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
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