanza, the refrain is ‘Our Lady of Pain’. The rhyme scheme is ababcdcd, where a and c are regularly feminine; ‘Dolores’ appears nine times in this position. The metre and stanza is very close to those of some poems by William Praed, such as ‘Song for the Fourteenth of February’ (1827), except that Swinburne’s last line is shorter by a foot than Praed’s and so clinches each stanza. Swinburne read Praed at school and respected his work (Lang, 3, 314), though coolly (Studies in Prose and Poetry [1891] 1894, p. 100). Byron used the same versification (that is, with the trimeter final line) in ‘Stanzas to [Augusta]’ (1816); however, Swinburne was critical of Byron for ‘having… so bad an ear for metre’ (Essays and Studies, [1866] 1875, p. 251). Saintsbury, in A History of English Prosody (1906, Vol. 3, p. 344), reviews Swinburne’s antecedents:
Poems and Ballads and Atalanta in Calydon Page 42