THE POETRY OF ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE

Kum. ADARSH BALA

Poetry is not a mere cluster of words, strung aimlessly, as children string daisies “to be a moment’s ornament.” Poetry is the soul’s infinite passion finding vent in spontaneous outbursts of measured and musical expression. Two things are needed (i) Thought in the widest conception (ii) Music, explicit and implied, Carlyle defines poetry as “Musical Thought.”

The supreme triumph of Swinburne’s poetry is its music. If we just read the following lines, with due accent, from “Before Dawn,” we find that they are not only the monument of poetic melody, but they also illustrate the sensuousness of Swinburne’s verse:

“Ah, one thing worth beginning

One thread in life worth spinning

Ah, sweet, one sin worth sinning

With all the whole soul’s will

To lull you till one stilled you

To kiss you till one killed you

To feed you till one filled you

Sweet lips, if love could fill.

To hunt sweet Love and lose him

Between white arms and bosom

Between the bud and the blossom

Between your throat and chin

To say of shame–what is it?

Of virtue–we can miss it

Of sin–we can but kiss it

And it’s no longer sin.”

John Drinkwater writes, “Only Milton is his equal in habitual mastery and range of consonantal and vowel music, and even he made no such exploration as Swinburne in applying that music to lyrical measures.” Edmund Gosse also does justice to him by saying: “Swinburne carried the prosody of the Romantic age to its extreme point of mellifluousness, and he introduced into it a quality of speed, of throbbing velocity, which no one, not even Shelley, had anticipated.”

Swinburne’s music is of a twofold character: it is, paradoxical though it should sound, at once natural and artificial. Its artificiality is due to the poet’s unparalleled mastery over poetical form and language; while his passionate, vehement, and ebullient temper is responsible for its naturalness and spontaneity which go to render the poetry of Swinburne, “more bounding and fleet-footed than even the most dancing measures of Shelley.” The racing spontaneity on the one hand, and the air of art and trickery on the other, combine to give at times to Swinburne’s poem an excessive facility which is the point of Trail’s delightful parody in which an amazed world asks, “Master, how is it done?” and the poet answers:

“Let this thing serve you to know

When the river of rhymes should flow

I turn on the tap and they come.”

Many critics criticize him on the score that he did not possess sufficient profundity of thought. This is, however, a misconception. In fact, with the exception of Meredith and Browning and one or two more, Swinburne was perhaps the most intellectual of English poets. If, unfortunately, he had not his unexampled habitual mastery of poetical language, he would undoubtedly have been an obscure and difficult as Meredith and Browning, and critics would then have celebrated him as a poet of deep thoughts, for according to Arthur Conan Doyle, “they think that unless a thing is obscure it must be superficial, whereas it is often the shallow stream which turbid, and the deep which is clear.” But simply because his infinite power of expression enables him to convey every idea, however recondite, with the utmost imaginable lucidity a few critics have fallen into the error of supposing that he was deficient in thought. For them, however, the judicious verdict of Edmund Gosse is a rebuff more than enough:

“We shall not merely fail to appreciate the position of Swinburne, but stumble blindly in our examination of his qualities, if we do not begin by perceiving that to a degree unparalleled, he was cerebral in all his forces. He was an unbodied intelligence, “hid in the light of thought; showering a rain of melody from some altitude untouched by the privileges and drawbacks of mortality.”

The sentence of Gosse should carry conviction, but if there be some non-believers still left, let them study, the “Songs Before Sunrise.” One may say that the thought in these lines is not at all deep, because one can understand it without the slightest mental effort upon one’s part. To this the reply is that thought is not to be measured by the amount of pain requisite to comprehend it. Swinburne’s musical clarity of expression should by no means lessen his virtual claim to profundity of thought. Oliver Elton writes, “Certainly like Tennyson, Browning, Matthew Arnold, Patmore and James Thomson, Swinburne revealed a new promised land for metaphysical verse, even if he only entered it once or twice.”

A lot has been uttered about the paganistic aspect of Swinburne’s poetry, Passages like:

“But the gods of your fashion

That take and that give;

In their pity and passion

That scourge and forgive,

They are worms that are bred in the bark

That falls off: they shall die and not live...”

may seem to lend support to such an accusation; but it is clearly a mistake to see paganism in the poet’s opposition to malign gods. For the gods that Swinburne denounced were obviously no more than the instruments of the destructive power that works through man. They were not God. Them he would cast out, but he had no desire to dethrone the power behind them. This is not paganism a quite modern mysticism.

Swinburne’s poetry has also been attached for sensuous tendencies. Undoubtedly, his poetry contains references to certain unseemly actions of man’s animal nature, it seems all the same unjust to accuse the poet of immorality. Like that of Shelley, the poetry of Swinburne was a centre of revolt. It was a revolt against the clergy, against despotic monarchy, and against debasing theology; it was a revolt against the ethical, the political, and the theological order of the day, It stands for democracy and liberty.

“Life

Eternal, passionate, aweless,

Insatiable, mutable, dear,

Makes all men’s laws for us lawless

We strive not; how should we fear strife?”

The criticism of Swinburne’s poetry is incomplete without mentioning his passion for the sea and his love of children. Speaking of the sea Swinburne himself says, “Its salt must have been in my blood, before I was born.” “The Lake of Gaube” and “A Swimmer’s Dream” relate real experiences and there is no mistaking the ring of a master-feeling:

“A purer passion, a lordlier leisure,

A peace more happy than lives on land,

Fulfils with pulse of diviner pleasure

The dreaming head and the steering hand;

I lean my cheek to the cold grey pillow,

The deep soft swell of the full broad billows,

And close mine eyes for delight past measure,

And wish the wheel of the world would stand.”

Again, in Ex-voto:

“Yours was I born, and ye,

The sea wind and the sea,

Made all my soul in me

A song for ever;

A harp to string and smite

For love’s sake of the bright,

Wind and the sea’s delight,

To fail them never.”

His love for the sea is, indeed, a consuming passion. Hence, he is universally regarded as “the greatest singer of the sea.” James Douglas writes, “Doubtless other poets have sung the sea, but no other poet has sung it so spontaneously and so sincerely.”

His love of children is clearly exhibited in the poem entitled “A Child’s Laughter” and many other pieces. In “Herse” also, speaking of a child some sweet months old, Swinburne writes:

“All roses that the morning rears are nought;

All stars not worth a thought;

Set this one star against them, or suppose

As rival this one rose.”

Like Milton it was the great desire of Swinburne to do something worth doing. In the Dedicatory Epistle prefixed to his collected poems he avows that his strong ambition is “to do something worthy of a young countryman of Marlowe, the teacher, and Webster, the pupil of Shakespeare, in the line of work which those three great poets had left as a possibly unattainable example for ambitious Englishmen.” “The Queen Mother” and “Rosamond” “Atlanta in Calydon” and “Frechtheus,” and “The Marian Triology” were the offspring of this ambition. They possess numerous magnificent passages of rare beauty. The choruses of the Atlanta” are remarkable. But on the whole, the dramas suffer from want of restraint. No audience can be found willing to listen to speeches a hundred lines long. “Bothwell,” the longest, covers some five hundred pages. But “to censure it,” as James Douglas points out, because of its length is uncritical. It is not a drama but a dramatic chronicle, or, to use Swinburne’s own phrase, a “chronicle in history.” And when “Bothwell” is studied from this standpoint, it will be found to be truly “a monument of that nineteenth century discovery, the historic sense.” Nor is it the worse for it as pure poetry. It abounds with rich passages of magnificent poetry, almost unequalled in their splendour in the whole range of poetic drama–the dreams of Bothwell and Darnley, for instance, and the speech of John Knox, and the haunting scene in Darnley’s chamber on the night of his murder. Its blank verse also is remarkable for its graceful ease and sweet spontaneity. As regards the characters in the plays of Swinburne, they do not dwell in the memory long. They are, as Andrew Lang puts it, “sonorous rather than sympathetic, more heroic than human.”

We should not forget that Swinburne’s plays were never written for the stage. On the contrary, they were composed in deliberate contempt of the modern theatre, in which the drama is divorced from literature. Swinburne remains “a lyrical poet who crowded an imaginary stage with historic and literary rather than histrionic conceptions.”

In the art of story-telling Swinburne proved rather a failure. The current of narrative is not allowed to move forward by the waves of lyric impulse, which smell and sink wearily on a single or many, but not connected points. Lang remarks, Narrative was not the poet’s forte, he was too ebullient, and neither ‘Tristram’ nor ‘Balin and Balan’ was on a level with the early triumphs.”

Swinburne accepted the tragic opposition of evil to man’s desire not as a pitiful event that can be endured only by the exercise of a severely disciplined faith, but as a positive benefaction satisfying certain direct and instinctive demands of his nature. The poet knows and finds joy in his knowledge that “the unending quarrel is the salt of existence here upon earth.”

“For chill is known by heat and heat by chill

And the desire that hope makes love to still

By the fear flying beside it or above

A falcon fledged to follow a fledging dove,

And by the fume and flame of hate and ill,

The exuberant light and burning bloom of love.”

In spite of a few drawbacks–his exccessive use of alliteration, his verbal plethora, his lack of insight into proper histrionic conception, his want of self-restraint, and his destitution in the matter of story-telling or narrative power–Swinburne ranks supreme in respect of his dullest symphonies, his orchestral harmonies, and his lyric raptures. The poetry of Swinburne may well be likened to a garden where delicious breezes blow, where fragrant roses bloom, where “the bright brown nightingale amorous” sings her melancholy anthem in full-throated ease, where bees and butterflies hum their soothing ditties, and where the green linnet, sitting upon his orchard seat, pours forth his song in gushes. Swinburne’s verse is ‘musical thought.’ “He is a reed through which all things blow into music.” His poetry is “simple, sensuous and impassioned.” The pulse of the wind, the passion of the sea, is to be found in almost every line that he wrote. His mastery of poetical language, his command over poetical form, his lyrical impulse are simply unparalleled. “Over his poetry there is a kind of nebulous beauty, peculiar to him, defying analysis, and his chief, if not his only claim to distinction.”

This article can be safely concluded with a remark of John Drinkwater who wrote:

“The experience that he (Swinburne) recorded in his poetry was as powerful, as invigorating, and as mutable as the sea. It knew as many moods and was responsive to as many winds. It passes in our vision from turbulence to profound peace, from uncurbed anger to all imaginable calm and beauty of benefaction, but variable it is not lawless, and in change it is yet One.”

Back