Golden Reed

Some artists are best compared to birds: they create their art instinctively, almost - or even entirely - without conscious will and intellectual effort. In music, Mozart is probably the most prominent of these avian analogs; in poetry, Swinburne probably is. Tennyson called him a “reed through which all things blow into music”, and although that is unfair it does not fall so very far wide or short of the mark. Nor, in probably the best essay ever written on his work, does A.E. Housman's crude and bathetic comparison of him to a “sausage machine”.

Swinburne's poetry CAN be called facile. Or fluent. It flows sweetly and smoothly for the most part, though occasionally whirling into rapids of passion or indignation. Despite the claims of some academics, it is informed by serious and considered beliefs - his opposition to Christianity, for example - but whether or not those beliefs chime with your own you should be moved by its beauty and technical perfection:

Pale, beyond porch and portal,
Crowned with calm leaves she stands
Who gathers all things mortal
With cold immortal hands;
Her languid lips are sweeter
Than love's who fears to greet her,
To men that mix and meet her
From many times and lands.

This, from “The Garden of Proserpina”, might stand as a paradigm of his technique: his love of alliteration and his unfailing facility with rhyme, for example; and this, from the same poem, might stand as a paradigm of his philosophy and ultimate nihilism:

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.

Then star nor sun shall waken,
Nor any change of light:
Nor sound of waters shaken,
Nor any sound or sight:
Nor wintry leaves nor vernal,
Nor days nor things diurnal;
Only the sleep eternal
In an eternal night.

If you are moved at all by these quotations, you should sample more of his work in this collection, edited by L.M. Findlay and published by Carcanet of Manchester. It contains all of his most famous (and best) poems: his forsaken *cri de cœur* “The Triumph of Time”; the subtle, complex, and disturbing Sapphic autograph “Anactoria”; the brief and nihilistic “The Garden of Proserpina”; the sado-masochistic hymn “Dolores”; the melancholy and paradoxical “A Forsaken Garden”; and more. Even those most reluctant to bestow that much-abused term “genius” should be happy to agree that it can be bestowed on Swinburne, and that it is unjust for him to be better known today for his extra-curricular sexual activities than for his verse.