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BOOK: The Columbia History of British Poetry
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Page 501
The three men "garmented with gold" who form the entourage of the Lady of "A Ballad of Life," and the Lady herself, could be figures frozen in the space of a watercolor or tapestry; so, too, could be Queen Venus ''with a hood striped gold and black" in "A Ballad of Life." What we have come to perceive as Pre-Raphaelite detail marks the description of the "graven images" of "A Cameo" or the catalogue that enumerates and dismembers Dolores, "Our Lady of Pain," or the features and garb of the mysterious harlot Aholibah, in the poem named after her.
Yet Swinburne's style is already evolving, beginning to stress the ear over the eye and to detach the word from the thing, breaking down accepted syntactical patterns and conventional word associations. Moreover, possibly influenced by Christina Rossetti, Swinburne has begun to use negative description to create powerful images and dreamscapes. "The Garden of Proserpine," for example, vividly depicts the winds that do not blow and the things that do not grow in the realm of death:
No growth of moor or copice
No heather-flower or vine,
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Pale beds of blowing rushes
Where no leaf blooms or blushes.
The poem, reminiscent of "Dream Land," ends with the well-known enumeration of absent sights and sounds that, by their very absence, will create the desired "sleep eternal / In an eternal night."
Swinburne's decision to not merely
épater
but to stun
le bourgeois
with accounts of sadomasochism, necrophilia, bisexuality, and vampirism, makes the entire volume of
Poems and Ballads
political in the broadest sense of the word. In a narrower sense, political verses that look forward to
Songs Before Sunrise
(1871) inhabit the earlier volume. "A Song in Time of Revolution," with its Blakean and Shelleyan assault on priests and kings and its use of biblical rhetoric to discredit the Bible, and "A Song in Time of Order," its companion piece assaulting Napoleon III and the Pope, already evidence Swinburne's passion for Lady Liberty. Swinburne's rebellion against monarchies, pruderies, creeds, and God himself is well underway. Yet
Poems and Ballads
no longer contains verses on the marriage of convenience or on the fallen woman; the very concepts have begun to fade as Swin-
 
Page 502
burne blurs the cultural distinctions between "good" and "evil" women.
Severed and frustrated love, the yearning for death, the preoccupation with failure are writ large in
Poems and Ballads
as are the legions of fatal womenactive and passivelinked with these problems. Swinburne is fascinated by powerful matriarchal authority figures, and the numerous narrative voices (some identified, some not) that populate the volume reflect this preoccupation. He had already developed the fantasy of the dominant female figure in his earlier plays, most notably, in Althea, Meleager's mother in
Atalanta in Calydon
(1865). But in
Poems and Ballads
these "daughters of dreams and of stories" become goddessespowers to be feared and worshipped. Nature is a Great and Terrible Mother, as is Death (in the form of Proserpine), the Sea (in "The Triumph of Time"), and even the force of Creation itself (a concept later developed in ''Hertha").
Often described in the language of religion, like the infamous fatal women of "Dolores" and "Faustine," these female icons combine the power of the generatrix with that of the dominatrix of sadomasochistic lore. The role of the male is to prostrate himself before them. In a fascinating inversion of the Pre-Raphaelite tradition, male figures are now depicted as embowered or confined. Tannhauser in "Laus Veneris" is the love object, trapped in the bower of Venus; the scribe in "The Leper" (a poem for which Swinburne invents a medieval French source) is confined with the dead, leprous body of the aristocratic lady he has loved. Swinburne's rather passive male figures abase themselves before female icons so powerful that the men dare look at them only in dream or fantasy or when the ladies are asleep or dead.
Subtle voyeurism pervades the volume, yet, for the most part, eyes are designed for kissing or for weeping rather than for looking. Swinburne's emphasis is on the eyelid rather than the eye. Dolores, the perverse inversion of the Virgin Mother, has "hard eyes that grow soft for an hour," but they are even less accessible to her worshipper than the "Cold eyelids" that hide them. Other cult images: Cleopatra, Lucrezia Borgia, Venus, Aholibah, Faustine, and the twenty-two legendary "fair and foul" queens who appear in "The Masque of Queen Bersabe" seemingly lack eyes and are also not to be looked at; they often bind the eyes of their lovers/victims with their hair. Love is torture; the female beloved does not reciprocate nor does she even look at her adorer, although she mayas with Venus in "A Ballad of Death"occasionally permit her worshipper to raise his eyes to her.
 
Page 503
Gaze, in general, ceases to be significant, and only in "Anactoria," Swinburne's dramatic attempt to replicate the voice and spirit of Sappho, does it retain some of its power. Here the looks that pass between the two women are killing. The enraged, rejected Sappho finds that Anactoria's faithless blue eyes "blind" her; she yearns to make them bright with tears and torture. In a sadistic ecstasy she dreams of devouring them along with the rest of her former beloved. Sappho's own triumph will be that her gaze, the vision of the poet, will survive and become immortal. In a world without reciprocity or communication, ruled by an oppressive Judeo-Christian God and permeated by "the mystery of the cruelty of things," fulfilled love is impossible. The only refuge is in art or dream.
Dream landscapes and interiorsidentified as such in the ballads of "Life" and "Death," or more subtly designated as in "The Garden of Proserpine "permeate the lyrics, dramatic monologues, and narratives of the volume. At times, as in "Hesperia," the absence or vagueness of a specific background highlights the iconic images of the dreamer and the dream. Time is usually dream timethe shortened, extended, or frozen moment of the dream experience as in ''A Ballad of Death," and "Laus Veneris"and the speed of Swinburne's long anapestic and dactylic lines creates a mesmeric dream effect. The poems of
Poems and Ballads
imitate dream structure and language. Settings and figures change, coalesce, and appear and disappear; transitions between stanzas or sections are based on dream logic; logical progression is absent. Fragments of experience are presented but left mysterious (as in "August"); discontinuity becomes a poetic strategy.
Swinburne's style, based on private verbal associations, his use of incantatory repetition, mixed metaphors, modifiers detached from the nouns they ordinarily modify, fusions of concrete and abstract traits, heavy alliteration and assonance, all amplify the dreamlike effect of his poems. As in dream, the reader knows what is being said without being able to analyze the precise words that say it. Less concerned than Gabriel Rossetti and Morris with fidelity to the facts of external nature, less repressed than Christina Rossetti, Swinburne presents things as they appear to the eye and sound to the ear in sleep. Thus he creates works in which the gap between poetry and dream is closed, and the way to symbolism is further opened. Although Swinburne moved away from his Pre-Raphaelite faith toward a poetry of the ear and the indefinite, his Pre-Raphaelite tendencies meshed with those of the two Rossettis and Morris to become part of the lexicon of Victorian poetry
 
Page 504
The widening sphere of Pre-Raphaelite influence can be seen in the concentrated particularity of the poetry of Hopkins. Its effects are clearly visible in the decorated, fairy-haunted early poems of Yeats. Essentially, Pre-Raphaelitism broadened the realm of poetry and freed it from constraints imposed upon its themes and subjects. Moreover, it introduced new conventions of image and association, on which later poets would expand and against which our own era would, ironically, react.
Further Reading
Bloom, Harold, ed.
The Pre-Raphaelites
. New York: Chelsea, 1986.
Hönnighausen, Lothar.
The Symbolist Tradition in English Literature: A Study of Pre-Raphaelitism and Fin de Siècle
. Translated by Gisela Hbnnighausen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988.
Hunt, John Dixon.
The Pre-Raphaelite Imagination, 18481900
. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968.
Lang, Cecil Y., ed.
The Pre-Raphaelites and Their Circle
. 2d ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1975.
McGann, Jerome J. "The Religious Poetry of Christina Rossetti,"
Critical Inquiry
10 (1983): 127144.
Rees, Joan.
The Poetry of Dante Gabriel Rossetti: Modes of Self-Expression
. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981.
Riede, David G.
Swinburne: A Study of Romantic Mythmaking
. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1978.
Rosenblum, Dolores.
Christina Rossetti: The Poetry of Endurance
. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1986.
Sambrook, James, ed.
Pre-Raphaelitism: A Collection of Essays
. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974.
Silver, Carole.
The Romance of William Morris
. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1982.
BOOK: The Columbia History of British Poetry
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