Lines 1524–31 might be glossed as follows: when dawn touches night, the sky sees three things happen: lips and eyelids laugh, redden, and divide; breasts heave; and undulation of hair colours the clouds. ‘He’ in line 1593 is Plexippus; in line 1595 ‘this man’ is Toxeus. Herlet expands line 1655: ‘[stains that are] no festal stains [of delightful wine but stains] of undelightful wine.’ Lines 1714–15 would have the more natural order ‘beasts that slay, divide, and feed, [and so] cheer themselves’. Eurythemis (line 1740) is Althaea’s mother; see line 299. ‘Put back’ in Althaea’s question at line 1803, ‘shall I put back my day?’ may mean either ‘to set back to an earlier position’ (and thus pretend not to know what she must do) or ‘to defer, put off’ (and so delay the day that will destroy her as well as her son).
Fifth Stasimon (lines 1809–1855)
The choral ode consists of two stanzas, mostly rhymed irregularly. The first is composed of iambic tetrameter lines (with occasional elisions or anapaestic substitutions). The second consists of eight lines of iambo-anapaestic trimeter followed by ten lines of iambo-anapestic pentameter in rhyming couplets with an internal rhyme after the third foot.
Exodus (lines 1856–2317)
Althaea, Chorus, Second Messenger, Meleager, Atalanta, Oeneus.
A variety of Greek idioms is present in this scene. Line 1897, ‘what word has flown out at thy mouth?’, recalls the Homeric expression, ‘What word has escaped the barrier of thy teeth?’ The address to the head, ‘O holy head of Œneus’ (line 2182), is a form of address common in Greek tragedy; see also line 1032. The metaphor of the ploughed field for the womb (lines 2215–17) is Greek (see, for example, Sophocles, Oedipus the King, lines 1211–12 and 1256–7). For ‘the doorway of thy lips’ (line 1899), compare both Euripides, Hippolytus, line 882 (‘the gates of my mouth’) and Psalms 141:3 (‘door of my lips’).
Althaea’s line 1893 may ironically recall the New Testament pronouncement ‘This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased’ (Matthew 3:17, etc.). Althaea’s name was ‘a healing’ (line 1944) because Swinburne, like Greek poets, freely puns with names and invokes here the verb λθαíνω, to heal. Her final words (line 1947) are similar to Jocasta’s in Oedipus the King (lines 1071–2) as she goes to her death.
The kommos begins at line 1948 and continues to line 2181. A kommos is a lament which takes the form of a lyric, or semi-lyric, dialogue between the chorus and one or more actors. (For more information, see the appendix ‘Kommos, Threnos, Amoibaion’ in H. D. Broadhead, The Persae of Aeschylus, Cambridge, 1960.) Swinburne adapts this Greek dramatic convention. His kommos consists of three parts:
1) lines 1948–83. The chorus splits into two companies, as in the kommos of Aeschylus, Seven Against Thebes, lines 875–960. Each semichorus delivers a stanza of six rhyming (abccab) lines of iambo-anapestic trimeter.
2) lines 1984–2026. The second messenger’s lines are not lyric. He speaks in sets of three unrhymed iambic lines, dividing the semichorus’s rhymed (abab) four-line stanza into two sections. Their lines are also iambo-anapestic trimeter. This is perhaps modelled on the amoibaion in Aeschylus, Agamemnon, lines 1072–1177, the scene in which Cassandra’s passionate lyrical utterances alternate with the iambic lines of the chorus, until they are caught up by her excitement and adopt her lyrical metre.
3) lines 2027–181. The lyrical exchange between the semichorus, Me leager, Atalanta and Oeneus occurs in five-line stanzas rhyming ababb and consisting of four iambo-anapestic dimeters followed by an iambo-anapestic hexameter (the stanza of Swinburne’s ‘Hertha’, 1871). This four-part kommos was probably influenced by the three-part kommos of Aeschylus, The Libation-Bearers, lines 306–478. In particular, Oeneus’s wish that Meleager had died more nobly (lines 2112–16) echoes Orestes’ wish for a more noble death for Agamemnon at lines 345–53.
Mario Praz compares the third part of the kommos and the rest of the play to the end of Euripides’ Hippolytus. Here Meleager is brought dying on the scene, is comforted by Atalanta, and forgives his mother who has killed him. In Euripides’ play, Hippolytus is brought dying on the scene, is comforted by Artemis, and forgives his father who has killed him.
The language of the kommos is elevated. The ‘blast of… God’ (line 2046) recalls Job 4:9 (‘by the blast of God they perish’). ‘Without lyre’ (line 2070) recalls the dirge described in Aeschylus, Agamemnon, line 990. The ‘dreamer of dreams’ (line 2078) is a phrase from Deuteronomy 13:1, 3, 5. ‘Winter’s wan daughter’ (line 2104) is a kenning for snow. The Pontic sea (line 2126) and the Hellespont (line 2121) occur in Shakespeare, Othello, Act III, Scene 3, line 453. ‘Pine’ is used metonymically for a ship at line 2155 (and earlier at line 590), as pinus can be used for ship (or mast or oar) in Latin poetry.
Meleager’s battle with the men of Thrace (lines 2107–12) is presumably a battle fought by the Argonauts on the way to Colchis. The enmity of the Thracians and the Lemnian women (who receive the Argonauts) is recorded in Apollonius Rhodius, Argonautica, Book 1, line 678.
The place-names can be located on the map in the appendix. ‘Acroceraunian snow’ (line 2121) refers to the mountains on the west shore of Epirus. The phrase occurs in Shelley’s ‘Prologue to Hellas’ (1822) line 173, and his ‘Arethusa’ (1824) opens with a couch of snows in the Acroceraunian mountains. These mountains are the western limit of the Greek world, and the Hellespont (line 2121, ‘the ford of the fleece of gold’, now the Dardanelles) is the eastern limit. The Hellespont derives its name from Helle (line 2151), who fled with her brother Phrixos through it on a ram with golden fleece. Helle fell and was drowned in the sea (pontos); Phrixos reached Colchis on the golden ram. The Chersonese (line 2125) is the peninsula forming the northern side of the Hellespont, which connects the Aegean with the Propontis (line 2141, the Sea of Marmara), and thus is in fact south of the Bosporus (cf. line 2126). Swinburne, like most English poets except for Milton, uses the spelling ‘Bosphorus’ (βσπορος in Greek).
Meleager’s last words (line 2309) may be indebted to John 9:4, ‘the night cometh, when no man can work’.
The six-line stanza at the end of the play rhymes ababab. The lines are iambo-anapestic trimeter. Lines 2314–15 may recall these lines from Blake’s Europe (Plate 2, lines 28–9):
And who shall bind the infinite with an eternal band,
To compass it with swaddling bands?
Swinburne quotes these lines in his study William Blake (1868, but written earlier).
APPENDIX 1:
Notes on Poems and Reviews
Swinburne responded to hostile reviews of Poems and Ballads with this pamphlet, published in 1866 by Hotten. See Lang, 1, 192–8 for a full discussion.
The text was edited by Clyde Kenneth Hyder in Swinburne Replies (Syracuse University Press, 1966); he also annotated it. The text and notes are reprinted with the kind permission of the Syracuse University Press.
Notes on Poems and Reviews
‘Je pense sur ces satires comme Épictète: ‘Si l’on dit du mal de toi, et qu’il soit véritable, corrige-toi; si ce sont des mensonges, ris-en.’ J’ai appris avec l’âge à devenir bon cheval de poste; je fais ma station, et ne m’embarrasse pas des roquets qui aboient en chemin.’
– Frédéric le Grand.
‘Ignorance by herself is an awkward lumpish wench; not yet fallen into vicious courses, nor to be uncharitably treated: but Ignorance and Insolence, these are, for certain, an unlovely Mother and Bastard!’
– Carlyle.
It is by no wish of my own that I accept the task now proposed to me. To vindicate or defend myself from the assault or the charge of men whom, but for their attacks, I might never have heard of, is an office which I, or any writer who respects his work, cannot without reluctance stoop to undertake. As long as the attacks on my book – I have seen a few, I am told there are many – were confined within the usual limits of the anonymous press, I let them pass without the notice to which they appeared to aspire. Sincere or insincere, insolen
t or respectful, I let my assailants say out their say unheeded.
I have now undertaken to write a few words on this affair, not by way of apology or vindication, of answer or appeal. I have none such to offer. Much of the criticism I have seen is as usual, in the words of Shakspeare’s greatest follower,
As if a man should spit against the wind;
The filth returns in’s face.1
In recognition of his fair dealing with me in this matter, I am bound by my own sense of right to accede to the wish of my present publisher, and to the wishes of friends whose advice I value, that on his account, if not on mine, I should make some reply to the charges brought against me – as far as I understand them. The work is not fruitful of pleasure, of honour, or of profit; but, like other such tasks, it may be none the less useful and necessary. I am aware that it cannot be accomplished without some show of egotism; and I am perforce prepared to incur the consequent charge of arrogance. The office of commentator on my own works has been forced upon me by circumstances connected with the issue and re-issue of my last book. I am compelled to look sharply into it, and inquire what passage, what allusion, or what phrase can have drawn down such sudden thunder from the serene heavens of public virtue. A mere libeller I have no wish to encounter; I leave it to saints to fight with beasts at Ephesus or nearer.2 ‘For in these strifes, and on such persons, it were as wretched to affect a victory, as it is unhappy to be committed with them.’3
Certain poems of mine, it appears, have been impugned by judges, with or without a name, as indecent or as blasphemous. To me, as I have intimated, their verdict is a matter of infinite indifference: it is of equally small moment to me whether in such eyes as theirs I appear moral or immoral, Christian or pagan. But, remembering that science must not scorn to investigate animalcules and infusoria,4 I am ready for once to play the anatomist.
With regard to any opinion implied or expressed throughout my book, I desire that one thing should be remembered: the book is dramatic, many-faced, multifarious; and no utterance of enjoyment or despair, belief or unbelief, can properly be assumed as the assertion of its author’s personal feeling or faith. Were each poem to be accepted as the deliberate outcome and result of the writer’s conviction, not mine alone but most other men’s verses would leave nothing behind them but a sense of cloudy chaos and suicidal contradiction. Byron and Shelley, speaking in their own persons, and with what sublime effect we know, openly and insultingly mocked and reviled what the English of their day held most sacred. I have not done this. I do not say that, if I chose, I would not do so to the best of my power; I do say that hitherto I have seen fit to do nothing of the kind.
It remains then to inquire what in that book can be reasonably offensive to the English reader. In order to resolve this problem, I will not fish up any of the ephemeral scurrilities born only to sting if they can, and sink as they must. I will take the one article that lies before me; the work (I admit) of an enemy, but the work (I acknowledge) of a gentleman. I cannot accept it as accurate; but I readily and gladly allow that it neither contains nor suggests anything false or filthy. To him therefore, rather than to another, I address my reclamation. Two among my poems, it-appears, are in his opinion ‘especially horrible’.5 Good. Though the phrase be somewhat ‘inexpressive’, I am content to meet him on this ground. It is something – nay, it is much – to find an antagonist who has a sufficient sense of honesty and honour to mark out the lists in which he, the challenger, is desirous to encounter the challenged.
The first, it appears, of these especially horrible poems is Anactoria. I am informed, and have not cared to verify the assertion, that this poem has excited, among the chaste and candid critics of the day or hour or minute, a more vehement reprobation, a more virtuous horror, a more passionate appeal, than any other of my writing. Proud and glad as I must be of this distinction, I must yet, however reluctantly, inquire what merit or demerit has incurred such unexpected honour. I was not ambitious of it; I am not ashamed of it; but I am overcome by it. I have never lusted after the praise of reviewers; I have never feared their abuse; but I would fain know why the vultures should gather here of all places; what congenial carrion they smell, who can discern such (it is alleged) in any rose-bed. And after a little reflection I do know, or conjecture. Virtue, as she appears incarnate in British journalism and voluble through that unsavoury organ, is something of a compound creature –
A lump neither alive nor dead,
Dog-headed, bosom-eyed, and bird-footed;6
nor have any dragon’s jaws been known to emit on occasion stronger and stranger sounds and odours. But having, not without astonishment and disgust, inhaled these odours, I find myself at last able to analyse their component parts. What my poem means, if any reader should want that explained, I am ready to explain, though perplexed by the hint that explanation may be required. What certain reviewers have imagined it to imply, I am incompetent to explain, and unwilling to imagine. I am evidently not virtuous enough to understand them. I thank Heaven that I am not. Ma corruption rougirait de leur pudeur.7 I have not studied in those schools whence that full-fledged phoenix, the ‘virtue’ of professional pressmen, rises chuckling and crowing from the dunghill, its birthplace and its deathbed. But there are birds of alien feather, if not of higher flight; and these I would now recall into no hencoop or preserve of mine, but into the open and general field where all may find pasture and sunshine and fresh air: into places whither the prurient prudery and the virulent virtue of pressmen and prostitutes cannot follow; into an atmosphere where calumny cannot speak, and fatuity cannot breathe; in a word, where backbiters and imbeciles become impossible. I neither hope nor wish to change the unchangeable, to purify the impure. To conciliate them, to vindicate myself in their eyes, is a task which I should not condescend to attempt, even were I sure to accomplish.
In this poem I have simply expressed, or tried to express, that violence of affection between one and another which hardens into rage and deepens into despair. The key-note which I have here touched was struck long since by Sappho. We in England are taught, are compelled under penalties to learn, to construe, and to repeat, as schoolboys, the imperishable and incomparable verses of that supreme poet; and I at least am grateful for the training. I have wished, and I have even ventured to hope, that I might be in time competent to translate into a baser and later language the divine words which even when a boy I could not but recognise as divine. That hope, if indeed I dared ever entertain such a hope, I soon found fallacious. To translate the two odes and the remaining fragments of Sappho is the one impossible task; and as witness of this I will call up one of the greatest among poets. Catullus ‘translated’8 – or as his countrymen would now say ‘traduced’ – the Ode to Anactoria – Eς ’Eωμναν: a more beautiful translation there never was and will never be; but compared with the Greek, it is colourless and bloodless, puffed out by additions and enfeebled by alterations. Let any one set against each other the two first stanzas, Latin and Greek, and pronounce. (This would be too much to ask of all of my critics; but some among the journalists of England may be capable of achieving the not exorbitant task.) Where Catullus failed I could not hope to succeed; I tried instead to reproduce in a diluted and dilated form the spirit of a poem which could not be reproduced in the body.
Now, the ode Ες ’Eωμναν – the ‘Ode to Anactoria’ (as it is named by tradition) – the poem which English boys have to get by heart – the poem (and this is more important) which has in the whole world of verse no companion and no rival but the Ode to Aphrodite, has been twice at least translated or ‘traduced’. I am not aware that Mr. Ambrose Phillips,9 or M. Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux, was ever impeached before any jury of moralists for his sufficiently grievous offence. By any jury of poets both would assuredly have been convicted. Now, what they did I have not done. To the best (and bad is the best) of their ability, they have ‘done into’ bad French and bad English the very words of Sappho. Feeling that although I might do it better I
could not do it well, I abandoned the idea of translation – χων οντ γε θυμ.10 I tried, then, to write some paraphrase of the fragment which the Fates and the Christians have spared us. I have not said, as Boileau and Phillips have, that the speaker sweats and swoons at sight of her favourite by the side11 of a man. I have abstained from touching on such details, for this reason: that I felt myself incompetent to give adequate expression in English to the literal and absolute words of Sappho; and would not debase and degrade them into a viler form. No one can feel more deeply than I do the inadequacy of my work. ‘That is not Sappho,’ a friend said once to me. I could only reply, ‘It is as near as I can come; and no man can come close to her.’ Her remaining verses are the supreme success, the final achievement, of the poetic art.
But this, it may be, is not to the point. I will try to draw thither; though the descent is immeasurable from Sappho’s verse to mine, or to any man’s. I have striven to cast my spirit into the mould of hers, to express and represent not the poem but the poet. I did not think it requisite to disfigure the page with a foot-note wherever I had fallen back upon the original text. Here and there, I need not say, I have rendered into English the very words of Sappho. I have tried also to work into words of my own some expression of their effect: to bear witness how, more than any other’s, her verses strike and sting the memory in lonely places, or at sea, among all loftier sights and sounds – how they seem akin to fire and air, being themselves ‘all air and fire’;12 other element there is none in them. As to the angry appeal against the supreme mystery of oppressive heaven, which I have ventured to put into her mouth at that point only where pleasure culminates in pain, affection in anger, and desire in despair – as to the ‘blasphemies’* against God or Gods of which here and elsewhere I stand accused, – they are to be taken as the first outcome or outburst of foiled and fruitless passion recoiling on itself. After this, the spirit finds time to breathe and repose above all vexed senses of the weary body, all bitter labours of the revolted soul; the poet’s pride of place is resumed, the lofty conscience of invincible immortality in the memories and the mouths of men.
Poems and Ballads and Atalanta in Calydon Page 49