I have a deep, dark confession to make: sometimes, when the moon is full and my medication wears off, I like Swinburne. There are a couple of Swinburne threads in Mastery, but they were about specific poems and didn't go very far.

I'd never heard of him before I started poking around in online workshops and saw "Swinburnian" used as a derogatory term for overly poetical, flowery, archaic, long-winded poetry. It seemed as if everyone -- from the hip, opaque poets to the Garrison Keillor types -- was in agreement on this one thing: that Swinburne was the exact opposite of what contemporary poetry should be. Naturally, this aroused my curiosity.

His Poems & Ballads, which I've been (slowly) working my way through, so outraged Victorian critics that his publisher was forced to withdraw it from circulation. That alone is reason enough to like him. Afterwards, in defense of his publisher, Swinburne wrote a pamphlet in which he denied his poems were about homosexuality or sadomasochism or anything else considered "indecent or blasphemous" and accused his critics of having dirty minds. Of course this was baloney, but he expressed himself with so much wit and defiance that you have to smile. Here's an excerpt:

Evasive, but still, considering the times, brave. Remember what happened to Oscar Wilde. But enough about his character. I meant to say a few words in defense of his poetry, or at least in defense of some of it.

First of all, what an ear! Pick any stanza of any poem of his at random, and read it aloud. Lilting, sweeping, rhythmic, fluid music. Recently I tried to write something in his style, and let me tell you, he's not easy to imitate. I don't mean snide parody, but respectful imitation. He was an uncompromising metrist (and by that I do not mean rigidly regular) with great respect for the line (by which I do not mean he never enjambed), and amazingly deft with alliteration and anaphora. Poe defined poetry as "the rhythmical creation of beauty in words," but Swinburne was better at it.

Here's a stanza I just opened to at random, from To Victor Hugo :

Yea, he is strong, thou say'st,
A mystery many-faced,
The wild beasts know him and the wild birds flee;
The blind night sees him, death
Shrinks beaten at his breath,
And his right hand is heavy on the sea:
We know he hath made us, and is king;
We know not if he care for anything.

And, just to see if it works again, here's another stanza, picked totally at random, from Ilicet :

There is not one thing with another,
But Evil saith to Good: My brother,
My brother, I am one with thee:
They shall not strive nor cry for ever:
No man shall choose between them: never
Shall this thing end and that thing be.

But that's the easy part: everyone knows Swinburne sounded good. The problem, according to his modern critics, is that he was extremely (as Maz would say) "poetickal." And he was. But after reading a lot of relentlessly un-poetical contemporary poetry, a little Swinburnian flamboyance can hit the spot. He didn't go into the mundane details of, say, packing a suitcase, and try to extrapolate meaning or beauty from that. He talked a lot about God, goddesses, red flowers, good and evil, blood, sex and death. You know, fun stuff. And he questioned a lot of assumptions. In the stanzas above, he's questioning whether God cares about His creations, and questioning the binary nature of good and evil. Today that may seem unremarkable, the stuff of adolescent poetry. But in his day, in his culture, that was a big deal.

Okay, you say, but he padded his verse with a lot of fluff in service to the form. And he may have done that to an extent, but I suspect he's not quite as guilty of it as people say. I noticed when I was reading Dolores that the notes were pretty extensive. He made a lot of allusions, which is why, as I mentioned earlier, it's taking me so long to read his stuff. Take this stanza:

O garment not golden but gilded,
O garden where all men may dwell,
O tower not of ivory, but builded
By hands that reach heaven from hell;
O mystical rose of the mire,
O house not of gold but of gain,
O house of unquenchable fire,
Our Lady of Pain!

Now, call me dumb, but if it weren't for the notes, I'd never have known that this alludes to the Loreto Litany of the Blessed Virgin. I'd have thought these were just fanciful images he came up with on his own. But they're not fluff; every one of those images is meaningful. In his pamphlet, he's able to pull off his disingenuous defense of his poems because they're so allusive and layered. "Dolores" can be seen as an ode to an abstract anti-madonna or to an employee of a London flagellation brothel. Either way it's a fun read.

The other problem, people say, is that Swinburne was long-winded. Ahem. :) The accepted wisdom today is that a poem should say what it has to say in as few words as possible, and say it only once. Swinburne rhapsodized, chanted, explored a single theme in a dozen different ways. There's something to be said for chanting. The rhythm itself adds meaning and emotion, building on itself, like a chant at a protest rally, or a drum solo, or saying a rosary as opposed to a single Hail Mary.

Another factor may be that Swinburne often used anapestic meter and compound rhymes like "Dolores / adore is," and those are often associated with light verse. But that's rather arbitrary, isn't it?

I googled, and according to at least one Internet source, Frost was an admirer of Swinburne. A. E. Housman harshly criticized him, but praised his rhyming ability and imitated his "rhythms." Strangely, Pound supposedly liked him, at least for a while. Other admirers reportedly included Hardy, Wilde, Lewis Carroll, and Faulkner. Okay, so that's not a very long list. I'm grasping at straws.

It would be easy for everyone to respond by posting examples of Swinburne's worst poetry as proof that the consensus is right and his life's work was indeed worthless. I humbly suggest that that would not be the best use of our time, and propose instead that people post and discuss poems or sections of poems of his that they find genuinely interesting. But do what you have to do.



[This message has been edited by Rose Kelleher (edited June 19, 2006).]

Rose, I'm glad you're introducing Swinburne to this forum, because I've always enjoyed his stuff (in smalllish doses)-- mostly due to the incredibly musical effects of his rhythms and his sounds. In fact, I have to admit that these elements have a considerably greater effect on me than the actual content of his poems, most of the time-- with the notable exception of "Hymn to Proserpine", which I honestly think is one of the most heartbreaking poems in the language.

Swinburne's work often comes up in discussions of prosody; he really was masterful with internal rhyme, dipodic rhythms, etc., which is another reason I turn to him occasionally. A third reason is that he was actually capable of laughing at himself a little. Here was a guy-- unllike many contemporary poets-- who was cheerfully aware of his own quirks and idiosyncricies, and you probably know that he wrote a very funny self-parody-- a poem called "Nephelidia" that starts like this:

"FROM the depth of the dreamy decline of the dawn through a notable nimbus of nebulous noonshine,
Pallid and pink as the palm of the flag-flower that flickers with fear of the flies as they float. . . " --etc.!

Can you see the poets of our own generation doing something like that-- Sam Gwynn notwithstanding?? Well, maybe there are a couple more, but I'm still impressed with what I can only call Swinburne's comparative humility. Thanks again for bringing him back.

Marilyn

Thanks for posting this, Rose.
I'm a fan of Swinburne, for all the reasons mentioned by you and Marilyn.

Here's an extract from Hymn to Proserpine which I think is spectacular in its virtuosity:

Wilt thou yet take all, Galilean ? but these thou shalt not take,
The laurel, the palms and the paean, the breasts of the nymphs in the brake;
Breasts more soft than a dove's, that tremble with tenderer breath;
And all the wings of the Loves, and all the joy before death;
All the feet of the hours that sound as a single lyre,
Dropped and deep in the flowers, with strings that flicker like fire.
More than these wilt thou give, things fairer than all these things ?
Nay, for a little we live, and life hath mutable wings.
A little while and we die; shall life not thrive as it may?
For no man under the sky lives twice, outliving his day.
And grief is a grievous thing, and a man hath enough of his tears:
Why should he labour, and bring fresh grief to blacken his years ?
Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilean; the world has grown grey from thy breath;
We have drunken of things Lethean, and fed on the fullness of death.
Laurel is green for a season, and love is sweet for a day;
But love grows bitter with treason, and laurel outlives not May.

Like a lot of Victorians he was over-prolific and his worst stuff isn't good; but then again, whose is?

And he invented the roundel.

And I believe he significantly influenced Ernest Dowson, another wonderful lyric poet.

Best wishes,
David

Rose!

Thank you for starting this topic.

Rose, I don't even need the full moon (and my meds never work right) to love Algy.

To me, he is one of the great Gods of meter - at his best, that is. As you and David have suggested, he not all of a piece in terms of quality.

I have learned - and I am still learning - so much about rhythm from this poet. To me, he is the future as well as the past. My future, at least. I want to learn to write - if I can - with something like the metrical music and energy he achieves in his best work.

I will certainly be back with more to say, but for now, here is one of my favourites, from Poems and Ballads of 1866.


A LEAVE-TAKING.

LET us go hence, my songs; she will not hear.
Let us go hence together without fear;
Keep silence now, for singing-time is over,
And over all old things and all things dear.
She loves not you nor me as all we love her.
Yea, though we sang as angels in her ear,
She would not hear.

Let us rise up and part; she will not know.
Let us go seaward as the great winds go,
Full of blown sand and foam; what help is here?
There is no help, for all these things are so,
And all the world is bitter as a tear.
And how these things are, though ye strove to show,
She would not know.

Let us go home and hence; she will not weep.
We gave love many dreams and days to keep,
Flowers without scent, and fruits that would not grow,
Saying `If thou wilt, thrust in thy sickle and reap.'
All is reaped now; no grass is left to mow;
And we that sowed, though all we fell on sleep,
She would not weep.

Let us go hence and rest; she will not love.
She shall not hear us if we sing hereof,
Nor see love's ways, how sore they are and steep.
Come hence, let be, lie still; it is enough.
Love is a barren sea, bitter and deep;
And though she saw all heaven in flower above,
She would not love.

Let us give up, go down; she will not care.
Though all the stars made gold of all the air,
And the sea moving saw before it move
One moon-flower making all the foam-flowers fair;
Though all those waves went over us, and drove
Deep down the stifling lips and drowning hair,
She would not care.

Let us go hence, go hence; she will not see.
Sing all once more together; surely she,
She too, remembering days and words that were,
Will turn a little toward us, sighing; but we,
We are hence, we are gone, as though we had not been there.
Nay, and though all men seeing had pity on me,
She would not see.

Rose,
Your Swinburne "essay" is one of the best things I've read for ages.
Janet

Rose:

No work is ever worthless if you get something out of it.

The dogs may bark, but it is YOUR caravan rolling on...

Best--
Tom

Yes, Rose, when someone is out of fashion it becomes the fashion to belittle him, and people with not a hundredth of the target’s talent enthusiastically join in the denigration.

Swinburne was considered degenerate in his time. That — and the fact that he created a fictional character and reviewed works by him — would make him interesting to me even if I hadn’t read any of his verse.

Certainly he made verse-music, and certainly he’s open to the charge that there’s sometimes more sound than sense in his lines. But at least there is sound! And when these accusations are made, where are the critics who defend modern obscurity by telling us that we’re misguided when we look for literal meaning? “A poem should not mean, but be.” Why isn’t that a justification for Swinburne, too, in passages where he seems to be “sound-driven”?

There are few stanzas more memorable than this one from Atalanta . It’s a marvellous expression of winter giving way to spring, dark days to hopeful and so on, but I don’t know that I could explicate every line.

For winter's rains and ruins are over,
And all the season of snows and sins;
The days dividing lover and lover,
The light that loses, the night that wins;
And time remember'd is grief forgotten,
And frosts are slain and flowers begotten,
And in green underwood and cover
Blossom by blossom the spring begins.


(I stole that stanza pattern and meter, more or less, for my Australian train poem.)

I’ve often wondered, looking at the rhyme scheme of Hymn to Proserpine, if he first wrote it in trimeter and then decided to join up pairs of lines to make the hexameter of the poem as published. I think I prefer the trimeter pattern of The Garden of Proserpine , in which his agnosticism, his skepticism about Christian hope for an afterlife, is clear:

.
.
.
Though one were strong as seven,
He too with death shall dwell,
Nor wake with wings in heaven,
Nor weep for pains in hell;
Though one were fair as roses,
His beauty clouds and closes;
And well though love reposes,
In the end it is not well.
.
.
.

From too much love of living,
From hope and fear set free,
We thank with brief thanksgiving
Whatever gods may be
That no life lives for ever;
That dead men rise up never;
That even the weariest river
Winds somewhere safe to sea.


He was a Victorian but one can hardly accuse him of taking a conventional line! He believed that people become less trustworthy as they get older — presumably as spontaneous passions give way to guarded self-interest.

As Wikipedia puts it, “Swinburne may have been one of the first people not to trust anyone over thirty. This of course created problems for him after he himself passed that age.”

Henry




[This message has been edited by Henry Quince (edited June 22, 2006).]

Rose,
My husband comes to poetry with a whimper but I made him read your piece which he greatly enjoyed. As he walked away from the computer he remarked: "Perhaps the greatest problem for Swinburne was that his name was Algernon".;)
Janet

An excellent point, Henry!

And you make another good point with the idea of the hexameter of his "Hymn to Proserpine" being a product of two tri-lines, and the "Garden of Proserpine" staying with tri, when it might have been hex.

I have heard this point made on a number of times on this board - I recall Tim saying something similar. But I wanted to make a small point here that it doesn't automatically follow that all hex lines can be split into two tri-lines. The "Hymn" certainly feels like most lines can be split, with a definite mid-line caesura. But I prefer to write my hex without this caesura.

If a hex can be split in two, I believe that it should be split in two, and be what it is - two lines of tri posing as something else.



------------------

Henry,
I am one of those who thinks that if a poem doesn't "be" I don't give tuppence what it "means" and I also believe that the "be" is what it means. And not just poetry. All art.
Janet

Wonderful thread. I'm going to out myself. I love Swinburne. Algy and Lord Tennyson and Kipling need to be approached with reverence by anyone who fancies himself a metrist. However silly or benighted we might find much of what was said by those three, they were just light years beyond what your average New Formalist has within his metrical grasp. Bill Baer folded The Formalist, in part, because he was so tired of reading bland pentameters.

Marilyn, I'd heard of the parody but hadn't read it. Ha! Maybe if a poet can't be parodied, he's not taking enough risks.

David, that's right, I'd forgotten about the roundel! Maybe we should start a roundel challenge in Drills & Amusements.

Mark, I've noticed a lot of Swinburne's stanzas end with a two-foot line. Would you say that's a Swinburne thing, or did everybody used to do that and I just don't know because I haven't read a lot of Victorian poetry?

Janet, thanks. :)

Tom, of course you're right, but every so often I do forget that, so thanks for the reminder.

Henry, good point about the double standard. Re: the meter of Hymn to Proserpine, the internal rhymes certainly support your point, but if he did move from tri to hex I think it was a good move in this case. With your comments in mind, I tried reading it as tri/pause/tri, but I prefer the rolling rhythm I get when I read it as hex.

Tim, I sympathize with Bill Baer. I overuse IP myself. I feel a Swinburnian phase coming on, though, hee hee, which you may regret encouraging.

Here's a section of Hymn to Proserpine that reminds me of a discussion I had with Maz about the Virgin Mary. Both of us have recently posted poems about her, and I think this excerpt touches on some of what she was getting at: the triumphant goddess versus the submissive virgin. In the popular image of Mary, though, with her gold crown, and her foot on the serpent, she has power.

Yea, once we had sight of another: but now she is queen, say these.
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 odour and colour of flowers,
White rose of the rose-white water, a silver splendour, 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.

Like Tim, I'm a fan of Tennyson and Kipling, but unlike Tim, I've never quite made the grade with Swinburne. As a teenager (forty years ago!) I tried hard to like him because of his reputation, but his allusiveness defeated me and I never found the time to try him again. The wonderful sounds in the quoted passages are incentive enough. I might still need an annotated edition, however.
Richard

You know, I kind of dig Swinburne in small doses, kind of like an old King Crimson album or something like that. I can get into it, but it's not really where my tastes lie.

And my opinion of him can turn on a dime. A couple of years ago, I was sitting at a seaside cafe in Napflio, Greece, chainsmoking, soaking up the Mediterranean ambience, and reading Swinburne. He was doing this lush nature thing, which worked well for me until, quite abruptly, I exclaimed to myself, "Will he just get fucking on with it? I get it, okay?" Then I went back to my hotel and read some Ezra Pound, just to detox.

I have no clue what that means in the larger sense, but there it is.

Quincy

For the record,
I once posted a rag-time poem and nobody got it at all until I posted it later and a couple of Sphereans did. We usually look for the known and predictable.
Janet

Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837-1909)

Faustine

Ave Faustina Imperatrix, morituri te salutant.
http://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/poem/2082.html
Sphere,

Nephelidia (the hilarious parody Marilyn Taylor alerted us to)
http://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/poem/2096.html


We've been dealing in the main with Swinburne as metrist. I believe he was a great rhymer as well. We use the phrase "rhyme-driven" too much. I know what it means, and the proscription is usually well taken. But Swinburne shows us the line between ingenuity and strain can be the merest crazing. Trying so hard for unforced naturalness, we sometimes deprive ourselves of real wonders. Rhyming should encourage us to greater accuracy, not less. And when language is accurate it can surprise. Prolific, needing selection, not always accurate in this sense, Swinburne should nonetheless be read. I am encouraged by this thread and this whole community. Thanks to Rose! Also Swinburne's life, learning, facility and personality remain fascinating to the highest degree.

Best,
Mike Slipp

Notice that strictures about sticking to complete rhyme or slant rhyme is demolished by Faustine in which he uses both.
Janet

I quoted Nephelidia in the Amphigories thread I started in GT early this year, with the idea of maybe stimulating “all sound and no sense” exercises of our own — an endeavour that fell flat. Perhaps I’ll try resurrecting it in FunExcise, where Rose, if I remember correctly, recently posted one.



[This message has been edited by Henry Quince (edited June 22, 2006).]

Rose, I wouldn't say that the two-foot ending is a specifically Swinburnian move, since so many of the Victorians employ it in their het-met stuff. His sapphics and roundels probably add to the feeling that he uses it a lot. It can be very effective, can't it, as shown by "A Leave Taking".

Well, someone is bound to put this up eventually, so here it is - the great Swinburnian tour de force of the double rhymed sestina. Has anyone here ever had a shot at such a beast?


The Compaint of Lisa


by Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837 - 1909)
BANNED POST BANNED POST BANNED POST
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There is no woman living who draws breath
So sad as I, though all things sadden her.
There is not one upon life's weariest way
Who is weary as I am weary of all but death.
Toward whom I look as looks the sunflower
All day with all his whole soul toward the sun;
While in the sun's sight I make moan all day,
And all night on my sleepless maiden bed.
Weep and call out on death, O Love, and thee,
That thou or he would take me to the dead.
And know not what thing evil I have done
That life should lay such heavy hand on me.

Alas! Love, what is this thou wouldst with me?
What honor shalt thou have to quench my breath,
Or what shall my heart broken profit thee?
O Love, O great god Love, what have I done,
That thou shouldst hunger so after my death?
My heart is harmless as my life's first day:
Seek out some false fair woman, and plague her
Till her tears even as my tears fill her bed:
I am the least flower in thy flowery way,
But till my time be come that I be dead,
Let me live out my flower-time in the sun,
Though my leaves shut before the sunflower.

O Love, Love, Love, the kingly sunflower!
Shall he the sun hath looked on look on me,
That live down here in shade, out of the sun,
Here living in the sorrow and shadow of death?
Shall he that feeds his heart full of the day
Care to give mine eyes light, or my lips breath?
Because she loves him, shall my lord love her
Who is as a worm in my lord's kingly way?
I shall not see him or know him alive or dead;
But thou, I know thee, O Love, and pray to thee
That in brief while my brief life-days be done,
And the worm quickly make my marriage-bed.

For underground there is no sleepless bed.
But here since I beheld my sunflower
These eyes have slept not, seeing all night and day
His sunlike eyes, and face fronting the sun.
Wherefore, if anywhere be any death,
I fain would find and fold him fast to me,
That I may sleep with the world's eldest dead,
With her that died seven centuries since, and her
That went last night down the night-wandering way.
For this is sleep indeed, when labor is done,
Without love, without dreams, and without breath,
And without thought, O name unnamed! of thee.

Ah! but, forgetting all things, shall I thee?
Wilt thou not be as now about my bed
There underground as here before the sun?
Shall not thy vision vex me alive and dead,
Thy moving vision without form or breath?
I read long since the bitter tale of her
Who read the tale of Launcelot on a day,
And died, and had no quiet after death,
But was moved ever along a weary way,
Lost with her love in the underworld; ah me,
O my king, O my lordly sunflower,
Would God to me, too, such a thing were done!

But if such sweet and bitter things be done,
Then, flying from life, I shall not fly from thee.
For in that living world without a sun
Thy vision will lay hold upon me dead,
And meet and mock me, and mar my peace in death.
Yet if being wroth, God had such pity on her,
Who was a sinner and foolish in her day,
That even in hell they twain should breathe one breath,
Why should he not in some wise pity me?
So if I sleep not in my soft strait bed,
I may look up and see my sunflower
As he the sun, in some divine strange way.

O poor my heart, well knowest thou in what way
This sore sweet evil unto us was done.
For on a holy and a heavy day
I was arisen out of my still small bed
To see the knights tilt, and one said to me
"The king;" and seeing him, somewhat stopped my breath;
And if the girl spake more, I heard her not,
For only I saw what I shall see when dead,
A kingly flower of knights, a sunflower,
That shone against the sunlight like the sun,
And like a fire, O heart, consuming thee,
The fire of love that lights the pyre of death.

Howbeit I shall not die an evil death
Who have loved in such a sad and sinless way,
That this my love, lord, was no shame to thee.
So when mine eyes are shut against the sun,
O my soul's sun, O the world's sunflower,
Thou nor no man will quite despise me dead.
And dying I pray with all my low last breath
That thy whole life may be as was that day,
That feast-day that made trothplight death and me,
Giving the world light of thy great deeds done;
And that fair face brightening thy bridal bed,
That God be good as God hath been to her.

That all things goodly and glad remain with her,
All things that make glad life and goodly death;
That as a bee sucks from a sunflower
Honey, when summer draws delighted breath,
Her soul may drink of thy soul in like way,
And love make life a fruitful marriage-bed
Where day may bring forth fruits of joy to day
And night to night till days and nights be dead.
And as she gives light of her love to thee,
Give thou to her the old glory of days long done;
And either give some heat of light to me,
To warm me where I sleep without the sun.

O sunflower make drunken with the sun,
O knight whose lady's heart draws thine to her,
Great king, glad lover, I have a word to thee.
There is a weed lives out of the sun's way,
Hid from the heat deep in the meadow's bed,
That swoons and whitens at the wind's least breath,
A flower star-shaped, that all a summer day
Will gaze her soul out on the sunflower
For very love till twilight finds her dead.
But the great sunflower heeds not her poor death,
Knows not when all her loving life is done;
And so much knows my lord the king of me.

Ay, all day long he has no eye for me;
With golden eye following the golden sun
From rose-colored to purple-pillowed bed,
From birthplace to the flame-lit place of death,
From eastern end to western of his way,
So mine eye follows thee, my sunflower,
So the white star-flower turns and yearns to thee,
The sick weak weed, not well alive or dead,
Trod under foot if any pass by her,
Pale, without color of summer or summer breath
In the shrunk shuddering petals, that have done
No work but love, and die before the day.

But thou, to-day, to-morrow, and every day,
Be glad and great, O love whose love slays me.
Thy fervent flower made fruitful from the sun
Shall drop its golden seed in the world's way,
That all men thereof nourished shall praise thee
For grain and flower and fruit of works well done;
Till thy shed seed, O shining sunflower,
Bring forth such growth of the world's garden-bed
As like the sun shall outlive age and death.
And yet I would thine heart had heed of her
Who loves thee alive; but not till she be dead.
Come, Love, then, quickly, and take her utmost breath.

Song, speak for me who am dumb as are the dead;
From my sad bed of tears I send forth thee,
To fly all day from sun's birth to sun's death
Down the sun's way after the flying sun,
For love of her that gave thee wings and breath
Ere day be done, to seek the sunflower. BANNED POST
BANNED POST BANNED POST

Mark,
I wrote this mono-near-rhyme sestina:
To Maiden Aunts


Too glib, to condescend to maiden aunts
who saw the world at war, as all at once
their world went mad and robbed them of their chance
to live their lives. No whisper or response
to make them feel like flowers. No romance
to sing their hearts into a fervent dance.

And if fate toyed with them, and at some dance
they met a boy who charmed them, maiden aunts
were far too frightened to believe romance
could promise them a future. Never once
did they entrust their youthful heart’s response
to love. It was too great a loss to chance.

They saw life as a brutal game of chance
where happiness was like a firefly’s dance,
elusive and capricious. Their response
was frozen. Thus the girls turned into aunts
before their beauty faded. All at once
they turned to books and study for romance.

The scholar aunts were teachers and romance
for them was knowledge. They gave girls the chance
to own their lives. They told them all how once
girls had no freedom, and their eyes would dance
when Eliot (George not Tom) spoke well of aunts
and Woolf (Virginia) wrote their response.

They saw their younger sisters’ vain response--
new furniture, designer clothes--romance
had trapped them in domestic dullness. Aunts
had independence. They each seized the chance
to travel. Correspondence traced their dance
through fabled cities, loving more than once.

They knew where history and drama once
enacted out a passionate response,
and on exotic tombs their spirits danced
to unfamiliar music. A romance
that echoed through the universe. A chance
to travel with the Bodhisattva aunts.

My favourite aunt once said that real romance
was more than a response to casual chance,
but rather freedom’s dance for captive aunts.

_________
But how plain deal it seems compared with the beauty of Swinburne. Mind you, I was aiming at plain.

[This message has been edited by Janet Kenny (edited June 20, 2006).]

Bravo, Janet!

Yes, I enjoyed your Aunt sestina. Well done!

You now more than most of us can truly appreciate the degree of difficulty in bringing the full double, full rhymed sestina to a satisfactory completion.

I salute, you! - I who have yet to attempt any type of sestina.

Algy's double-banger is a mortifying challenge.



------------------

I've got a double rhymed sestina up in Metrical at the moment (Visions of Granada). My first post was the same. 'The Complaint of Lisa', naturally, is one of my favourite poems in the English language, but unfortunately Mark got there first. Here instead is the wonderful 'Itylus'. If only Eliot had such an ear for verbal music, he wouldn't have felt obliged to tarnish Algy's reputation in one of his many awful essays, which were somehow fashionable in his time.


ITYLUS

Swallow, my sister, O sister swallow,
How can thine heart be full of the spring?
A thousand summers are over and dead.
What hast thou found in the spring to follow?
What hast thou found in thine heart to sing?
What wilt thou do when the summer is shed?

O swallow, sister, O fair swift swallow,
Why wilt thou fly after spring to the south,
The soft south whither thine heart is set?
Shall not the grief of the old time follow?
Shall not the song thereof cleave to thy mouth?
Hast thou forgotten ere I forget?

Sister, my sister, O fleet sweet swallow,
Thy way is long to the sun and the south;
But I, fulfill'd of my heart's desire,
Shedding my song upon height, upon hollow,
From tawny body and sweet small mouth
Feed the heart of the night with fire.

I the nightingale all spring through,
O swallow, sister, O changing swallow,
All spring through till the spring be done,
Clothed with the light of the night on the dew,
Sing, while the hours and the wild birds follow,
Take fight and follow and find the sun.

Sister, my sister, O soft light swallow,
Though all things feast in the spring's guest-chamber,
How hast thou heart to be glad thereof yet?
For where thou fliest I shall not follow,
Till life forget and death remember,
Till thou remember and I forget.

Swallow, my sister, O singing swallow,
I know not how thou hast heart to sing.
Hast thou the heart? is it all past over?
Thy lord the summer is good to follow,
And fair the feet of thy lover the spring:
But what wilt thou say to the spring thy lover?

O swallow, sister, O fleeting swallow,
My heart in me is a molten ember
And over my head the waves have met.
But thou wouldst tarry or I would follow
Could I forget or thou remember,
Couldst thou remember and I forget.

O sweet stray sister, O shifting swallow,
The heart's division divideth us.
Thy heart is light as a leaf of a tree;
But mine goes forth among sea-gulfs hollow
To the place of the slaying of Itylus,
The feast of Daulis, the Thracian sea.

O swallow, sister, O rapid swallow,
I pray thee sing not a little space.
Are not the roofs and the lintels wet?
The woven web that was plain to follow,
The small slain body, the flower-like face,
Can I remember if thou forget?

O sister, sister, thy first-begotten!
The hands that cling and the feet that follow,
The voice of the child's blood crying yet,
Who hath remember'd me? who hath forgotten?
Thou hast forgotten, O summer swallow,
But the world shall end when I forget.


Swinburne is perhaps my favourite poet in the language, so I'll respond further to Rose's excellent thread as soon as I have more time.

Iain

Iain,
I just had a peek at your double sestina. I'll definitely comment as soon as I find a moment. I'm very impressed.
Janet

Thank you, Janet. Bear in mind that the second draft doesn't function in the form. Anyway, since someone at some point would post this, here is my second and last post of a Swinburne poem here, which is the first thing I actually read of his, and which is still a mainstay of anthologies despite the apparent neglect of the poet:-


A FORSAKEN GARDEN

In a coign of a cliff between lowland and highland,
At the sea-down's edge between windward and lee,
Walled round with rocks as an inland island,
The ghost of a garden fronts the sea.
A girdle of brushwood and thorn encloses
The steep square slope of the blossomless bed
Where the weeds that grew green from the graves of its roses
Now lie dead.

The fields fall southward, abrupt and broken,
To the low last edge of the long lone land.
If a step should sound or a word be spoken,
Would a ghost not rise at the strange guest's hand?
So long have the gray bare walks lain guestless,
Through branches and briers if a man make way,
He shall find no life but the sea-wind's restless
Night and day.

The dense hard passage is blind and stifled
That crawls by a track none turn to climb
To the strait waste place that the years have rifled
Of all but the thorns that are touched not of time.
The thorns he spares when the rose is taken;
The rocks are left when he wastes the plain;
The wind that wanders, the weeds wind-shaken,
These remain.

Not a flower to be pressed of the foot that falls not;
As the heart of a dead man the seed-plots are dry;
From the thicket of thorns whence the nightingale calls not,
Could she call, there were never a rose to reply.
Over the meadows that blossom and wither,
Rings but the note of a sea-bird's song.
Only the sun and the rain come hither
All year long.

The sun burns sear, and the rain dishevels
One gaunt bleak blossom of scentless breath,
Only the wind here hovers and revels,
In a round where life seems barren as death.
Here there was laughing of old, there was weeping,
Haply, of lovers one never will know,
Whose eyes went seaward a hundred sleeping
years ago.

Heart handfast in heart as they stood, 'Look thither,'
Did he whisper? 'Look forth from the flowers to the sea;
For the foam-flowers endure when the rose-blossoms wither,
And men that love lightly may die-- but we?'
And the same wind sang, and the same waves whitened,
And or ever the garden's last petals were shed,
In the lips that had whispered, the eyes that had lightened,
Love was dead.

Or they loved their life through, and then went whither?
And were one to the end-- but what end who knows?
Love deep as the sea as a rose must wither,
As the rose-red seaweed that mocks the rose.
Shall the dead take thought for the dead to love them?
What love was ever as deep as a grave?
They are loveless now as the grass above them
Or the wave.

All are at one now, roses and lovers,
Nor known of the cliffs and the fields and the sea.
Not a breath of the time that has been hovers
In the air now soft with a summer to be.
Not a breath shall there sweeten the seasons hereafter
Of the flowers or the lovers that laugh now or weep,
When as they that are free now of weeping and laughter
We shall sleep.

Here death may not deal again for ever;
Here change may not come till all change end.
From the graves they have made they shall rise up never
Who have left nought living to ravage and rend.
Earth, stones, and thorns of the wild ground growing,
While the sun and the rain live, these shall be;
Till a last wind's breath, upon all these blowing,
Roll the sea.

Till the slow sea rise, and the sheer cliff crumble,
Till terrace and meadow the deep gulfs drink,
Till the strength of the waves of the high tides humble
The fields that lessen, the rocks that shrink,
Here now in his triumph where all things falter,
Stretched out on the spoils that his own hand spread,
As a god self-slain on his own strange altar,
Death lies dead.


Newcomers to Swinburne unaware of the propagandist tactics used by twentieth century modernists (excluding Pound) to cast slurs on late Romanticism will tend to enquire just why a great poet such as this has slipped beyond criticular favour. Of course, the reverence paid towards modernist poets who served their own ends with their written opinions, by modernist editors and the critics who have always been lackeys, in this century, to their editorial tastes, speaks volumes enough.

The frankly inflated reputation of Yeats is actually an aspect of their revisionist opinion. Had anyone, in Yeats' early years, made serious claim that he rivalled Tennyson and Swinburne, much less exceeded them, the person voicing such an opinion would have been dismissed as a madman. Yeats' early poems, pretty though some of them are, are not far beyond the poetry of Wilde as an exercise in Victorian pastiche. His modernist era work produced no lasting monuments of the sort produced (and I grudgingly say this) by Eliot or by the twentieth century's greatest poet, Pound. Yeats' corpus, so far as I can see it, produced perhaps a handful of great poems, including one of my favourite lyrics ever, 'Sailing to Byzantium', yet it does not go much beyond. Yeats is over-rated now because critics lazily see him as a turning point between what they see as the decadence of the Victorian age and the purity of the modern. Actually, between the styles of one age and those of the next, that reputation ought to go to Hardy or, on a more progressive level, Pound. Yeats is more accessible than the still widely misunderstood latter so the trophy goes to Yeats. Yet his verse is still largely filled with mediocre music, pretentiously earnest themes, and a tendency to briefly wax lyrical with stilted metaphors on absolutely nothing. A full reading of 'Poems and Ballads' confirms Swinburne as being a far, far better poet.

There are a number of flaws in Swinburne's work, granted, which need to be recognised first purely in order to be set out of the way. He over-uses certain words for the effect of alliteration, assonance and rhyming. There are many 'rods' and 'flowers', and much use of 'wine'and 'foam'. His range of themes can be narrow, but his expression within these themes is wide ranging and his themes extend further than Hopkins', or Christina Rosetti's (and C. Rosetti is only set higher than her brother because her work falls more easily on the modern ear). The general mellifluous pablum modern critics are wont to accuse him of is only prevalent in his poetry since the point where he burned out at the Pines: and those who seek to point out that taking his worst poetry as an indication of the whole is a worthwhile excercise should apply that same standard to Wordsworth, whose standards were more erratic, and whose worst material extends further out after the dissipation of his genius and, if anything, is worse.

Hopefully, his reputation will be assured again by the close of the current century. His material is, after all, spread out widely on the Internet, and he is still accepted as a figure whose influence has not even fully been felt by various current poets. Blake dwelled in obscurity for some fifty years until his reputation was rescued via the criticism of Swinburne. Someday someone else's might well do the same for him.

Iain

Wow. Didn't know that.

Yeah, for someone who's routinely written off as a lightweight, he certainly had a brain. In his pamphlet, he defends Anactoria by pointing out that every schoolboy is expected to recite Sappho in the original Greek. Can you imagine kids doing that nowadays? I hope someday, perhaps in my nineties, to be as well read as Swinburne was at age ten.

Speaking of Sappho, in the notes to Anactoria (I'm reading this , by the way, which has tons of notes, thank goodness) he's quoted as saying:

Ahhhh...that's so un-wishywashy!

Iain,

Eliot's essays "mostly awful"? I happen to really like "Tradition and the Individual Talent." Yeah, he gave Swinburne a hard time, but he was invaluable in bringing forward previously neglected writers from the seventeenth century.

Quincy

Iain,
You've followed Rose with a tremendously interesting essay. Thank you so much.
What a magnificent poem that poem is. Does anyone mention its colour and chiaroscuro?

When I was a child Christina Rosetti reached me immediately. That must be good. Nobody read her to me. I found her.

I have resisted Pound, not for political reasons but because a particularly autocratic Italian poet who didn't speak English, introduced his work to me as the "greatest". Since his English was very marginal I developed a habit of resisting Pound. I'll try again.
Janet




[This message has been edited by Janet Kenny (edited June 24, 2006).]

Iain,

I can accept that Swinburne could be your "favorite poet in the language". Perhaps you mean this the way I can say on certain days, "Richard Strauss is my favorite composer" while knowing, feeling, that Bartok, Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Shostakovich, Ligeti, not to mention Monteverdi, Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, Bruckner, Wagner and many others are greater. If you mean anything more than this I worry for you and your poetry. I mean all this affectionately, half-jokingly, and please read my fond post above. But Swinburne does seem a dangerous influence. You say some other provocative things. It can be useful to consider Yeats, great poet that he is, overrated. Yvor Winters is brilliant, and brilliantly funny, on him and his charges must be answered. But I think Christina Rossetti is far and away the stronger poet in her family. And while you can read a handful of Yeats, that's about the amount of Pound, maybe a quarter-pound, I can read. And I'm not disturbed by his bigotries, as I'm certain he started going frankly mad quite early. Just some thoughts.

Best,
Michael Slipp

Rose - Cheers. I'm glad to be a part of your thread.

Quincy - Eliot did do well in writing of Donne, and I like his essay on his favourite poet Dante. He was, however, a negligible presence re: his personal views on Whitman, Tennyson, Swinburne, Poe and Blake. I think he moulded his criticism too much to suit his views of where his own work should fall in terms of a progression from the Romantic. In short, it suited his own agenda. He was not the first poet/critic to work in this way and perhaps I generalised against him, but I really do feel that his reliability extends mainly to Dante and the metaphysical poets.

Janet - For some reason, though 'Poems and Ballads' has already been published by Penguin, though you'll have to track a copy out of print, no-one has released a copy of its third series, which is where 'A Forsaken Garden' comes from, along with 'The Complaint of Lisa' and the beautiful 'At a Month's End', which can still be found online in its first draft under the title 'At the End of a Month.' Publishers probably sell less copies of other poets but delete Swinburne reissues faster. This may not be the case eternally, since other poets now part of our lasting canon have went missing for longer than he.

Mike - My favourite composer is Beethoven. I can well understand those who'd lay claim to Mozart, R. Strauss, Bach or Wagner. In fact, I'd personally say that the finest opera ever written was 'Tristan und Isolde', though obviously some would disagree.

I think that personal preference, in a way, can be subjective, since our own sensiblities have to come into play beyond our mere objectivity in how we are met by an artistic presence. I personally can only handle, having read it straight through, around a third of Pound's 'Cantos.' If extremely well edited down, I think it would far outdo 'The Wasteland', but Pound was too mentally unstable then to think of it. It's his poetry in 'Personae' that will prove his lasting monument to twentieth century verse.

Apologies to Rose if it seems I've temporarily hijacked or deviated from the theme of the thread. I'll go and correct my own poems now.

Iain

[This message has been edited by Iain James Robb (edited June 25, 2006).]

It's a pleasure to see all the secret Swinburne lovers coming out of the closet. My own confession is that when I was in college and suffering from a major case of unrequited love, I memorized large swaths of "The Triumph of Time" and still recite with pleasure the verse beginning

There lived a singer in France of old
By the tideless, dolorous midland sea.
In a land of sand and ruin and gold
There shone one woman and none but she.

I'd like to see someone offer a prize for the best poem beginning with those 4 lines.

This is absolutely fascinating. I'm off to the library - he was definitely in the sneer-and-ignore category when I was at school.

I would just like to add that some of the best erotic poetry I ever read is in Swinburne's TRISTAN AND ISEULT - see Canto 2, "The Queen's Pleasance."

This is the same man who in his old age took to writing sentimental verse about babies. Whom the gods love die young.

Thank you, Gail.

Yes, you are right, he was a bit of a fizzer there towards the end. But as you say, some of the earlier good stuff is so good.

I think that text you mention could bear a short quotation, if I may.

Here is the last few movements from "The Queen's Pleasance" , Part II, from Tristram of Lyonesse

BANNED POSTHere he caught up her lips with his, and made
The wild prayer silent in her heart that prayed,
And strained her to him till all her faint breath sank
And her bright light limbs palpitated and shrank
And rose and fluctuated as flowers in rain
That bends them and they tremble and rise again
And heave and straighten and quiver all through with bliss
And turn afresh their mouths up for a kiss,
Amorous, athirst of that sweet influent love;
So, hungering towards his hovering lips above,
Her red-rose mouth yearned silent, and her eyes
Closed, and flashed after, as through June's darkest skies
The divine heartbeats of the deep live light
Make open and shut the gates of the outer night.
BANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTLong lay they still, subdued with love, nor knew
If could or light changed colour as it grew,
If star or moon beheld them; if above
The heaven of night waxed fiery with their love,
Or earth beneath were moved at heart and root
To burn as they, to burn and bright forth fruit
Unseasonable for love's sake; if tall trees
Bowed, and close flowers yearned open, and the breeze
Failed and fell silent as a flame that fails:
And all that hour unheard the nightingales
Clamoured, and all the woodland soul was stirred,
And depth and height were one great song unheard,
As though the world caught music and took fire
From the instant heart alone of their desire.
BANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTSo sped their night of nights between them: so,
For all fears past and shadows, shine and snow,
That one pure hour all-golden where they lay
Made their life perfect and their darkness day.
And warmer waved its harvest yet to reap,
Till in the lovely fight of love and sleep
At length had sleep the mastery; and the dark
Was lit with soft live gleams they might not mark,
Fleet butterflies, each like a dead flower's ghost,
White, blue, and sere leaf-coloured; but the most
White as the sparkle of snow-flowers in the sun
Ere with his breath they lie at noon undone.
Whose kiss devours their tender beauty, and leaves
But raindrops on the grass and sere thin leaves
That were engraven with traceries of the snow
Flowerwise ere any flower of earth's would blow;
So swift they sprang and sank, so sweet and light
They swam the deep dim breathless air of night.
Now on her rose-white amorous breast half bare,
Now on her slumberous love-dishevelled hair,
The white wings lit and vanished, and afresh
Lit soft as snow lights on her snow-soft flesh,
On hand or throat or shoulder; and she stirred
Sleeping, and spake some tremulous bright word,
And laughed upon some dream too sweet for truth,
Yet not so sweet as very love and youth
That there had charmed her eyes to sleep at last.
Nor woke they till the perfect night was past,
And the soft sea thrilled with blind hope of light.
But ere the dusk had well the sun in sight
He turned and kissed her eyes awake and said,
Seeing earth and water neither quick nor dead
And twilight hungering toward the day to be,
"As the dawn loves the sunlight I love thee."
And even as rays with cloudlets in the skies
Confused in brief love's bright contentious wise,
Sleep strove with sense rekindling in her eyes;
And as the flush of birth scarce overcame
The pale pure pearl of unborn light with flame
Soft as may touch the rose's heart with shame
To break not all reluctant out of bud,
Stole up her sleeping cheek her waking blood;
And with the lovely laugh of love that takes
The whole soul prisoner ere the whole sense wakes,
Her lips for love's sake bade love's will be done.
And all the sea lay subject to the sun.

Rose,

Many thanks for posting. I'm too Browningesque in my preferences to be a big Swinburne fan, and in self-indulgent mode much prefer to wallow in Tennyson or Housman. However, I was much taken by Itylus in my school days and was glad to be reminded of it. Thanks, Iain! Works up effectively to its climax, I think.

Margaret