As I said previously, I’ve been reading a lot by and about the improbable Victorian Algernon Swinburne. He’s not very well known these days, despite possessing many qualities and concerns that appeal to the contemporary spirit. After all, he lived the first part of his life as an enfant terrible, precocious and fearless as Rimbaud, saying, doing, writing and championing the most radical things imaginable, a real we piss anywhere, man type rock star, who, if he had dies young, might be remembered the same way as his heroes Keats, Shelley and Byron. But despite sincere youthful efforts at dissipated self-destruction, he lived on, proceeding directly from tempestuous adolescence to a staid and unforgivably boring old age full of rote verses and reactionary views.
Despite Swinburne’s mastery of all known verse forms, even his brilliant early work can be hard going for today’s reader. Part of it is our fault – when poetry is conceived of at all these days it’s as a relatively brief lyric. Even the great epic of modernity, T. S. Eliot’s "The Wasteland," would be considered short by Victorian standards. Part of it is that the antique poets such as Sappho who were most admired by the modernists have survived mostly in fragments, giving a distorted sense of the epigrammatic, unfinished quality of their work, much like our incomplete conception of Classical statuary, which, of course, was never meant to be viewed sans arms, legs or color. In contrast, the men of England’s Victorian prime were entirely comfortable with vast epics like the Aeneid, and cut the cloth of their own verse accordingly. The dehumanizing conflagrations of the twentieth century have shrunk the scope of poetic vision, and the pulse of the electronic age has both quickened and shortened humankind’s attention span. We no longer have patience with the idea that a universal completeness can or should be contained in a work of art, evidenced by the changing critical fortunes of, say, Longfellow and Emily Dickinson.
But it’s not all our fault. Even the most dedicated booster (if such a creature exists) would have to admit that Swinburne’s early and best work is far from perfect. Like Poe, it’s hard work to hack your way through Swinburne’s wordy convolutions, but, unlike Poe, who always maintained a brilliant concern for overall effect, it’s not always worth it. As some critic I read somewhere along the line said, Swinburne’s intent is largely percussive. He’s a slave to his own insanely powerful rhythm, and once he’s got the hooves of his great poetic steed thundering, it’s hard for him to rein it in. Many times a Swinburne poem overshoots a seemingly ideal and conclusive stopping place only to continue madly over the cliffs of anti-climax.
However amid the din and drone there are passages that are simply astonishingly radiant. Like his friends the Pre-Raphaelites, it’s not the obscure myths or the fuzzy politics that arrest, but the brilliantly visionary details, the glowing sacralization of sensual life. In an eternal moment the contradictions between life and death, nature and man, pain and pleasure are dissolved in the ecstasy of beauty.
Here’s one of my favorite examples, a little riff about pagan and Christian, in which Swinburne contrasts Mary and Aphrodite:
Not as thine, not as thine was our mother, a blossom of flowering seas,
Clothed round with the world’s desire as with raiment, and fair as the foam,
And fleeter than kindled fire, and a goddess, and mother of Rome.
For thine came pale and a maiden, and sister to sorrow; but ours,
Her deep hair heavily laden with odor and color of flowers,
White rose of the rose-white water, a silver splendor, a flame,
Bent down unto us that besought her, and earth grew sweet with her name.
For thine came weeping, a slave among slaves, and rejected; but she
Came flushed from the full-flushed wave, and imperial, her foot on the sea.
And the wonderful waters knew her, the winds and the viewless ways,
And the roses grew rosier, and bluer the sea-blue stream of the bays.
