Rendall notes the appearance of the sundew in George Crabbe, The Borough (Letter 1); Swinburne respected Crabbe (Lang, 5, 135). Rendall also reminds us that the traditional contrast between flowers that revive every year and man for whom death is final (stanza 3) is found in Moschus’s ‘Lament for Bion’:
Alas the mallows, when they wither in the garden, and the green parsley and the flourishing curled dill, they live anew and grow another year; but we men, great and mighty in our wisdom, when once we die, unhearing in the hollow earth we sleep the long long sleep that knows no waking.
In his review ‘The Poems of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’, Swinburne admired the ‘keen truthfulness and subtle sincerity’ of Rossetti’s ‘A Young Fir-Wood’, ‘The Honeysuckle’, and ‘The Woodspurge’, poems written by 1856 (Essays and Studies, [1870] 1875, pp. 70–1). In 1880, he protested against Henry Arthur Bright’s too exclusive commendation of Tennyson’s floriculture and cited the flower called by its Spanish name in Browning’s ‘Garden Fancies’ (1845) and the ‘plant… yielding a three-leaved bell’ in Sordello (1840, Book 2, line 290), Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s ‘The Woodspurge’ and ‘The Honeysuckle’, Morris’s good words for the sunflower (perhaps in ‘A Good Knight in Prison’, 1858, but cf. ‘The Gilliflower of Gold’, 1858), as well as his own ‘Sundew’ (see Lang, 4, 121). For the French background, see Philip Knight’s Flower Poetics in Nineteenth-Century France (1986). Swinburne disparaged his poem later in life (Lang, 5, 40, 70; 6, 153).
The metre is iambic tetrameter; the stanza rhymes abbab.
Félise
The epigraph is the refrain (rebriche) of Villon’s ‘Ballade des dames du temps jadis’ from Le Testament: Rossetti translates it in 1869 as ‘But where are the snows of yester-year.’ (‘Antan’ derives from ante annum.)
Line 61, ‘You loved me and you loved me not’, might recall the formula used in children’s divining-games, but the OED gives as the earliest written reference to it the 1909 Old Hampshire Singing Games. The OED gives no instance of ‘fledge’ used intransitively after 1637 except for line 69. Line 76 recalls Shakespeare, The Tempest, ‘deeper than e’er plummet sounded’ (Act III, Scene 3, line 101) and ‘deeper than did ever plummet sound’ (Act V, Scene 1, line 56). Line 134 may have been influenced by Keats’s remark in a letter to Benjamin Bailey dated 22 November 1817: ‘The Imagination may be compared to Adam’s dream – he awoke and found it truth.’ Lines 136–7 recall Isaiah 6:6–7. Lines 234–5 are reminiscent of Shakespeare, King Lear, Act I, Scene 4, ‘beat at this gate that let thy folly in’. Lines 229 and 236 recall Matthew 23:17 and 19. Line 244 echoes Shakespeare, Macbeth, Act II, Scene 2, line 60 (‘making the green one red’) and line 245 recalls one of the temptations of Christ in the desert, Matthew 4:3.
Swinburne defends ‘Félise’ in a letter to John Ruskin in 1866 (Lang, 1, 160):
I recalcitrate vigorously against your opinion of ‘Félise’, which is rather a favourite child of mine. As to the subject, I thought it clear enough, and likely to recall to most people a similar passage of experience. A young fellow is left alone with a woman rather older, whom a year since he violently loved. Meantime he has been in town, she in the country; and in the year’s lapse they have had time, he to become tired of her memory, she to fall in love with his. Surely I have explained this plainly and ‘cynically’ enough! Last year I loved you, and you were puzzled, and didn’t love me – quite. This year (I perceive) you love me, and I feel puzzled, and don’t love you – quite. ‘Sech is life,’ as Mrs. Gamp says [in Dickens’s Martin Chuzzlewit, Chapter 29]; ‘Deus vult [‘it is God’s will’, not in Dickens]; it can’t be helped.’ As to the flowers and hours [lines 91, 93], they rhyme naturally, being the sweetest and most transient things that exist – when they are sweet. And the poem, it seems to me, is not long enough to explain what it has to say.
See also his letter to William Rossetti, Lang, 1, 193.
The stanza consists of four iambic tetrameter lines followed by an iambic dimeter, rhyming ababb. However, the two stanzas starting at line 116 rhyme abaab, where the lines in b are iambic trimeter. Swinburne occasionally substitutes an anapest for an iamb or elides consecutive vowels. ‘Félise’ is used six times as a rhyme (three times with ‘seas’).
An Interlude
The ‘flag-flowers’ of line 11 belong to the yellow flag (Iris pseudacorus), common in wet meadows. Vernon Rendall in Wild Flowers in Literature (1934) records the appearance of flag-flowers in John Clare’s ‘Recollections after a Ramble’ (1821) and Tennyson’s ‘The Miller’s Daughter’ (1832), to which we might add Southey’s Thalaba (1801, Book 11, line 431), John Clare’s ‘Summer Evening’ (1821) and ‘The Wild Flower Nosegay’ (1821), and Shelley’s ‘The Question’ (1824). The meadow-sweet (line 12) is Spiraea ulmaria, of the same order as roses; it grows to about two feet and has creamy-white, strongly scented flowers; it is common in damp ground such as in moist meadows or along river-banks. It is not the species Spiraea salicifolia, which the name denotes in the United States. Rendall notes the meadow-sweets in Clare, Tennyson, Meredith and Arnold.
The lines are trimeter, and the metre consists of both iambs and anapests. The rhyme is abab, where a has a feminine ending.
Hendecasyllabics
The name (‘eleven syllables’) refers to the metre of the line:
with two possible variations, each occurring within the first two syllables:
The metre was favoured by Catullus, who used it in about two-thirds of his lyric poems. In English, the stress replaces the quantity of classical verse, though quantity must still be reckoned with. Coleridge’s ‘Catullian Hendecasyllabics’ (a reworking of the hendecasyllabic line into twelve syllables and running / xx / xx / x / x / /) was first published in 1834; Tennyson’s ‘Hendecasyllabics’ (‘all in quantity’) in 1863.
George M. Ridenour (‘Swinburne’s Imitations of Catullus’, Victorian Newsletter 74, Fall 1998, pp. 51–7) sees the poem’s welcome to autumn in relation to Catullus’s poem 46, which welcomes spring and is written in hendecasyllabics; he also takes lines 19–25 to be a reversal of the welcome to the beloved in the spring (‘For, lo, the winter is past…’), in the Song of Solomon 2:11–13. The metaphorical use of eyelids (line 6) perhaps recalls Milton, ‘Lycidas’ (line 26), ‘under the opening eyelids of the morn’.
In 1875, Swinburne objected to Gosse’s reference to the ‘laborious versification’ of Catullus, ‘whom I should have called the least laborious, and the most spontaneous in his godlike and birdlike melody, of all lyrists known to me except Sappho and Shelley: I should as soon call a lark’s note laboured as his’ (Lang, 3, 1).
Sapphics
Sappho’s stanza was modified by Horace, and the modified form became the basis for most English sapphics before Swinburne. Among the Elizabethan experiments with the sapphic, Philip Sidney’s and Thomas Campion’s are the most famous. Sidney’s most successful effort, ‘If mine eyes can speak,’ like Campion’s paraphrase of Psalm 19 (‘Come, let us sound’), adopts the scansion of the Horatian sapphic:
A caesura is mandatory after the fifth or sixth syllable. In English, stress replaces quantity; nonetheless, Swinburne, like Tennyson, was attentive to quantity and would not have demurred at Cowper’s admonition: ‘without close attention to syllabic quantity in the construction of our verse, we can give it neither melody nor dignity.’
In his Observations in the Art of English Poesie, Campion offers freer versions of the stanza, so that it consists of trochaics with an initial spondee, ‘to make the number more grave’. Although these freer versions had little subsequent influence, the insistence on gravity was important. Later sapphic stanzas were frequently weighty, as for example poems by Isaac Watts (‘The Day of Judgment’) and William Cowper (‘Lines Written During a Period of Insanity’). Robert Southey employed it to describe the death of an abandoned, homeless woman in ‘The Widow’ (1795). In Shelley’s ‘The Crisis’ (in the Esdaile Notebook, not published until the twentieth century) the theme is p
olitical injustice.
Swinburne bypasses this way of treating the metre, and returns to its form in Sappho rather than Horace. The scansion (marked in terms of accent rather than quantity, where x indicates a variable syllable) is
/ x / / xx / x / /
/ x / / xx / x / /
/ x / / xx / x / /
/ xx / /.
The Greek form differs from the Latin in having a variable fourth foot (in Horace it is always long) and in not requiring a caesura after the fifth or sixth syllable, so that the line flows more freely.
Théodore de Banville did not break with the traditional French form in his two sapphic poems ‘Idolâtrie’ and ‘À Victor Hugo’ in Les Cariatides (1842), but the first is an attempt to return to Sappho via sapphics:
Mètre divin, mètre de bonne race,
Que nous rapporte un poëte nouveau,
Toi qui jadis combattais pour Horace,
Rhythme de Sappho!
Sappho, of Mitylene (line 16) in Lesbos (lines 15, 30, 49), was called the ‘Tenth Muse’ (lines 26–30) in antiquity (Greek Anthology, 9.506; the expression is used by Shakespeare in Sonnet 38).
One of the interlocutors in Jerome J. McGann’s Swinburne: An Experiment in Criticism (1972) sees the poem as a conscious imitation with a reversal and further development of the ‘Ode to Aphrodite’, in which Aphrodite implores Sappho’s attention, not vice versa, etc. (p. 112).
At Eleusis
With some changes of detail, the poem keeps close to the story of Demeter as it is told in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter (which had been translated by Shelley around 1818 and published in 1839): after Hades abducts Persephone, her mother Demeter, hearing the echo of her voice, goes to seek her. No one will tell Demeter what happened until she meets Hecate, who takes her to the sun, who explains that Zeus gave her daughter to Hades. She is angry and distraught; disguised as an old woman, she wanders the earth until she meets the daughters of Celeus, a ruler of Eleusis. They are respectful and kind to her, and she becomes a nurse to Demophon, the infant son of Celeus and Metaneira. She tries to make him immortal by burning away his mortality; however, she is interrupted by Metaneira. (In later versions, Demophon is replaced by Triptolemus, as in Swinburne.) In the hymn, Demeter then reveals herself and begins to instruct the Eleusinians in her worship. She leaves then and instigates a year-long universal famine to force Zeus and Hades to release her daughter. A compromise is reached: Persephone is to spend part of each year with her mother. Demeter then renews the earth and teaches the Eleusinians to perform her mysteries.
Swinburne adopted some of the Greek phrases of the original: ‘τς ’ατκα γονατ’ λυvτο’ (line 281), ‘and right away her knees were loosened’; compare this with Swinburne’s lines 23 and 91. ‘Cope’ (line 101) is obsolete for ‘to meet’ or ‘to have a relation with’; it is used with this meaning in Shakespeare. ‘Competence’ (line 115) means sufficiency. The kingfisher (line 132) is the Greek mythical bird, the Halcyon. ‘Pleached’ (line 209) means interlaced. Lines 214–15 are an absolute construction, ‘when Celeus is dead and swathed…’
William Rossetti wrote that ‘ “At Eleusis” is an exceptionally long speech spoken by Demeter, as from a Greek tragedy – recalling also such modern work as some of Landor’s Hellenics [1847], or Browning’s so-called “Artemis Prologizes” [1842].’ It is written in blank verse. ‘Perfecting’ (line 136) and ‘perfected’ (line 201) are stressed on the first syllable.
Two pages from a manuscript are reproduced and discussed in John Hollander, ‘Algernon Charles Swinburne’s “At Eleusis” ’, in the Paris Review 154 (Spring 2000) 246–51.
August
Published in the Spectator, 6 September 1862.
For a discussion of the motif of the orchard, ‘the favourite Pre-Raphaelite refuge after 1850’, see Lothar Hönnighausen’s The Symbolist Tradition in English Literature (1988), pp. 141–2.
Keats in ‘To Autumn’ (1820) is Swinburne’s great predecessor in descriptions of ripeness.
The metre is iambic tetrameter; the stanza rhymes aabbab. Lines 1–2, 13–14, and 55–6 are repetitions with variations.
A manuscript is reproduced in P. J. Croft’s Autograph Poetry in the English Language (1973), pp. 139–40 (and facing pages).
A Christmas Carol
There was a revival of interest in Christmas carols in the mid-nineteenth century. Davies Gilbert published the first modern collection of carols in 1822; the next collector, William Sandys, published his in 1833; both men anticipated that carol singing would become extinct (see the preface to The Oxford Book of Carols, 1928). But scholarly interest in them, which would prompt Thomas Wright to publish several collections of early carols; romantic medievalism, which would inspire William Morris’s carols published in 1860; and the rise of Anglo-Catholicism following the decline of the Evangelical movement, all helped to revive the form as part of the ‘Victorian “reinvention” of Christmas’ (see the introduction to The New Oxford Book of Carols, 1992).
In 1884, in response to a request to reprint the poem, Swinburne indicated that his three favourite carols were William Morris’s ‘Masters in this hall’ (published around 1860 in Edmund Sedding’s Nine Antient and Goodly Carols for the Merry Tide of Christmass; Swinburne said it was worth ‘1,000,000,000 of mine’); ‘As Joseph was a-walking’ (‘which everybody knows’); and ‘I sing a mayden’ (published in 1856 by Thomas Wright; ‘I picked up the pamphlet by accident years ago’); see Lang, 5, 74–5).
The drawing by Rossetti which suggested the poem is presumably related to the watercolour A Christmas Carol, dated on the upper left side ‘Xmas 1857–58’, which shows a young woman playing a clavicord decorated with Christmas scenes and having her hair combed by two women.
The metre is predominantly iambic. The rhyme scheme is a4b3a4b3c3c3. The last two lines of each stanza form a variable refrain.
The Masque of Queen Bersabe
Although the story of David’s adultery with Bathsheba, his sending her husband Uriah to death in war, and the public exposure of his sins by Nathan (2 Samuel 11–12), does not seem to be among the extant miracle plays in English, the subject nonetheless is part of the sacred history upon which the cycle of miracle plays is based. However, since David was seen typologically as a figure of Christ in the Middle Ages, the story tended to be evaded or allegorized. Even in later English literature, George Peele’s The Love of King David and Fair Bethsabe has few parallels. (The drama was the subject of qualified praise by Swinburne in his essay ‘Christopher Marlowe in Relation to Greene, Peele, and Lodge’, Contemporaries of Shakespeare, [1916] 1919.) Nothing like the procession of the twenty-two women occurs in the extant miracle plays (not even the names of the women, including Bersabe, appear in the York, Chester or Towneley plays, at least). Still the cycles usually included a procession of prophets, sometimes including David. Bathsheba had a greater vogue in medieval and later art and in continental drama. For further information, see Elmer Blistein, ‘David in the Drama before 1600’, The Dramatic Works of George Peele, 1970, pp. 165–76.
The renewed appreciation and publication of medieval dramas was a recent phenomenon. The Shakespeare Society published some of the first modern editions of miracle plays (‘mysteries’) in 1841 (Coventry plays) and 1843–7 (Chester plays). John Hall in his Chronicles dated the introduction of the masque in England to 1513, and the word itself, according to the OED, first appears in print in 1514.
The Latin names of characters and stage directions are typical of such plays:
‘PRIMUS [etc.] MILES’ = ‘first [etc.] soldier’; ‘Paganus quidam’ = ‘a pagan.’
Et percutiat eum in capite = And let him strike him in the head.
Tunc dicat NATHAN propheta = Then let the prophet Nathan speak.
Hìc Diabolus capiat eum = Here let the Devil take him.
Et hìc omnes cantabunt = And here everyone will sing.
Et hìc exeant, et dicat Bersabe regina = And here let them leave, and let Queen Bers
abe say.
Et tunc dicant Laudamus = And then let them say the ‘Laudamus’.
The vocabulary is often archaic: ‘patens’ (line 13) = shallow dishes; ‘brast’ (line 16) = burst; ‘chirk’ (line 28) = chirp; ‘By Mahound’ (line 32; cf. line 116) = By Mahomet, an oath common in miracle plays, where Mahomet is taken to be a pagan god; ‘spill’ (line 33) = kill; ‘Poulis’ (line 38) = Paul’s; ‘I wis’ (lines 47, 56, 102) = certainly; ‘rede’ (lines 53, 111) = suppose; ‘sow of lead’ (line 67) = ‘large oblong mass of metal, as obtained from the smelting-surface’ (OED ‘sow’ 6a; cf. ‘pig’ sb. 1.7); ‘latoun’ (line 84) = made of latten, a metal like brass; ‘shot-windows’ (line 84) = windows opened on a hinge; ‘scant’ (line 85) = scanty supply; ‘basnets’ (line 86) = small, light headpiece; ‘stancheons’ (line 92) = upright supports; ‘kirtle’ (line 104) = skirt or outer petticoat; ‘Termagaunt’ (line 113) = ‘name of an imaginary deity held in medieval Christendom to be worshipped by Muslims’ (OED); ‘to-bete’ (line 114) = beat violently; ‘perfay’ (line 115) = by my faith (the OED gives this example as the first since the sixteenth century); ‘it is no boot’ (line 125) = it is no use.
‘As red as any’ (line 8) is an old comparison; it occurs, for example, in Langland, Piers Plowman B, Passus II, line 12. Lines 127–8 echo John 16:19.
The procession of women includes both classical and biblical names, sometimes with no particular reference or allusion implied:
HERODIAS. The wife of Herod Antipas (the son of Herod I), she seems in Swinburne’s poem to have performed herself the dance that the gospels attribute to her daughter Salome, for which Herod agreed to give her the severed head of John the Baptist. The subject was very popular in the second half of the nineteenth century; Heinrich Heine’s Atta Troll (1843) helped to introduce it.
Poems and Ballads and Atalanta in Calydon Page 44