AHOLIBAH. Along with her sister Aholah, a whore in the allegory of Ezekiel 23, to be brought to judgement. ‘She doted upon the Assyrians her neighbours, captains and rulers clothed most gorgeously, horsemen riding upon horses, all of them desirable young men’ (Ezekiel 23:12). See Swinburne’s poem ‘Aholibah’, p. 214.
CLEOPATRA. Also the subject of Swinburne’s poem ‘Cleopatra’ (1866); she committed suicide rather than be taken captive. Cf. Gautier’s Une Nuit de Cléopâtre (1845 ).
ABIHAIL. The name occurs in the Old Testament (e.g. the mother of Esther, among others). Isaiah 23 contains ‘the burden of Tyre’.
AZUBAH. An Old Testament name; Amorites were enemies of the Jews.
AHOLAH. See Aholibah. The city of Amalek was hostile to the Jews; see 1 Samuel 15.
AHINOAM. Two women in the Bible shared the name, a wife of Saul and a wife of David.
ATARAH. One mention in the Old Testament (1 Chronicles 2:26). Sidon is a Phoenician city.
SEMIRAMIS. Assyrian queen and heroine. See note to ‘Laus Veneris’. ‘Chrysophras’ (line 6): ‘the ancient name of a golden-green precious stone… It was one of the stones to which in the Middle Ages was attributed the faculty of shining in the dark’ (OED).
HESIONE. Daughter of Laomedon, king of Troy; saved by Heracles from a sea monster. Among various medieval accounts, there is Gower’s in Confessio Amantis.
CHRYSOTHEMIS. Daughter of Agamemnon. Samothrace is an island in the Aegean.
THOMYRIS OF SCYTHIANS. Queen who defeated Cyrus of Persia; see note to ‘Satia Te Sanguine’.
HARHAS. Mentioned once at 2 Kings 22:14. The Anakim are traditionally the surviving descendants of the giants of Genesis 6. (Tennyson: ‘I felt the thews of Anakim’, In Memoriam, 1850, CIII, 31.)
MYRRHA. Daughter and lover of Cinyras, of Panchaia, fabulous island between Arabia and India. The story is told in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Book 10.
PASIPHAE. Cretan queen. See note to ‘Phædra’.
SAPPHO. Poet from Lesbos. See notes to ‘Anactoria’ and ‘Sapphics’.
MESSALINA. Wife of the Roman emperor Claudius; licentious and ambitious; one of the targets of Juvenal’s Satires 6 and 10.
AMESTRIS. Wife of Xerxes I, the Persian king. In ‘Notes on Designs of the Old Masters at Florence’ (Essays and Studies, [1868] 1875, p. 320), Swinburne describes a drawing of a woman’s head by Michelangelo as ‘the deadlier Venus incarnate’, namely such women as Lamia or Cleopatra or ‘the Persian Amestris, watching the only breasts on earth more beautiful than her own cut off from her rival’s living bosom’. The story is in Herodotus 9. 112. Susa (Biblical Shushan) and Ecbatana are Persian cities in the time of Xerxes I.
EPHRATH. In 1 Chronicles 2:19, Ephrath replaces Azubah after her death. The valley of Rephaim makes several appearances in the Old Testament.
PASITHEA. The name of one of the Graces.
ALACIEL. The daughter of the Sultan of Babylon and eventual wife of the King of Algarve, who slept with nine men but was still taken for a virgin. The story is in Boccaccio’s Decameron, the seventh story of the second day. She also figures in Banville’s ‘Nadar’ of 1859.
ERIGONE. Daughter of Icarius, who was taught by Dionysus how to make wine. She killed herself when she found the body of her father, whom shepherds murdered in their drunken confusion. The story is told by Landor in the Hellenics (1847); it also influenced a composition by Berlioz (1841) and is represented in a painting by Gustave Moreau (1855).
Although the verse of the miracle plays is not iambic – instead interspersing an irregular number of unstressed syllables among the stressed syllables – Swinburne’s verse is mainly iambic. The stanza forms of the miracle plays are numerous and include the rime coué of this poem (and of Tennyson’s ‘The Lady of Shalott’, 1832).
St. Dorothy
Swinburne knew the treatment of the martyrdom of St Dorothy in Thomas Dekker and Philip Massinger’s The Virgin Martyr, a source for his early unpublished play ‘The Unhappy Revenge’ (see Edward Philip Schuldt’s dissertation Four Early Unpublished Plays of Algernon Charles Swinburne, 1976, pp. 118–24). Charles Lamb had praised The Virgin Martyr in his Specimens of English Dramatic Poets (1808), and several editions of Massinger’s complete plays were published in the first half of the nineteenth century. The martyrdom is recorded in many editions of the Golden Legend. In 1861 Swinburne wrote to Lady Trevelyan about ‘St. Dorothy’: ‘I wanted to try my heathen hands at a Christian subject, you comprehend, and give a pat to the Papist interest’ (Lang, 1, 38).
Norman H. MacKenzie (in an essay in Vital Candle, edited by John S. North and Michael D. Moore, 1981) explores the context of the mid-century interest in St Dorothy and adduces, in addition to Swinburne, Christina Rossetti’s ‘A Shadow of Dorothea’ (dated November 1858), Burne-Jones’s watercolour eventually called Theophilus and the Angel (1863–7), William Morris’s intention to include her among the stories in his Earthly Paradise, and early work by Gerard Hopkins.
A ‘shawm’ (lines 4, 393) is a medieval oboe. ‘Lampadias’ (line 24) is in Pliny a kind of comet or meteor (Natural History 2.90). ‘Lattice’ (line 36) is a window of lattice-work, and ‘after’ (line 37) means ‘behind’. ‘Other some’ (line 40) means ‘some others’. ‘Outwatch’ (line 58) is the only OED citation for the act of outwatching, that is, watching until the object watched disappears (cf. Milton’s ‘Il Penseroso’, line 87). ‘Middle Rome’ (line 86) = ‘the middle of Rome’, an archaic partitive usage revived, on the evidence of the OED, by Byron. Diomedes (line 104) wounded Aphrodite in battle during the Trojan war. A ‘thalamite’ (line 128) is a rower of a trireme; either Swinburne or Theophilus seems not to be using the word precisely. To ‘turn again’ (line 156) is to turn back. The ‘Janiculum’ (line 185) is the hill on which tradition locates the crucifixion of St Peter. The French in line 191 means ‘Good sir, God keep you.’ ‘Nones’ (line 282), the daily ecclesiastical office said at the ninth hour (about 3 p.m.), can in later use sometimes be said earlier, according to the OED, which quotes this line from Swinburne. ‘Saws’ (lines 283, 289) are stories or sayings; the word was obsolete though current in Shakespeare. The OED does not record the form ‘adrouth’ (line 288) from ‘drouth’, archaic for thirst. Although ‘hag’ meaning ‘nightmare’ was obsolete in Swinburne’s time, ‘hag-ridden’ (line 324), ‘afflicted by nightmare’, was still current usage. ‘Wit’ in line 365 is knowledge (OED 11b, the last citation is from 1648). Of ‘waterheads’ (line 374), Norman H. MacKenzie notes in his Poetical Works of Gerard Manley Hopkins (1990, p. 240): ‘Swinburne… uses it vaguely, probably for water-falls or springs.’ ‘Purfled’ (line 382), ‘having a decorative or ornamental border’, was revived as an archaism in the nineteenth century. ‘Wall-weed’ (line 401) appears to be Swinburne’s new term for the wallflower.
To my knowledge, there is no scripture that likens woman to an empty can (lines 292–3) and no ‘place amorous’ (line 437) in ancient or modern Rome. ‘Scripture’, however, once had the more general meaning of any written composition.
Line 12 may recall Tennyson, ‘Sir Galahad’ (1842, line 3), ‘My strength is as the strength of ten.’ ‘Eyed like a gracious bird’ (line 48) recalls Keats, ‘Lamia’ (1820, line 50), ‘Eyed like a peacock.’ ‘When God saith, “Go” ’ (line 157) may recall Matthew 8:13, ‘And Jesus said unto the centurion, Go thy way.’ Line 287 recalls the leviathan of Job 41:1–2.
William Rossetti observed that ‘ “St. Dorothy” is Chaucerian work, even to the extent of intentional anachronisms in the designations of the personages and otherwise.’ Gabalus, in particular, presumably the Roman emperor Heliogabalus (204–22), known for his cruelty, homosexual orgies, and worship of Baal, stands in anachronistically for the proconsul Sapricius under the Emperor Diocletian (245–316), who is Dorothy’s traditional tormentor. (Heliogabalus appears in Gautier’s Mademoiselle de Maupin, 1835 and Une Nuit de Cléopâtre, 1845; Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘William Wilson’, 1839; and Flaubert’s L’Education Sentim
entale, 1845. Simeon Solomon painted a Heliogabalus in 1866. See also Lang, 1, 57.) Theophilus’s prayer to Venus (lines 123–51) is reminiscent of Arcite’s prayer to Mars in The Knight’s Tale. Rossetti referred to the ‘intimate and indwelling Chaucerism’ of ‘St. Dorothy’. Still, much of the archaic vocabulary is early modern English rather than Chaucerian: ‘Gaditane’ (line 29, of Cadiz), ‘trans-shape’ (line 102, transform), ‘gold-ceiled’ (line 138), ‘downlying’ (line 235), ‘sheaved’ (line 268, gathered into a sheaf), ‘weet’ (line 292, know), and ‘writhled’ (line 435, wrinkled) date from the sixteenth or very early seventeenth centuries, according to the evidence of the OED.
The poem is in rhyming couplets of iambic pentameter; the metre is more regularly iambic than Chaucer’s. Sequences of sentences beginning with ‘And’ occur in both ‘St. Dorothy’ and Chaucer, but Swinburne’s series tend to be longer.
The Two Dreams
The poem is an adaptation of the sixth story of the fourth day of Boccaccio’s Decameron:
Andriula loves Gabriotto: she tells him a dream she has had and he tells her another he has had; he dies suddenly in her arms; while she is carrying him to his house with one of her servants, they are arrested by the authorities and she explains how things stand; the mayor tries to violate her, but she will not have it; her father hears this and frees her when she is found innocent; altogether refusing to live in the world any longer, she becomes a nun.
Swinburne’s changes include changing Andriula and Gabriotto into lovers rather than a secretly married couple and, in general, heightening the sensuality of the landscape and of the dreams.
William Rossetti wrote that ‘ “The Two Dreams”, from Boccaccio, is almost in equal measure Keatsian.’ Keats’s ‘Isabella’ (1820) derives from the fifth story of the fourth day of the Decameron.
Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s painting Bocca Baciata (1859) takes its title from Boccaccio; his Fiammetta dates from 1866. He published his translation of six sonnets by Boccaccio in 1861. See Herbert G. Wright’s Boccacio in England (1957) for more information about the reception and influence of Boccaccio in this period. Tennyson’s ‘The Golden Supper’ was first published in 1869.
Landor’s Pentameron (1837) consists of imaginary conversations between Petrarch and Boccaccio over five days; on the first day, Petrarch praises Boccaccio’s depiction of Andriula’s dream.
In his preface to Charles Well’s Joseph and His Brethren (1876), Swinburne referred to the ‘direct aim and clear comprehension of story which are never wanting in Boccaccio’ and to the ‘perfect narrative power which sustains the most poetical stories even of the fifth day of the Decameron, keeping always in full view the simple prose of the event’.
‘Somewhile’ (line 4) is sometimes. A ‘rood’ (line 34) is a measure of six to eight yards. ‘Prevalence’ (line 74) is mastery. ‘Evenwise’ (line 78) means ‘in like manner’. ‘Scanted’ in line 101 (stinted) is the first use since the seventeenth century, according to the OED, which describes ‘impleached’ (line 165) as ‘poet. rare’ and cites only Shakespeare, Tennyson and Swinburne. ‘Mere’ (line 238) is pure. ‘Chuckles’ (line 362) is the only OED citation for this usage.
The description of Ser Averardo’s house may owe something to the description of Madeline’s casement in Keats’s ‘The Eve of St. Agnes’ (1820).
The metre is iambic pentameter, in rhyming couplets.
Aholibah
Aholibah, in the allegory of Ezekiel 23, is unfaithful to God and consorts first with Assyrians and then with Babylonians:
12 She doted upon the Assyrians her neighbours, captains and rulers clothed most gorgeously, horsemen riding upon horses, all of them desirable young men.
13 Then I saw that she was defiled, that they [she and her sister Aholah] took both one way,
14 And that she increased her whoredoms: for when she saw men portrayed upon the wall, the images of the Chaldeans portrayed with vermilion,
15 Girdled with girdles upon their loins, exceeding in dyed attire upon their heads, all of them princes to look to, after the manner of the Babylonians of Chaldea, the land of their nativity:
16 And as soon as she saw them with her eyes, she doted upon them, and sent messengers unto them into Chaldea.
17 And the Babylonians came to her into the bed of love, and they defiled her with their whoredom, and she was polluted with them, and her mind was alienated from them.
[…]
22 Therefore, O Aholibah, thus saith the Lord God; Behold, I will raise up thy lovers against thee, from whom thy mind is alienated, and I will bring them against thee on every side;
23 The Babylonians, and all the Chaldeans, Pekod, and Shoa, and Koa, and all the Assyrians with them: all of them desirable young men, captains and rulers, great lords and renowned, all of them riding upon horses.
24 And they shall come against thee with chariots, wagons, and wheels, and with an assembly of people, which shall set against thee buckler and shield and helmet round about: and I will set judgement before them, and they shall judge thee according to their judgements.
25 And I will set my jealousy against thee, and they shall deal furiously with thee: they shall take away thy nose and thine ears; and thy remnant shall fall by the sword: they shall take thy sons and thy daughters; and thy residue shall be devoured by the fire.
26 They shall also strip thee out of thy clothes, and take away thy fair jewels.
[… ]
40 And furthermore, that ye have sent for men to come from far, unto whom a messenger was sent; and lo, they came: for whom thou didst wash thyself, paintedst thy eyes, and deckedst thyself with ornaments,
41 And satest upon a stately bed, and a table prepared before it, whereupon thou hast set mine incense and mine oil.
42 And a voice of a multitude being at ease was with her: and with the men of the common sort were brought Sabeans from the wilderness, which put bracelets upon their hands, and beautiful crowns upon their heads.
43 Then I said unto her that was old in adulteries, Will they now commit whoredoms with her, and she with them?
Many details of phrasing are taken from Ezekiel 23: line 60 from verse 41; lines 67 and 127 from verse 42; line 84 from verse 12; line 113 from verse 15; lines 123–5 from verse 25; line 130 from verse 43; and line 138 from verse 41. Lines 86–8 are taken from Song of Solomon 2:5. Some phrases like ‘creeping things’ (line 62) and ‘I will go up’ (line 91) occur in several places in the Bible. The ‘middle sea’ (line 16) is the Mediterranean; the ‘sackbut’ (line 67) is a Renaissance trumpet.
Line 34 is reminiscent of the first line of Donne’s sonnet, ‘I am a little world made cunningly’, as line 65 is of Pope’s line ‘This painted child of dirt that stinks and stings’, from the ‘Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot’ (line 310). ‘Strange seas’ (line 129) recalls Wordsworth, The Prelude, Book III, line 63 (1850).
The citizens in Swinburne’s Chastelard (1865) Act 5, Scene 1, discuss a sermon about Aholah and Aholibah.
The poem is in iambic tetrameter, and the stanzas rhyme ababb.
Love and Sleep
The conjunction of love and sleep is traditional; cf. Pope’s Iliad, Book 14, line 405, ‘with Love and Sleep’s soft Pow’r opprest’; Burns’s ‘On a Bank of Flowers’ (1790), line 4, ‘With love and sleep opprest’; Shelley’s ‘The Sunset’ (1824) lines 24–5, ‘the youth and lady mingled lay in love and sleep’ and Homeric Hymn to the Moon (1839), line 21, ‘The Son of Saturn with this glorious Power Mingled in love and sleep.’
The sonnet is Petrarchan, rhyming abba abba cde cde.
Madonna Mia
The phrase ‘madonna mia’, an address to the beloved, is not uncommon in Italian duecento poetry. Dante Gabriel ‘Rossetti translates it as ‘my lady mine’ in his version of Jacobo da Lentino [Giacomo da Lentini], ‘Of his lady’, in 1861; he gives the Italian in a footnote.
Douglas C. Fricke compares the poem to Wordsworth’s Lucy poems, especially ‘Three years she grew in sun and shower’, in
his 1971 doctoral dissertation from Pennsylvania State University, A Critical Study of Swinburne’s Poems and Ballads (1866).
The metre is iambic; the stanza rhymes aaabcccb, where a and c are trimeters and b is dimeter.
The King’s Daughter
Swinburne’s interest in ballads began in his childhood and endured throughout his life. In 1861 he began to prepare his own collection of mostly northern ballads, relying heavily on Francis Child’s 1861 edition of English and Scottish Ballads, and also on Walter Scott’s Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (1802) and Peter Buchan’s Ancient Ballads and Songs of the North of Scotland (1828); he abandoned the project shortly after. (See Anne Henry Ehrenpreis’s ‘Swinburne’s Edition of Popular Ballads’, Publications of the Modern Language Association 78:5, December 1963, 559–71.)
‘The King’s Daughter’ is the first of five consecutive ballads in Poems and Ballads. The tradition of the literary ballad includes works by many of the major Romantic writers (Coleridge, Wordsworth, Scott, Keats) as well as Tennyson and, nearer to Swinburne’s time, William Morris and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. (Swinburne praised Rossetti’s ‘Sister Helen’ intensely, in Essays in Studies, [1870] 1875, p. 86.) See Anne Henry Ehrenpreis’s anthology The Literary Ballad, 1966.
Poems and Ballads and Atalanta in Calydon Page 45