, 8 Coleridge and Keats are quozed ftom Romane Poetry An Annotated Anthalagy, ‘ed, Michael O'Neil and Charles Maloney (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007), ‘See Allo (ed), Poon of Matthew Amd, p. 257. ip. 654. Did, p. 3650. ‘Quoted in Phelan (ed), Cough: Select Poems, 9.28 id, 29. Chapter 35, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Swinburne DAVID G. RIEDE ‘When Arthur Henry Hillam introduced the poetry of his friend ‘Tennyson to the Victorian reading public in r83r, he introduced him as a poet of ‘sensa: tion’ in the school af Keats and Shelley as opposed to ‘reflection’ in the school ‘of Wordsworth. In introducing Tennyson as a poet who does not suffer his ‘mind ‘to be occupied during its creation by any other predominant motive than the desire of beauty’ Hillam was perhaps premature in heralding the advent of a genuinely aesthetie schoo! of British poetry, but he seems almost prophoetically to have introduced the later generation of great Victovian poets ‘of what Walter Pater called the * “aesthetic” poetry’: Dante Gabriel Rossetti, ‘Algemon Swinbume and William Morris, Pater introduced the term ‘acs thetic poetry’ in his review of Morris's The Earthly Paradise in 1868, but he dated the origin of such poctry to Morris's earlier volume, The Defence of Guenevere an Other Poems (1858), and he defined it asa poetry ‘tormented and ‘awry with passion, like the body of Guenevere defending herself from the charge of adultery’, poetry characterised by ‘the strange suggestion of a deliberate choice between Christ and a rival lover'* Pater was primarily interested in the way in which these poets, like the poets of the late Middle ‘Ages, expressed the ‘composite experiences ofall the ages? as transmitted in art and incorporated ia the body and mind of the poet. His use of the term ‘aesthetic’ was undoubtedly intended to suggest the inclleesual apprehension of past artistic achievements, but it also very explicily and aptly retams to the root meaning of ‘sesthede’ in sensation and the body. Pater did not use the loaded term ‘sensational’, which had recently been associated with novels ‘widely considered as dangerously immoral, but Hallam’s term was used in this newly moraised sense to attack the aesthetic poety: attacks on Swinbume’s sensual Poem and Ballads were about to explode into an all-out crieal barrage on Swinbume, Rossetti and Morris as poets of the morally degrading ‘sensational school of literanure’, which ‘delight(s) in extreme physical experiences ~ ecstasies and horrors ~ for their own sake, or rather osfor the sake of the moxbid appetite they create and for the moment help to satisty’* Paes's assessment was parscularly ape not only because ic helped 10 buffer Morris, Rossetti and Swinbume ftom atacks on them as a merely sensual, ‘morbid, fleshy school of poesry without denying their genuine delight in bodily beauty and passion, but also because it correc recognised the beginnings of ‘aesthetic poetry’ in the first book to emerge ffom the close association of the ‘three poets that hed begun in 1857 when Rossetti agreed to paint murals for the (Oxford Union and had been joined by Monts, Ned Jones (later Edward Coley ‘BumeJones) and, ¢ an engaged onlooker, the undergraduate Swinburme. The murals were all on Arthurian themes, and all the artists agreed chat, as Rosser putit in a different context, in contrast to Tennyson's Chuistan moralising ofthe legends, the treatment of Malory’s tales would be conducted in a way ‘wherein God and Guenevere will be weighed against each other by another table of ‘weights and measures’ and would ‘emphasise the marked superiority of Guenevere over God'? Morts’s poem is not quite so bold, since the work, influenced in form by Browning, isa dramasic monologue spoken by Guenevere Nevertheless Guenevere’ defence against charges of aduitery amounts to lite ‘more than the claim that her physical beauty and passion outweigh mere moral, (Chistian considerations, and the implied poet intervenes in his owm voice t0 praise her for her beauty and pasion, not her arguments sail she svod eight up, and never shrunk, ‘But spoke on bravely, glosious lay fir (Whatever tears her fll ips may have dunk, ‘She stood, and seemed to think and wrung her hair, Spoke out at lat with no more trace of shame, With passionate twisting of her body there «.* ‘Though Morris's was the firs re volume of ‘sesthetie poetry, the origins of the style are to be found in the early works of the group's acknowledged leader, Rosset By the time of the Oxford murals project Rossetti was already a famous and influensal artist, primarily as a painter and 2 founding member and leader ofthe Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, which had begun co revolutionise British painting in 1849 with its conficted rerums ‘to nature’ and to early ltalian devotional forms of painting in deliance of the formal rules of the Royal Academy. Though he was best known at this time as painter, Rossen alseady had a considerable reputation as a poet based on his trans- lations of Dante and the esrly Italian poets and oceasionel publications in oe ‘Dante Gabriel Retsets and Swinburne sonal avantgarde journals that he and Morsis had been instrumental in exeating. Rosset, however, had not started out as conspicuously a poet of the bodily senses, bu rather asa disciple of the Christian poetry of Dante and the stinoist: he had even collected much of his own poetry in a manuscript entitled 'Songs ofthe Ar-Catholic’ and sent it wo the surviving iiend of Keats and Shelley, Leigh Huns, who had particular praise for the ‘Dantesque Iheavens' of the precocious “The Blessed Damozel’, the poem that more than any other helped to establish and sustain Rosset’ fame. The interest in Catholic spiritvaliry came naturally to Rossetsi as the son of an Italian expatriate scholar of Dante and a devoutly Anglo-Catholic mother, and was ‘even more conspicuously present in Rosset’s early paintings, The Girlhood of ‘Mary Virgin (289), and Boce Ancilla Domini (850), in their accompanying sonnets and in such poems as ‘Ave’ and “My Sister's Sleep’. Nevertheless, as bis miltanly egnostie brother William liked to point out, Rossetti was never «true believer in Catholic or even Christan dogma, and the emphasis in the term “AreCatholic’ always fell, for him, on the first word: he was, that i, always an ‘aesthetic’ poet. Certainly his early poetry and painting, do not seem strikingly sensual and scareely hint at bodies tormented and awey with passion, but even as Rossetti drew on medieval Catholicism for spiritually suggestive imagery, he was also deploying more concretely sensual imagery. Most notoriously, in the dramatic poem ‘Jenny’ Rosstti’s speaker contem- plates the sleeping body of a prostinute and ponders the wide gap berween the sensual truths ofthe body and the moral idealsms of Christianity, more cor less explicitly juxtaposing Cheist with a rival lover, and even parodying ‘and replacing the ascetic ideal of the Virgin Mary with the bodily charms of the sleeping whore: ‘Poor shameful Jenny, fll of grace’? ‘Jenny’ is ofcourse a dramatic poem, and it is a mistake 10 identily the speaker with Rossetti Jhimaclf, but tis difcal to judge just how much ironic distance Rossetti puts between himself and the speaker. For modern readers itis easy to condemn the sexism of the speaker when his sympathy for Jenny is mixed with contemptuous comments on her status a8 a commodity and on her defled ‘mind, or when he regards her a an enigma to be gazed at but not spoken to, Rossetti, however, syrapathetically described the speaker as a ‘young and thoughtfl man ofthe world’ and insisted that the only way to come to terms ‘with the pressing problem of prosttation was to approach it ftom the ‘inter standing point’ of such a man,* Consequently the poem is probably best seen as serious effort to examine « major social problem of the day even as it simultaneously refleered Rossetti's own position asa painter and poer dealing in representations of female beauty as a commodity oxEven in his AreCetholic poems, Rossetti’ ‘Dantesque heavens’ had always been aesthetic, even ‘sensational’, representations of bodily beauty, as in the very first stanzas of his mose celebrated poem, “The Blessed Damozel “The Blessed damoze! leaned out” rom the gold bar of Heaven; Hr eyes were deeper than the depth (Of waters sled at even: Se had three lies her hand, “And the stars i her hai were seven. See ae ee a eer Oe esp aoe eto ee ee made / The bar she leaned on warm’ (lines 45-6). ee ee ee ene ne oe ae nee ae ee es ee oo (Of Winter radiance sheer and thin; eres eee ‘ee uae enters py a oy eee ee eee eee serene nly eee sey Be ee eee ee Ce a ndtangatl Pett git ieee aaa? ‘As McGann’s argument illastrates, Rossetti was @ poet of sensation fiom the start, though the quotatioa is from the version of the poem published in the 1670 Poems and had been revised, in Rossent's words, to eliminate the Christian oo Dante Gabriel Roser and Sweinbume lement altogether” partly by substinting the ‘iey exystal cup’ for the ‘ahtarcup' ofthe 188 and 1850 versions. Even in the earliest version, though, Rosset had deliberately empried the poem of Christan presence by emapeying the chalice: the moon's light ‘Seemed ollow lke an altar-cup’ (line 16. Rosset did not fully expunge the religious element from his poetry unt his revisions forthe publication of Poems in 2870, but by the time of his dose association with Mortis and Swinbume he was explicitly refusing to link physical imagery or bodily experience co religious or spiritual meaning, and hie had become emphatically « poet of bodily sensation, deploying imagery ‘that appealed directly to the physical senses, with no necessary referent beyond. The point is made almost programmatically in “The Woodspurge’, in which the speaker submits so completely 1o a sensation of grief that ‘consciousness, as McGann points out, is extinguished and nothing remains ‘but the sensation of ‘environmental stimuli." The famous closing image of the woodspurge flower might have been used to suggest a theological or spiritual meaning, bu is instead empdied out to suggest nothing more chan its ‘own ‘enormous relevance’ as a‘non-symbolic fae From perfect grief there need not be ‘Wisdom or even memory: One thing then learnt remains vo me, "The woodspurge has acup of three, ines 3-18) McGann apiy points out that this extreme version of ‘Keatsian’ insistence on ‘he material image, this truth first ofall to experience, notidess fs the basis of Rossetti’s notorious aestheticism’.™ Of course the blossom of the woodspurge is stil a far exy from the body ‘of Guenevere twisted and awry with passion, but beginning from the mid 1850s Rosseiti did devote his at increasingly and almost exclusively not only to the representation of che impassioned body, but even to the ‘deliberate ‘choice between Christ and a rival lover’. By the time he met Morris and ‘Swinbume, Rossexti had devoted himself almost exclusively to painting ‘enigmatically symbolic and often erose scenes from medieval legend. The ‘complese shift from spivitual, Dantean themes in Rossexti’s art, however, ‘appears most dramatically in 1859 when he left behind his characteristic ‘drawings and paintings of is deceased wife Elizabeth Siddall as Beatrice and ‘other chaste damozels for the Iushly sensual painting of his mistress Fanay Comforth, as Bacca Baclata, In his poetry, the shift to frankly sensual representation of the physical, impassioned body is most obvious in the 1860 ‘Song of the Bower’, which describes the erotic ideal and the bodily es‘ype of fernale beauty that preoccupied Rosset as a painter and post for the rest of his life ‘Whe were my prize, could 1 enter thy bower, "This day, to-morrow, at eve or at mom? ‘Large lovely arms and a neck like @ tower, ‘Bosom thea heaving thar now lis foslora, Deep in warm pillows, (he sun's Kiss is code!) ‘Thy sweemess ll near me, so distant to-day; >My hand sound thy head and thy hand on my should, ‘My mouth co thy neck as the world melts away.” ‘Once he had dedicated himself to an aesthetics, ‘sensational’ commitment 10 art and beatuy, the crowning achievement of Rosseti's poetic carcer was the sonnet sequence The House of Lif, consisting of roa miscellaneous sonnets, many of which celebrate erotic love and its representation in at asthe highest form of genius, Rossetti did continue to insist upon the morally and spriually redemptive power of love, but in such sonnets as ‘Genius in Beauty’, his ‘emphasis falls on female beauty enshrined in art Beauty like hers is genius, Not the call Of Homers of of Dante's heart sublime, — [Not Michae!'s hand farrowing the zones of ime, Is more with compessed mysteries musical Nay, notin Spring's or Summer's sweet footfall ‘More gathered gifts exuberant life bequeaths Than doth this sovereign face, whose ove-pell breathes Even from its shadowed contour on the wall (ines 8) Rossert’s contemporary admirers, such as F.W.H. Myers, praised him and defended the seeming amorality of his aestheticism on the moral grounds that for ‘ ‘The worshipper of Beauty the highest things are also the loveliest, and the strongest of moral agencesis also the most pervading and keenest joy. Art and Religion, which no compression could amalgamate, may by Love be ‘expanded and inerfased; and thus the poet may not ex 80 wholly who seeks ina woman's eyes ‘the meaning of ll things that are' and ‘the soul's sphere of Infinite images’ may not bea mere psmatc fringe to realy, but rather those nmages may be as dark rays made visible by passing through the medium of a ‘mind which is fed co refacr and reflect chem." Rosserti certainly did endow erotic love with such idealism, and as his use of ‘the Petrarchan sonnet form suggests, he was drawing on the neo Platonism of Danse Gabriel Rossetti and Swinburne the courtly love tradition, but Myers's elaborate defences would not have been necessary if what he called Rossett’s ‘Religion of Art’ and ‘Worship of ‘Beauty’ had not been presented in terms that shocked contemporary morality by displacing the Christian God with an altogether different deity: the per- sonified ‘Love’ of the The House of Life may be in part Platonic, but Plato wes 2 pagan, and ‘Love’ more dlosely resembles Venus than Christ. Further, the erotic evocation of soul is more carnal than Vietorian morality would charee: terisically approve, as in the evocation of deity in “The Kiss 1 was a child beneath her touch, ~a man ‘When breast w breast we clung, even Tand she, A spirit when her spit looked through me, — A god when all our lifebreath met to fan ‘Out lifeblood, il love's emulous ardours sen, re within fie, desire in dele. (ines 14) Love is also meant to be redemptive in the poem that Rossert! eventually suppressed because of the harsh criticism ofits eroticism, ‘Nupdal Sleep’ ‘Sleep sank chem lower than the tide of dreams, ‘And their dreams watched them snk, and slid away. Slowly thei souls swam up again, chrough gleams (Of watered light and dall drowned walfs of days ‘Till ftom some wonder of new woods and seams He woke, and wondered mote: for there she ly. (lines 9-14) ‘These lines have an impeccable pedigree in their clear allusion ta Milton's account of Adams dream and the creation of live, and also to Keats's com- ‘menton Adam's dream asa proof ofthe ‘holiness ofthe Heart's affections and the truth of Imagination," but as the octave of the sonnet graphically relates, the path to this redemptive notion of Love is emphatically carnal: ‘Avlength thelr long kiss severed, with sweet smart ‘And as the last slow sudden drops are shed From spelding eaves when all the stom has fled, So singly flagged che pulses ofeach heart. ‘Theis bosoms sundered, with the opening start (Of matried flowers to either side outpread From the knit stem; yet stil their mouths, burt sed, Fawmed on each other where they lay apart. (lines -8) Eventually voices of shocked indignation would be raised against this camal- ity, but not before being provoked by Swinburne’s much more shockingly sensational end genuinely blasphemous poetry. »‘The young Swinburne was well on his way towards a frankly pagan “Worship of Beauty’ of his own when he met Rossetti at Oxford. Like Rossetti, he had heen raised in an Anglo-Catholic home, but he seems to have retained his faith unt his enrolment at Oxford and he was only begin- ring his fierce reaction againse the fith of his youth in 1857. Atthe vender age of twenty, Swinburne had lang been practising his craft, had writen great ‘quantities f precocious juverilia and was at work on two tragedies, The Queen ‘Mother and Rosanna (published together in 1860), which already reflected his interest in unorthodox, sadistic and masochistic expressions of passionate sexuality and especially in the destructive power of passionate women. Under the influence of Rossetti and Mortis, he wrote various medievalist poems, including Queen Yoeult which, like “The Defence of Guenevere’, sided with beauty and passion as opposed to the orthodox morality of ‘Tennyson's Idils ‘Swinbume left Oxford to sete in London near Rossetti, Mortis and Jones {in 860 and throughout the early 1860s established himself as the enfant erie ‘of English letters. During these years he wrote in a remarkable variety of forms, from French burlesques of Victor Hugo and hoax reviews of obscene rench poets to serious and important literary criticism, an impressive epis- tolary novel (serialised in 877 a8 A Year's Letters, and published in book form as Love's Cross-Currents in r901) and, most significantly, the plays and poems that were to make him famous and kick up a storm of controversy with their ‘publications in the mid 1860s: Atalanta in Calydon (1865), Chasteland (1865) and Poons and Ballads (866). ‘Atatenta in Celyton, still justly acknowledged as one of Swinbume’s greatest works, showeased his extraordinary learning and critical tact in its compelling reproduction of Aeschylean tragedy, his astonishing lyrical gifts in the famous choruses\and his favourite themes of the fatal power and passion of women in the legend of Atalanta the huntress and Althaea, the fatal mother who slew her own son, Meleager. In addition, the pagan setting enabled him to express his antitheism and genuinely pagan belief in the beauty of the cyclical pattern of generation and destruction in natare; and the very form of the work, echoing Aeschylus, enabled him 10 repre- sent his aesthetic fith that great art endures, that at alone survives the fatal cydes of nature, Like Rosteni's Petrarchan sonnets and the Dantean terza rima of Morris's ‘Defence of Guenevere’ the characteristcally “aesthetic” use of traditional form brought the nineteenth century into contact with the remote past, enabling the poet to represent the ‘compasite experience of all ‘the ages’ formally as well as thematically. 90 Dante Gabriel Rosset and Swinbume Inaddlton, che play situates Swinbume a8 a poet of sensation, the lushness and sensuality recalling Keats, and the rush of images and ideas recalling Shelley. The characterstically rapid anapaestic verse is perhaps most evident in the famous first chorus: ‘When the hounds of spring are on winters eraces, "The mother of months in meadow or plain Fills the shadows and windy places ‘With lisp of leaves and ripple of rain; ‘And the brown bright nightingale amorous Is half assuaged for tyes, For the Thracian ships and the foreign faces, "The rongucless vigil and all the pain.* “These famous lines have been much derided for their supposed Swinburnean tendency to substinate a rush of sound for meaning and to sweep the reader away in a haze of words, and its true that the rapidity of the metre and the sonorous effects of the assonance and alliteration may sweep readers beyond the fall implications ofthe lines. The difficulty, however, is caused less by the rush of sound than by a rush of meaning: there is almost too much meaning, especially for readers not trained in the cassis, Swinbume uses the choruses to draw in the entire context of Greek mythology, here alluding particulasly to the goddess Arcemis in all of her aspects as goddess of the hunt and therefore of death and destruction, chaste goddess of the moon and the months, and goddess of fertility and che seasons: the point, economically sade by allusion to the body of Greek myth, is that chastity and ferlity, life and death, generation and destruction, ideslism and actuality, are so inex- twicably mixed as to be represented in one personification, the presiding deity of the tragedy. The further allusions, to the myth of Ielus, draw in the sadism and violence of Greek myth with the story, parallel ro Althaca’s tale, of Procne’s murder of her son Itylus in revenge against her husband Tereus, who had raped her siscer Philomela and cut out her tongue, Because the legend includes the metamorphosis of Philomela into a nightingale, who sings her grief for all ererity, Swinburne's allusion also. conibures to che play’s meaning in its suggestion that song, poeny, is the product of passion and violence, and survives to transcend the cycles of death and rebich presided over by Artemis, This is not the place to explicate the stanza fally, let alone to provide a fill reading of the play, but even this brief glance at the stanzas breadth and depth of allusion should illustrate that Swinbume does not substitute sound for sense as his detractors have traditionally oclaimed. Catherine Maxwell convincingly argues that bis metres ideally ‘help dramatize the meaning of the verse’ ‘Yeats’ proposition tht ‘he purpose of rhythm ... sto prolong the moment ‘of contemplation ... to keep us in that state of perhaps real ince in which the mind iberated from the pressore ofthe willis unfolded in symbol’ is 2 ‘good description ofthe way in which Swinbume's often mesmerizing metres ‘an hill readers into acquiescence s0 that they ebsorb through the poem's imagery controversial or dscurbing ideas they might otherwise not tolerate,” Certainly the linking of motherhood and murder, essential to the myths ‘Swinbume is dramatising, might be hard to tolerate, but even bardec for ‘Victorian audiences to tolerate was the overt anti-theism later voiced in the ‘chorus’s denunciation of ‘the supreme evil, God’ (ine 15). Because of is obvious poetic brilliance but probably even more because of ‘ts pre-Christian setting, Atalanta tn Calydon was well received and the pagan: ism, sensuality and antisheism went largely uncensored. The Christian British setting of his next publication, the tragedy Chastelard, however, offered no such excuse, and even when reviewers admired the mastery of Swinbume's poetic expression they noted with disapproval that ‘passionate burning kisses meet us on every page” or objected to the representation of Mary Stuart as “morally repulsive.” The obvious talent and learning exhibited in Atalanta in CCalydon and even in Chasteard had inhibited any extreme statements of moral outrage against his pagan sensuality, but the dam burst upon the publication ‘of Poems and Ballads, which established the poet's reputation as the ‘ibidinows Taureate ofa pack of saryrs’ and ‘an unclean fiery imp from the pit.** ‘Swinbume delighted in outraging the virtuous decorum of Vietorian socery, and undoubeedly many af his poems were designed to do just that. He himself described ‘Dolores, for example, as ‘boiling and gushing infamy’ and he might have added blasphemy, since the poern not only celebrates sado- ‘masochisdc sexuality but also parodies hymns to the virgin: the subtile, ‘Notre Dame des Sept Douleus, alludes o ‘our Lady of the seven sorrows’, the Virgin ‘Mary, but in context must be understood as ‘our lady ofthe seven pains’, the dominatrix, Dolores, 2 ‘mystical rose’, buta ‘mystical rose ofthe mire’ line 2) Dolores is alove goddess ofthe gutter, a purely carnal icon of sado-masochistic lst, and she is invoked accordingly ‘A, beau pasionate body "That never has ached witha hear! (On thy mouth though the Kisses are bloody, Though they sting tilt shudder and smare, oa Dante Gabel Rosset! and Swinburne “More kind than the love they adore, ‘They hurt not the heat or the brain, ‘Obizer and tender Dolores, (Our Lady of Pain (ines 6-8) Shocking as ‘Dolores’ is, many other poems in the volume were equally or ‘more appalling to Victorian moral sensibilities. ‘Faustine’, for example, is a kind of hymn to the fierce loves and sadistic pleasures of the empress who revelled in the slaughter of Christians. Worse, Swinbume favourably com- pares the pagan pleasures of ancient Rome with his own time of famished hours, Malmed loves and mean, This ghastly thinfaced time of ours. (ines 17-9) Bven worse is "The Leper’, a dramatic monologue based on a supposed French chronicle history ofa sinful lady whese many knightly lovers abandoned her ‘when she contracted leprosy, but who retained the love of a poor seibe who ‘continued to love her even as the leprosy ate away her fearares, ultimately continuing to make love to the corpse. The graphic representation of the Lady's loves and of the scribe’s passionate necrophilia was only apparently Jstfed by an excerpt from the medieval French chronicle, since the excerpt ‘was actually a hoax devised and writuen by Swinburne, and once aguin the poem's sins agsins decorum are exacerbated by an attack on the Christan God ‘who ‘makes time and ruins it and who wantonly ‘Changed with disease her body sweet, / The body oflove wherein she abode’ (ines 45, 47-8). Swinburne ‘undoubtedly intended all ofthese pocms to shock his contemporaries, but they all also paradigmatially embody the characteristic aesthetic substitution of the physical for the metaphysical, and they alljustapose present sensibilities with the past to represent something lke the composite expesience of all the ages For Swinburne, ascetic Christianity constituted an unremitting attack on the body of love, Chris's rival lover. For all ofits outrageous libidinousness and blasphemy, Poems and Ballads was a serious effort to challenge and extend the moral limits placed upon ar. Underlying the volumme’s nihilistic attack on Cristian morality sa defiant aesthesicism complete with a genuine paganism, This pioneering critical essay on William Blake, Swinburne had argued for an ‘aeschericlam that would see Christian asceticism a8 the antichesis of beauty, and would celebrate a belief that the sensual apprebension of beauty is superior to mere morality or delusional belief in the immortal soul. Like Pater, he saw the art of the Middle Ages as a ‘pagan revival’ pitting Christ ‘against some rival lover asin the legend of Venus and Tannhiuser, which, he es wet weargued, implied a sympathetic feeling ‘for the pagan side of things, revealing in the tradition the presence and touch of some poet.” At about the same ‘ime he was writing his essay on Blake, he was also writing his own version of the Tennhiiuser legend, ‘Laus Veneris’, which became the title poem of the American edition of Poems and Ballads. The legend of Tannhauser involves precisely the knight’s choice berween Christ and his pagan rival ‘Venus, Svinbure’s version makes it clear that if the choice comes down toa question of beauty, as it always must in Swinbure’s aestheticism, it must fall to Venus ‘Alas, Lord, surely thon at great and fi Butlo ber wandecflly wover hai ‘And thou dds heal us with thy piteous is, Bat see now, Lord; her mouth is lovelies. (nes 1-20) ‘Tannksiuser’s choice of Venus could be excused in Victorian eyes because the poem, like Rossen’ Jenny’ and Morris's “The Defence of Guenevere, s a dramatic monologue and cannot be simply understood as the poets own ‘expression of his views. ‘Tannhiuser’s views do, however, comespond with ‘Swinbume's aeshedcism as expressed in the soudy of Blake, and the same choice ‘of the pagan gods and the senses is expressed by speaker afer speaker in Poems ‘and Ballads, nowhere more clearly than in the words of one ofthe last remaining pagans of the early Christian era: "Thou hast conquered, © pale Galilean; the world has grown grey from thy breath; / We have drunken of things Lethean, and fed onthe fillnes of deat’ (‘Hymn to Prosespine’, lies 5-6). Asin ‘Dolores and ‘Laus Veneris, the ‘iva lover’ is pited even more explicitly against the ‘Viepin mother than against Crist, as the speaker pits Venus against her: Not a thine, not as thine, was our mother, a blossom of lowering seas, ‘Clothed round with the world’s desire as with ralment, and far as the foam, For thine came weeping, a slave among slaves, and rejected; bur she ‘Came flashed with the fllushed wave, and imperial, her foot on the sea, ‘And dhe wonderfl waters knew her, tbe winds and the viewless ways, ‘And dhe rose grew rosier, and bluer the se-bue stream of the bays. (Anactoria, lines 7-88) However shocking, this paganism offers an alternative to Christianity that is rot actually far from even Matthew Arold’s arguments in the contempor+ neous Culture end Anarchy that an overzealous devotion to Biblical morality, “Hlebraism’, was in need of correction by a renewed emphasis on the pagan —— Dante Gabriel Rosetti and Swinburne ‘deal of beauty, ‘Hellenism’. Further, as is generally true of Swinbume's and Rossett's aesthetic poetry, the claim is not only made discursively but ‘embodied in the dramatised speaker's desire, in the pulsations of the verse and the appeal to the senses of the imagery, which enciches the world with colour and endows it even with a tactile sense of weight and power, merging the narural force of the sea with the impassioned beauty of the ‘female body. Swinburme's aestheticism, of course, is far more extreme than Amold's Hellenism, mostly because itis more boldly sensual and far more cxitical of Christianity, but also because it makes an argument that only poetry and art, not any ideal of God, transcend the limits of moztaity. Swinburne’s pagan esthetic idealism is most obviously manifested in the magnificent elegy for Charles Baudelaire, ‘Ave arque Vale’, writen shortly after the publication of Poems and Baliads, and in the equally magisterial dramatic monologue spoken bby Sappho to her lover, ‘Anactori’. Although itis a dramatic monologue expressing sentiments entirely appropriate to Sappho and even in part appro priate fom her surviving poetry, ‘Anactoria’ was among the poems most savagely attacked by censorious reviewers of Poem ane Ballads, The abuse of the poem is not surprising considering its representations of the ‘amorous agonies’ (ine 29) of sadistic lesbian love, The eroticism includes a great deal of characeriscicelly Swinburnean biting and even eating, which may suggest less about Swinburme's understanding of lesbian practices than about his interest ina kind of parodic, eroticised Bucharis: Ah, that my lips were tuncess ips, but peessed "To the bruised blossom of thy scourged white bresst! Ahhat dhy mouth for Muses’ mllk were fed (On the sweet blood thy sweet small wounds bad bled! “That with my tongue I fle them, and could taste ‘The fain flakes ftom thy bosom tothe wast! ‘That [could drink thy veins as wine, and ext Thy breasts like honey! that from face to feet “Thy body were abalihed and consumed, And in my flesh thy very flesh entombed! (lines 105-14) The sensual imagery, appealing less ro sight and sound than'to the more primal senses of taste and hunger, exaggerates, bur epitomises Swinburne's (and Resseti’s and Morris's) substitution of body for soul, sensation for reflection. Further, nothing could more emphatically express Swinbume's ‘otion af the all-consuming nature of desire than Sappho's apparent willing ness to sacrifice her poetic gift for the erotic satisfaction of complete union.swith the beloved, but the yet more important point made in Sappho's speech is that from the power of this passion comes the more enduring power of poetic song. Once again, 2s in ‘Dolores’ and, far more compellingly, in Atalanta in Calydon, the sadistic violence of passion put into song is presented asthe only way to harmonise human emotion with a world apparently created by a sadistic God, with “The mystery of the cruelty of things’ (ine 154). As Keats had recognised, the law ofnatureis‘an eternal fierce destruction,* or as ‘Swinburne's Sappho puts it, ‘the earth, / Filled full with deadly works of life and birth, / Sore spent with hungry lusts of bith and death, / Has pain like ‘mine’ (ines 233-6). The expression of Seppho’s own cruel and hungry lusts is in perfect harmony with the spirit of nature, so that even ifshe can't fase her body wholly with her beloved's, she can fase her soul wholly with nature, become a part of nature and, like Keats's nightingale, live long beyond the “mungry generations’ of mere mortality. In the best early expression of the aestheticist myth that characterised Swinburne's later poetry, Sappho insists late in the poem that her music so harmonies the human spirit with the natural that unui the end of human history, ‘Mea shall not ee bright fre nor hear th sea, [Nor mix their hearts with music ‘Buti the light and laaghter, in the moan [And music, and in grasp of ip and hand ‘nd shudder of water that makes felt on land “The immeasurable remor of al the se2, Meraores shall mix and meraphors of me (lines 204-5, 210-4) Seppho's passionate song, reineamated in the bodies and senses of all who read it ill live as long as poetry is read —longer, certainly, than the gods of her time were to be worshipped. ‘Declining, or unable, to see Swinbure's real intentions and achievements, the most damaging of his eitcs, John Morley, simply reviled ‘the spurious pussions of a putzescent imagination’.* Prompting a deluge of outraged criticism, Poems and Ballads initiawed a cultare war over the acceptable and proper role of art in sociery that reverberated throughout the rest of the century and extended beyond the questions of decency in artand the creed of “ert for art's sake" into clinical and legal debate over not only the representa tion bu the practice of sexual ‘perversities”. Then as now, culture wars shed ‘more heat than light, and in the heat ofthis war Swinbume was accused by Robert Buchanan of revelling in filth ‘for the mere sake of uncleanness”™ and Dante Gabriel Rosetti and Swinburne by the London Review of familiaising himself with the ‘worst cirdes of Parisian lif’ and “érenching himself in the worst creations of Parisian Inerature’ to pollute English life and letters with ‘lust, bittemess, and despair’ Sill eager to shock, Swinburne himself did litle 10 raise the tone of the discussion in his response to the attacks as ‘the virulent virwe ‘of pressmen and prostitutes’ Allin all, the effect on Victorian society was, as Thomas Hardy later pat it, ‘as though a garland of red roses / Had fallen about the hood of some smug nun’ (lines 6-7). Written at a time when the ‘sensation novel’ was under virulent attack for its shocking and unnerving content, and was condemned particularly for ‘preaching to the nerves’? ‘Swinbume'sconteibutions tothe schoo! of sensation were clearly intended as an attack on certain smug Victorian attitudes, and they were sure to invite critical hostility. Catherine Maxwell concisely describes the apparent intent of such poetry and provides peshaps the best justification yet offered for the poe’s prurient excess, suggesting that he was indeed appealing to readers! ‘physical as well as intellecrual Beings as the verse communicates sinulta- neously tothe mind and senses, predominantly through that psychologically charged bodily element, the nerves’ It is not of profound interest that in ‘Swinbume's actual sexual life he could not be taught that ‘bting's no usc’ ‘but Maxwell's account of the embodiment of Swinbumean desire in verse is cridal to understanding, his poetry: ‘with regard to literary creativity Swinbume sees the transmisative activity of foo as a liberating violence, binding and disciplining language and yet releasing its energy. Form gives language its teth so thatthe finished poem is itself a pleasurable violence on the sensibility of the reader.”* Undoubtedly Swinbume's attack on certain ‘smug moral attitudes was salutary, but his real purpose, beyond simply creating beautiful poems, was to advance the aestheticsm that he had gleaned largely from Théophile Geutier and Charles Baudelaire and had developed in his study of William Blake, particulary the idea that art cannot strive to be the ‘handmaid of morality’ or even to advance mora ideas, but ‘must be concerned solely with ‘mere excellence of verse or colour’: ‘Art for ant’s sake, fist of all, and afterwards we may suppose all the rest shall be added vo her.” Purther, as he made clear in his elegy to Baudelaire and in ‘Anactoria, the transformation of even the most violent and messy passions into the perfect form of art may indeed constitute an attack on the reader, bat ieis a violence essential to break down resistance and to fuse the reader's sensibility to the poet's own, Swinlburne's contemporaries rarely doubted his mastery of poetic form, but they were, for the most part, incapable of the kind of response to his violent sexual themes chat Catherine Maxwell has said 66the poems call for. They were certainly incapable of appreciating his poetry the way he appreciated the poetry of John Fora 'Ne poet es forgetabe st than Ford, none fastens (as it were) the fangs of bis genius and hi will ore deeply in your memory. You cannar shake hands ‘with him and passby fhe touch you once he takes you, and whathe tkes he keeps his hol of his work becomes part of your thought and part of your spluitual foriture for ever™ Te isin just chis way chat Sappho's stinging and biting sensibility becomes all ‘but immoral, a part of the minds of readers across indefinite generations, Especially since Swinburne was too confident of his own powers to be 3 casualty, his opening salvo in the culture war was undoubtedly beneficial in ‘beginning a necessary discussion, but i¢ unfortunately set the stage for a devastating effect on Rossetti, who was less confident and less capable of withstanding the assault, Rossetti, forebodingly anxious about his reputation when he finally published his collected Poems in 1870, had attempted to circumvent hostile crsiism by arranging for many of his closest fiiends and admirers to seview the volume in the eading journals. Swinburne, Morris and ‘others obligingly heaped praises on che volume, saluting Rosters as one ofthe greatest poets in the history of English literature, but eventually one of ‘Swinbume’s fiercest derractors, Robert Buchanan, was able to find an oudet {for a vizulent attack on both Rosset and Swinburne and indeed on the entire group of what he called "The Fleshly School of Poetry’. Enraged by the praises Iheaped on Rossetti as well as by a literary feud with Wiliam Rosset, Buchazian's personal animus was so great that he almost dismissed the charge aguinst Swinburne by comparison ro the offences ofthe acknowledged master of the ‘fleshy schoo!’ the younger Swinburne was ‘only a little mad boy leaing off squibs; no great strong man, who might be really dangerous to society’. Buchanan's attack, moreover, was more personal than literary: Ms, Rosset s never dramatic, never impersonal, ~ always atdnudinizing, ‘posturing, and describing his own exquisce emotions. He is che ‘Blessed amaze leaning over the ‘gold bar of heaven’... he is heaven-born Helen, Sparta'squcen, whose ‘each twin breasts an apple sweets hei ith the frst wife of Adam; he the rosy Virgin of thé poem called “Ave, and the Queen in ‘he ‘Staffand Scrip: he is ‘Sister Helen’ melting her waxen man; he isall hese, Just a surely as he is Mr Rosseti solloquiaing over Jenny in her London lodging, or the very nuptial person waiting erotic sonnets to his wife... he fs just Mr Rose, a feshiy person, with nathing particular to tell us or reach us.” 664 ‘Dante Gabriel Rosetti and Swinbume Rossetti replied to this obtuse reading by insisting that the poems were in fact, dramatic, but the attack rankled because a great deal of highly personal material did inform the sonnets of The Houe of Lif. When Buchanan amplified the assaue in a pamphlet, Rossen feared the exposure of his darkest secrets: many of his sonnets commemorated his ongoing affair with Jane ‘Morris, the wife of his best friend, and worse, he suspected that Buchanan new of his exhumation of his wife to recover the poems he had buried with her in @ grandly romantic gesture. Already falling in health, Rossetti had ‘major nervous breakdown that left him incapacitated for poetry until the last years of his life, 1875-81, when he wrove two lengthy ballads and added enough sonnets to The Howse of Life to expand it from 50 to 102 sonnets, despite dropping ‘Nuptil Slep’. ‘Swinbume was easlly able co dely the critical atacks on himself, buche was already naming his attention away from erotic poetry to the radical politcal concers that had long preoccupied him and had already foun expression in a umber of early poems. As he became increasingly a poliical poet he conceded privately ro William Rossetti that ‘It was only Gabriel and his followers in ar (Vart pour Yart) who for a time frightened me from speaking coat politically.” Without actully disowning his aestheticism, Swinburne did speak out his politics over a series of volumes in the next decatle: A Song of Italy (4867), Songs bere Sunrise (872) and Songs of Two Nations (:875). These poems, Inspired by the efforts to unite Italy as 2 republic and by the charismatic Iralian leader, Mazzi, contained too much blasphemy and 100 much ofthe ‘reddest of red republicanism™ to placate his critics, but Swinburne regarded Songs before Sunrise, in particular, as his greatest work, and it does contain many lyrics of great poede as well as political power. His next true masterpiece, however, is his renar to the form of Greck tragedy, with Brechtheus (2876), ‘which forsook the eroticism and explicit blasphemies of Atalanta forthe sake ‘ofa quieter political engagement. Erechtheus was a tour de force inthe manner of Atalanta, only more 40. Atalat, ke ‘Anactoria’, had been concerned with the ‘mystery of the cruelty of things’, but like the political poetry, Brechtheus, dramatising the founding of Athens asthe ideal republic, was more optimis Ucally concerned to represent the benefits of harmonising human institutions “with the everlasting laws of the cosmos. The theme, transcending the merely Jaman, led Swinbume, as McGann has pointed out, to actempt to suggest ‘the existence of universal law’ without representing particular manifestations of law. The effect is a paucity of characterisation and parscularisaton, an albstracmess that leads Swinburne to rely more than ever on the verbal pyrotechnics and rushes of metaphor and allusion thet are sometimes 6described asa iffusenes, a fz of words and linguistic forms which become sn incantation or a monotone ... echoes [that] are thrown entirely back on themselves. Atmospheric nourishment, uprooted language, elaborate ‘unmeaning,”® The objection must be taken seriously because it continues to represent widespread responses not only to Frechtheus, but to all of Swinbuine’s still underappreciated late poetry. ‘The only way to refute the objection is by extended close reading of the poetry, and such readings, especially those of McGann and Margot Louis, have done much to substan- tiate McGann's argument thatthe effect of Swinburne’s difficult but mesmer- ing late poetey can be much like the effect ofthe celebrated Marsbar Cavesin Forster's A Passage to India: ‘A sound of complex reverberations which have been somehow completely harmonized, In both we encounter nor the realty of correspondence and harmony, the maya of its truth, but its law, the transcendent content we sometimes call its form."” Probably few readers vill be willing to grant quite so much to Swinburme’s aestheticism, or to believe he achieves the perfection of form that reveals the inner workings of the universe, but the aspiration and, to an extent, the achievement, are to be ound in such memorable late works as By the North Sea" (188), "The Lake of Gaube' (904) and ‘On the Clif (1879), which reprises his myth of the nnightingale’s song as the transmuted song of Sappho and the symbol of poetry ‘through the ages. Pechaps the greatest work of his later period, however; is the magisterial epiclength Tristram of Lyonesse(x882), a poetic tour de force that also brought Swinburne fill circle back to the early Arthurian interests that he shared with Mors, Rossetti and BurneJones and to the defence of the sival lover, sexual passion, over Christian morality. Tristram of Lyonesse, more lover, combined Swinbume'’s later style, his elaborate but to some extent disembodied and abstract harmonies, with the sensual imagery of nature land especially of the impassioned and beautiful body that was the hallmark ‘of his aesthetic poetry, as well as that of Moras and Rosset Notes 1. Arthur Henry Hallam, “On Some Characteristics of Modem Poetry and on the Lyrical Poetns of Alffed Tennyson’, in The Wenge of Aniear Hallam, ed. 7. Vail Motes (London: Oxford University Press, 1943) pp 182-98 (p. 18). ‘2 Walter Pater, ‘Poems by William Mors’, Westminster Review (October 1868), paso Thi. p. 207, “4 Clyde K, Hyde (ed), Swinbume: The Critical Hertage (New York: Barves ancl Noble, 1870), p. 3 Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Swinburne ‘The Corresponience of Dante Gabriel Rosset, ed, Willam E. Fredeman, 9 vols, (Carabridge: D.S. Brewer, 002-2), vo 1, pp 339, 394 Lines 55-So, in Willrn Morris, The Defence of Guenevere, and Other Poems, ed. Margaret Lourie (New York: Garland Publishers, 298). Dante Gabriel Rosset, The Cllr Portry ani Prose (New Haven: Yale Universvy Pres, 2003) All quotations from Rossett’s poetry are from this econ. Dante Gabriel Rassew, “The Stealthy School of Criticism’, in Coleced Poetry ‘and Prose, ed. Jerome McCann (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), pp. 337-8 Jerome McGann, ‘Rosset’ Significant Detail’, Victorian Poetry, 7 (5960), P44 Rosset, Comespondenc, wo. 1, . 75. Jerome], McGann, Rosset Significant Detail, Victorian Paetry, 7965) P46. Ti, pp. 7-8 (Quoted ftom the manuscript version in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, WH. Myees, ‘Rosser and the Religion of Beauty’, in Esayts Maem (London: Macmillan, 885). John Keas, Later, ed. Hydes Edward Rollins, 2 vols, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2958), vol. 1p. 184. Algernon Charles Swinburne, Major Poems and Selected Prose, ed. Jerome McGann and Charles L. Sligh (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004). Unless otherwise noted, all quotatlons fom Swinbume are from this edition Catherine Maxwell, Swinbume (Tavistock, Devon: Northcote Publisher, 2006), px. 3. Hyder (ed, Swininones The Critical Heritage, p. xvi Ii, p17 Ibid, p. 29. i. Algemon Swinburne, Leters, ed. Cecil Y. Lang, 6 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2959-62), vol. p23 Algernon Swinburne, Wiliam Blake: A Critea say, ed, Hugh J Lake (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 970), p. 89. Keats, Ltrs, vol. 1p. 97 Hyder, Swinbume: The Creal Hovtage, pp. 24-5 Bid. pa Ia, pas id, pt “A Singer Asleep’, The Complete Poems of Thomas Hardy, ed. James Gibson (London: Macrillan, 1578), p 265. HLL, Manse, ‘Sensation Novel’, Quarterly Review (Apails86), p. 482, ‘Maxwell, Swinbume, p. 25, Philip Henderson, Swinbure: Portrait of « Pact (New Yorke Macmillan, 1974, pa Maxwell, Swinburne, p. 2. Swinburne, Walia Blake, pp. 98-2 serwe ae 3. 2. Quoted by Maxwell, Swinburne, p- 24 Robert Buchanan, “The Fleshly School of Posty: Mr D.G. Rossen’, Contemporary Review, 18 G87), pp. 34-50, reprinted in David G. Riede (ed), rik Esaye on Dante Gabriel Ross (New York: G.K. Hall, 992), p. 29. Swinbume, Lees, vl. B95 Hyder (ed), Swinburne: The Crical Herage,p. 220 Jerome J. McGann, Sainhure: An Experiment Crise (Chleago: University of (Chicago Press, 1972), p.m. Maxwell, Swinbume, P13. Chapter 36 Christina Rossetti and Hopkins CATHERINE PHILLIPS Writing one of his characteristcally bubbling letters to William Mowbray Baile in July 186, Geraed Manley Hopkins old him that, Thave now amore sational hope than before of doing something ~in poetry and painting. About the frst have sid al there isto say in letter; about the latter I have no more 00m to speak, bat when next! see you Ihave grea things to tell. have been introduced to Miss nd Miss Christina Rossetti. met them and Hlolman Hunt and George Macdonald and Peter Cungajingham and Jenny Lind at the ‘Gumeys’." Clearly Christina was something of a celebrity and the under graduate Hopkins was atthe height ofhis ambitions of belonging to the atistie avantgarde ashe knew ofitin London. He had, he told Bali, ‘nearly finished an answer to Miss Rosseti’s Convent Threshold, to be called A voice from the ‘worl, or something like that, with which Lam at present in the fatal condicion of satsfuetion'* Rosteti's ‘Convent Threshold isnot an account of demure spiritual yearnings but depicts the turmoil of a woman caught between forbidden love and a petifying fear of damnation, a fear of the sort engens dered at Christ Church, Albany Street where Christina worshipped; erties have pointed to Pope's ‘Eloisa to Abelard as a literary precedent. Hopkins’s ‘answer reveals both the strengths and weaknesses of his immature verse "The iniial paragraph contains vibrant natural description, including the ‘extended metaphor of cuckoos calling, with the precise observation that che call varies between five notes and seven and that it can be heard earlier in some years than in others, but Hopkins had not the range of human experi- ence to convey with conviction the pain of losing a lover.* ‘More convincing s the passage following the lovers’ temps to save each other at the Last judgment. Ironically, Hopkins's narrator finds that, unlike his lover, whose: womanly love he had wrongly dismissed as ‘not strong’ (line <8) because female, he cannot give up his chance of salvation for her ‘Conveniently, in the poem such pric is not exacted; instead the young man concludes that he had been “gnorantiy bold (ine 126) even to dream that he 9