Poems and Ballads and Atalanta in Calydon

by Algernon Swinburne

  Various chances and causes must have combined to produce a state of faith or feeling which would turn all art and literature ‘into the line of children’.37 One among others may be this: where the heaven of invention holds many stars at once, there is no fear that the highest and largest will either efface or draw aside into its orbit all lesser lights. Each of these takes its own way and sheds its proper lustre. But where one alone is dominant in heaven, it is encircled by a pale procession of satellite moons, filled with shallow and stolen radiance. Thus, with English versifiers now, the idyllic form is alone in favour. The one great and prosperous poet of the time has given out the tune, and the hoarser choir takes it up. His highest lyrical work remains unimitated, being in the main inimitable. But the trick of tone which suits an idyl is easier to assume; and the note has been struck so often that the shrillest songsters can affect to catch it up. We have idyls good and bad, ugly and pretty; idyls of farm and the mill; idyls of the dining-room and the deanery; idyls of the gutter and the gibbet. If the Muse of the minute will not feast with ‘gig-men’38 and their wives, she must mourn with costermongers and their trulls. I fear the more ancient Muses are guests at neither house of mourning nor house of feasting.39

  For myself, I begrudge no man his taste or his success; I can enjoy and applaud all good work, and would always, when possible, have the workman paid in full. There is much excellent and some admirable verse among the poems of the day: to none has it given more pleasure than to me, and from none, had I been a man of letters to whom the ways were open, would it have won heartier applause. I have never been able to see what should attract men to the profession of criticism but the noble pleasure of praising. But I have no right to claim a place in the silver flock of idyllic swans. I have never worked for praise or pay, but simply by impulse, and to please myself; I must therefore, it is to be feared, remain where I am, shut out from the communion of these. At all events, I shall not be hounded into emulation of other men’s work by the baying of unleashed beagles. There are those with whom I do not wish to share the praise of their praisers. I am content to abide a far different judgment:–

  I write as others wrote

  On Sunium’s height.40

  I need not be over-careful to justify my ways in other men’s eyes; it is enough for me that they also work after their kind, and earn the suffrage, as they labour after the law, of their own people. The idyllic form is best for domestic and pastoral poetry. It is naturally on a lower level than that of tragic or lyric verse. Its gentle and maidenly lips are somewhat narrow for the stream and somewhat cold for the fire of song. It is very fit for the sole diet of girls; not very fit for the sole sustenance of men.

  When England has again such a school of poetry, so headed and so followed, as she has had at least twice before, or as France has now; when all higher forms of the various art are included within the larger limits of a stronger race; then, if such a day should ever rise or return upon us, it will be once more remembered that the office of adult art is neither puerile nor feminine, but virile; that its purity is not that of the cloister or the harem; that all things are good in its sight, out of which good work may be produced. Then the press will be as impotent as the pulpit to dictate the laws and remove the landmarks of art; and those will be laughed at who demand from one thing the qualities of another – who seek for sermons in sonnets and morality in music. Then all accepted work will be noble and chaste in the wider masculine sense, not truncated and curtailed, but outspoken and full-grown; art will be pure by instinct and fruitful by nature, no clipped and forced growth of unhealthy heat and unnatural air; all baseness and all triviality will fall off from it, and be forgotten; and no one will then need to assert, in defence of work done for the work’s sake, the simple laws of his art which no one will then be permitted to impugn.

  A. C. SWINBURNE.

  Explanatory Notes (Clyde Hyder)

  [bold numbers refer to note numbers inserted in Swinburne’s text]

  1. As… face. John Webster, The White Devil, III. 2. 149–50.

  2. Beasts at Ephesus. I Cor. 15:32.

  3. ‘For… them.’ In Ben Jonson’s ‘To the Reader’, at the conclusion of The Poetaster.

  4. Infusoria. The passage anticipates the stance of Under the Microscope.

  5. ‘Especially horrible.’ Quoted from the London Review, XIII (4 August 1866), 130.

  6. A lump… bird-footed. Shelley’s The Witch of Atlas, XI. 7–8.

  7. Ma corruption… pudeur. The statement that ‘my depravity would blush at their modesty’ neatly fits the context. If the French is a quotation, the source is undiscovered.

  8. Catullus ‘translated’. In Catullus, LI. Latin traducere, ‘to translate’, also means ‘to misrepresent’. Swinburne was fond of recalling the Italian equation of traduttóre and traditóre.

  9. Ambrose Philips, as the name is usually written (c. 1675–1749), in ‘A Fragment from Sappho’, and Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux (1636–1711) in Traité du sublime, chap. VIII, a translation of Longinus’s treatise, are referred to here.

  10. The Greek quotation is from the Iliad, IV. 43: ‘Of mine own will, yet with reluctant mind,’ cited by Swinburne himself as the equivalent of the Homeric phrase (Lang, IV, 230).

  11. By the side. Swinburne’s letter to W. M. Rossetti of 13 October 1866 mentions his wish to change to this reading (Lang, I, 200).

  12. ‘All air and fire.’ Michael Drayton’s phrase in regard to Marlowe, in his ‘To My Most Dearly-Loved Friend Henry Reynolds, Esquire, of Poets and Poesy’.

  13. The quotations are from Shelley’s Queen Mab, VII. 164, 172, 180. Moxon and Co., the publishers of Queen Mab, published Poems and Ballads before it was transferred to Hotten.

  14. ‘Violent… ends.’ Romeo and Juliet, Act II, Scene 6, line 9.

  15. Moods… worth. Matthew Arnold, ‘To a Gypsy Child by the Seashore’, line 18.

  16. Cotytto. A Thracian goddess the nature of whose rites suggests identification with the originally Phrygian Cybele.

  17. Origen (185–254), important Christian theologian, is mentioned as a type of the religious eunuch along with the mythical Atys, who, driven mad by the mother-goddess Cybele, emasculated himself (Swinburne knew the account in Catullus, LXIII). The corybantes and priests of Cybele also became eunuchs.

  18. On Dindymus, a mountain in Phrygia, stood an early sanctuary of Cybele. In Loreto, in central Italy, was a church reputed to contain the Virgin’s house, originally in Nazareth but said to have been brought thence by angels. At one time Loreto was regarded as ‘the Christian Mecca’.

  19. ‘Islands of the blest’ was used by Byron (Don Juan, III, line 700), in the poem beginning, ‘The isles of Greece…’ Byron’s editors cite the Greek for ‘the blessed isles’ (Hesiod’s Works and Days, line 171), interpreted as the Cape Verde islands or the Canaries. The name Hesperia was of course used for the western land, Italy, in Vergil’s Aeneid, III, line 163.

  20. The French for ‘Who has drunk will drink’ is apparently proverbial. [Balzac, Le Père Goriot, Part III, and La Cousine Bette, chapters 30 and 98.]

  21. Euphrasy and rue. Cf. Paradise Lost, XI, line 414.

  22. ‘Is… it.’ The Book of Common Prayer gives this reading for Psalm 139:6.

  23. Théophile Gautier, Albertus, XCVIII: ‘I warn the mothers of families that I am not writing for little girls, for whom one makes bread and butter; my verses are a young man’s verses.’

  24. MM. Purgon and Diafoirus are characters in Molière’s Le Malade imaginaire.

  25. The elder Faustina was the wife of the Emperor Antoninus Pius and the mother of the younger Faustina, who married her cousin Marcus Aurelius. Legend is less kind to the characters of the two women than sober history.

  26. Foolish virgins. Matt. 25:1 ff.

  27. The fallen goddess… divine. See, for instance, Œuvres complètes de Charles Baudelaire, ed. M. Jacques Crepet (Paris, 1925), II, pp. 215–16, 220, 226.

  28. In Plato… absurd. In the Symp
osium.

  29. More than once ‘… sculptor’s love’. Though the phrasing quoted by Swinburne has not been found in Shelley, both The Witch of Atlas and ‘Lines Connected with Epipsychidion’ refer to ‘that sweet marble monster of both sexes’. Chapter IX of Gautier’s Mademoiselle de Maupin, a work Swinburne greatly admired, has much to say of the ancient piece of sculpture. [The quotation has been traced to Gautier’s review of a play entitled Fragoletta in his Histoire de l’art dramatique en France depuis vingt-cinq ans (1859). See Catherine Maxwell, ‘Swinburne, Gautier, and the Louvre Hermaphrodite’, Notes and Queries 40:1 (March 1993), pp. 49–50.]

  30. The words quoted are, of course, from the first line of Keats’s Endymion; the following words sound like a reminiscence from the ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’, line 26: ‘For ever warm and still to be enjoy’d.’

  31. The phrases ‘loathsome and horrible’, ‘nameless and abominable’, and ‘unspeakable foulnesses’ were used in John Morley’s unsigned critique of Poems and Ballads in the Saturday Review, XXII (4 August 1866), pp. 145–47.

  32. ‘However… me.’ From Landor’s ‘Appendix to the Hellenics’, Poems, ed. Stephen Wheeler (London, 1935), III (Complete Works, XV), 236, lines 47–8.

  33. In A Swinburne Library, p. 32, Wise quotes ‘the lines as Swinburne first wrote them’: A Query

  Why should you grudge me lyre and laurel,

  O toothless mouth, O soundless maw?

  I never grudged you bell and coral,

  I never grudged you troughs and straw.

  Lie still in kennel, snug in stable,

  Good creatures of the stall or sty;

  Shove snouts for crumbs beneath the table;

  Lie still; and rise not up to lie.

  34. Ariosto (1474–1533), the great Italian poet most renowned for Orlando Furioso, ‘laughs in the sun’; Aretino (1492–1556), some of whose works are obscene, ‘sniggers in the shade’. Though the antithesis seems characteristic of Hugo’s style, the lines have not been found in Hugo or other French authors.

  35. The whiter… within. Cf. Matt. 23:27.

  36. ‘It… sound.’ From Ben Jonson’s song from Epicœne, or The Silent Woman (Act I, scene 1) beginning, ‘Still to be neat, still to be dressed.’

  37. ‘Line’ refers to standard of life or course of conduct.

  38. The OED cites Carlyle’s Miscellanies as using ‘gig-man’ in the sense of ‘one whose respectability is measured by his keeping a gig;… a “Philistine”.’ Swinburne’s description fitted poems like Buchanan’s ‘Liz’ and ‘Nell’, and Buchanan considered the passage aimed at him. But was it? One might with equal plausibility suppose that in referring to ‘idyls of the… deanery’ Swinburne was thinking of Patmore’s Angel in the House. Since other poems, now forgotten, may have fitted descriptions like this or ‘idyls of the gutter and the gibbet’, one must distinguish between suspicion and certainty.

  39. House… feasting. Cf. Eccl. 7:2.

  40. I… height. From Landor’s Poems, ed. Wheeler, III (Collected Works, XV), p. 277, in ‘Poems on Books and Writers’.

  APPENDIX 2: Map of places in Atalanta in Calydon

  INDEX OF TITLES AND FIRST LINES

  After Death 224

  Aholibah 214

  A little marsh-plant, yellow green 148

  A month or twain to live on honeycomb 147

  All the bright lights of heaven 73

  All the night sleep came not upon my eyelids 163

  Anactoria 47

  Anima Anceps 81

  April 145

  Asleep or waking is it? for her neck 9

  At Eleusis 165

  August 171

  Back to the flower-town, side by side 107

  Ballad of Burdens, A 100

  Ballad of Death, A 5

  Ballad of Life, A 3

  Before Dawn 120

  Before our lives divide for ever 29

  Before Parting 147

  Before the beginning of years [from Atalanta] 258

  Before the Mirror 103

  Bloody Son, The 227

  Cameo, A 91

  Christmas Carol, A 173

  Cold eyelids that hide like a jewel 122

  Dedication, 1865 234

  Dolores 122

  Erotion 106

  Faustine 86

  Félise 150

  Fragoletta 67

  Garden of Proserpine, The 136

  Hendecasyllabics 162

  Here, where the world is quiet 136

  Hermaphroditus 65

  Hesperia 139

  Hymn to Proserpine 55

  I found in dreams a place of wind and flowers 3

  I have lived long enough, having seen 55

  I will that if I say a heavy thing 202

  If love were what the rose is 84

  If you loved me ever so little 70

  Ilicet 61

  In Memory of Walter Savage Landor 107

  In the beginning God made thee 214

  In the fair days when God 114

  In the greenest growth of the Maytime 160

  In the month of the long decline of roses 162

  In the Orchard 82

  Interlude, An 160

  It hath been seen and yet it shall be seen 189

  Itylus 45

  King’s Daughter, The 222

  Kissing her hair I sat against her feet 103

  Kneel down, fair Love, and fill thyself with tears 5

  Knights mine, all that be in hall 176

  Lamentation, A 77

  Laus Veneris 9

  Lay not thine hand upon me; let me go 23

  Lean back, and get some minutes’ peace 86

  Leave go my hands, let me catch breath and see 82

  Leave-Taking, A 44

  Leper, The 95

  Let us go hence, my songs; she will not hear 44

  Lift up thy lips, turn round, look back for love 65

  Litany, A 73

  Love and Sleep 219

  Love at Sea 144

  Lying asleep between the strokes of night 219

  Madonna Mia 219

  Masque of Queen Bersabe, The 176

  Match, A 84

  May Janet 226

  Men of Eleusis, ye that with long staves 165

  My life is bitter with thy love; thine eyes 47

  Not as with sundering of the earth [from Atalanta] 304

  Nothing is better, I well think 95

  Noyades, Les 41

  O Love! what shall be said of thee? 67

  O that I now, I too were [from Atalanta] 290

  ‘O where have ye been the morn sae late 227

  Out of the golden remote wild west 139

  Phædra 23

  Push hard across the sand 109

  Rococo 92

  Rondel (‘Kissing her hair’) 103

  Rondel (‘These many years’) 70

  Sapphics 163

  Satia Te Sanguine 70

  Sea-Swallows, The 230

  Song Before Death 91

  Song in Time of Order. 1852, A 109

  Song in Time of Revolution. 1860, A 111

  St. Dorothy 189

  Stage Love 95

  ‘Stand up, stand up, thou May Janet 226

  Sundew, The 148

  Swallow, my sister, O sister swallow 45

  Sweet for a little even to fear, and sweet 106

  Sweet life, if life were stronger 120

  Sweet mother, in a minute’s span 91

  Take hands and part with laughter 92

  The burden of fair women. Vain delight 100

  The four boards of the coffin lid 224

  The heart of the rulers is sick 111

  The sea gives her shells to the shingle 234

  There is an end of joy and sorrow 61

  There was a graven image of Desire 91

  There were four apples on the bough 171

  There were four loves that one by one 232

  These many years since we began to be 70

  This fell wh
en Christmas lights were done 230

  Three damsels in the queen’s chamber 173

  Till death have broken 81

  To Victor Hugo 114

  Triumph of Time, The 29

  Two Dreams, The 202

  Under green apple-boughs 219

  We are in love’s land to-day 144

  We have seen thee, O Love, thou art fair [from Atalanta] 271

  We were ten maidens in the green corn 222

  What shall be said between us here 150

  Whatever a man of the sons of men 41

  When the field catch flower 145

  When the game began between them for a jest 95

  When the hounds of spring are on winter’s traces [from Atalanta] 250

  White rose in red rose-garden 103

  Who hath given man speech? [from Atalanta] 280

  Who hath known the ways of time 77

  Year of Love, The 232

  1 Æsch. Fr. Niobe:-

  1 EPICTETUS.

  * En ce temps-là estoyt dans ce pays grand nombre de ladres et de meseaulx, ce dont le roy eut grand desplaisir, veu que Dieu dust en estre moult griefvement courroucé. Ores il advint qu’une noble damoyselle appelée Yolande de Sallières estant atteincte et touste guastée de ce vilain mal, tous ses amys et ses parens ayant devant leurs yeux la paour de Dieu la firent issir fors de leurs maisons et oncques ne voulurent recepvoir ni reconforter chose mauldicte de Dieu et à tous les hommes puante et abhominable. Ceste dame avoyt esté moult belle et gracieuse de formes, et de son corps elle estoyt large et de vie lascive. Pourtant nul des amans qui l’avoyent souventesfois accollée et baisée moult tendrement ne voulust plus héberger si laide femme et si détestable pescheresse. Ung seul clerc qui feut premièrement son lacquays et son entremetteur en matière d’amour la reçut chez luy et la récéla dans une petite cabane. Là mourut la meschinette de grande misère et de male mort: et après elle décéda ledist clerc qui pour grand amour l’avoyt six mois durant soignée, lavée, habillée et deshabillée tous les jours de ses mains propres. Mesme dist-on que ce meschant homme et mauldict clerc se remémourant de la grande beauté passée et guastée de ceste femme se délectoyt maintesfois à la baiser sur sa bouche orde et lépreuse et l’accoller doulcement de ses mains amoureuses. Aussy est-il mort de ceste mesme maladie abhominable. Cecy advint près Fontainebellant en Gastinois. Et quand ouyt le roy Philippe ceste adventure moult en estoyt esmerveillé.