A.C. Swinburne and the Singing Word

New Perspectives on the Mature Work

Yisrael Levin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780754669968
• eBook ISBN: 9781317186182
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Focusing on Algernon Charles Swinburne's later writings, this collection makes a case for the seriousness and significance of the writer's mature work. While Swinburne's scandalous early poetry has received considerable critical attention, the thoughtful, rich, spiritually and politically informed poetry that began to emerge in his thirties has been generally neglected. This volume addresses the need for a fuller understanding of Swinburne's career that includes his fiction, aesthetic ideology, and analyses of Shakespeare and the great French writers. Among the key features of the collection is the contextualizing of Swinburne's work in new contexts such as Victorian mythography, continental aestheticism, positivism, and empiricism. Individual essays examine, among other topics, the dialect poems and Swinburne's position as a regional poet, Swinburne as a transition figure from nineteenth-century aesthetic writing to the professionalized criticism that dominates the twentieth century, Swinburne's participation in the French literary scene, Swinburne's friendships with women writers, and the selections made for anthologies from the nineteenth century to the present. Taken together, the essays offer scholars a richer portrait of Swinburne's importance as a poet, critic, and fiction writer.

Chapter 1
Knowledge and Sense Experience in Swinburne’s Late Poetry

Stephanie Kuduk Weiner

In “Triads” (1878), Algernon Charles Swinburne traces the boundary of human knowledge to the limit of sense experience. What falls beyond our senses, he argues, we cannot know:

The sense to the flower of the fly,

The sense of the bird to the tree,

The sense to the cloud of the light,

Who can tell me?

[…]

The secret of passing away,

The cost of the change of the moon,

None knows it with ear or with eye,

But all will soon. (Poems 3: 111)

Human senses offer no direct access to the flower’s experience of the butterfly or the meaning of death; they cannot be known “with ear or with eye.” Yet even as the poem asserts the inaccessibility of extrasensory knowledge, it invites its readers to exercise the mind’s capacity to recombine and translate our own sensations into an imaginative understanding of another being’s sense experience or another state of existence. We may imagine the flower’s “sense of the fly” by recourse to our own experiences of beauty, flickering motion, or gentlest touch; the tree’s “sense of the bird” we can conceptualize in terms of our own sensations of a bird’s weight, shape, and song. By drawing a stark line between what our senses can and cannot tell us, “Triads” forwards an empiricist theory that “from experience: in that, all our knowledge is founded,” as John Locke put it, while also following Locke in celebrating the “modes of thinking”—including remembrance, contemplation, reasoning, abstraction, imagination, and even dreaming—through which our perceptions of the world are built up into ideas and new ideas are born (109; 213–14).

Other poems Swinburne wrote in the later part of his career, particularly the elegies, also insist that sense experience of this world and knowledge of other worlds are separated by “the gate / That here divides our vision and our fate,” as he writes in “Memorial Verses on the Death of Théophile Gautier” (1878) (Poems 3: 63). These poems classify imagination as one of the powers of the mind reflecting upon its own processes and the sense perceptions that are its raw data. To be sure, some poems of these years make a substantially different claim: that the imagination is capable of perceptions beyond sense experience and the mind’s recombination of its impressions. Swinburne’s preferred names for imagination, “the soul’s sense” or the “spirit in sense,” suggest not only imagination but also intuition and a nonrational intelligence or vitality within physical sense (“Relics,” Poems 3: 27; Tristram of Lyonesse, Poems 4: 32). Yet Swinburne never argues or implies that this mental faculty grants access to a transcendent reality. The “omnipresent debate” in nineteenth-century intellectual life between empiricist and transcendental epistemologies registers in Swinburne’s late poetry as a sustained exploration of the scope and limits of knowledge drawn from sense experience of various kinds (Harris). Indeed, given the wide array of technical strategies and prosodic forms he uses in examining the relation between sensation and knowledge, its complexities seem to have propelled his poetic experimentation during the period beginning with Poems and Ballads, Second Series (1878) and especially during the Putney years.

Two important avenues Swinburne takes in exploring the grounds of knowledge in sense experience are of special interest because they have long been identified as new directions in his late work: descriptive poems that stake their claims for insight in moments of sense experience of particular places, and sound-driven poems that foreground the poet’s and reader’s experience of following patterns of sound toward unexpected meanings. In this essay, I argue that both these groups of poems center on the relation between sensation and knowledge, exploring this relation in different, even diametrically opposed, ways. Descriptive poems such as those that constitute “A Midsummer Holiday” (1884) and “The Lake of Gaube” (1904) investigate the quality of the knowledge that can be gained by attending to the experience of the real world. These poems are referential, and they often adopt what Carol T. Christ calls the “aesthetic of particularity,” a strain of Victorian and modernist poetics of which Swinburne is typically seen as standing outside. The sound-driven poems—sestinas, roundels, singsongy children’s verses, poems dense with alliteration and rhyme—concern the kind of insight that can be gained by paying attention to the sensuous qualities of language itself. They are antireferential in treating language as its own sensory experience, and they employ an apparently accidental or arbitrary approach to ideas to highlight the meanings poetry can garner from coincidences in the sounds of words. These poems’ use of particulars tends to be either deliberately minimized or highly symbolic. Both the descriptive and the sound-driven poems experiment with the implications of the mediating role language plays between sensation and knowledge, the descriptive poems examining the way language makes perception possible and communicable, the sound poems examining the sonorous associations of a language that can be detached from the world because its relation to the world is arbitrary and systematic rather than necessary and organic. My underlying premise is that Swinburne’s descriptive and sound-driven poems are best read according to terms provided not by Poems and Ballads, First Series (1866), too often the lens for interpreting all his work, but rather by nineteenth-century debates about knowledge and sensation. Such a reading reveals what is at stake for Swinburne in his foray into descriptive poetry and in the prominence he accords in his late work to sound-driven forms; and it places these works not only in the context of his career but also in that of nineteenth-century intellectual history.

* * *

Swinburne’s descriptive and sound-driven poems have suffered alike from the much bemoaned yet persistent neglect of his late works. The sound poems have raised difficulties because of their inescapable privileging of sound over sense, the central charge leveled at Swinburne’s work by T.S. Eliot and other early twentieth-century critics. Eliot’s famous reading of Swinburne condemns him as a poet for whom “the meaning and the sound are one thing”: “the object has ceased to exist, because the meaning is merely the hallucination of meaning, because language, uprooted, has adapted itself to an independent life of atmospheric nourishment” (134, 136). The tendency in most Swinburne scholarship has been to dodge rather than meet this criticism, to set the sounds of a poem aside in order to explore aspects of its theme or argument. Some critics interested in Swinburne’s aestheticism praise his “pursuit of pure sound,” but that same aestheticism has impeded understanding of the descriptive poems, which are seen as a surprising departure from his earlier antireferential and atmospheric technique (Dowling 178). To a large degree, for both his first readers and for more recent scholars, Poems and Ballads, First Series has set the terms for interpreting, evaluating, and assessing the significance of all of his poetry. Those terms—aestheticism, sexuality and sensuality, technical virtuosity— invest a great deal of significance in the otherworldliness and abstractness of the volume’s descriptive passages. Resulting accounts enlist Swinburne in the ranks of an anti-Enlightenment Romanticism whose truth claims are intelligible largely as a rejection of those asserted by Enlightenment rationalism, and whose preference for imagination and reverie rather than reason and observation entails a deliberately vague descriptive practice.

Yet in the republican and antitheist poems that appeared in volumes such as Songs before Sunrise (1871), Swinburne espouses a thoroughly empiricist epistemology that traces all knowledge not to transcendent revelation or inborn concepts, but to experience of this world and inward reflection on the powers of the mind. The argument of such poems is precisely congruent with empiricism as defined by Wendell V. Harris: the assertion “that any model or ideal man might attempt to follow is exoteric, self-constructed, tentative, and heuristic” rather than, as the transcendentalists propose, “esoteric, pre-existent, perfect, and peremptory” (359). Moreover, according to Margot K. Louis, beginning in the mid-1880s, “[t]he interaction of mind and nature, or the extent to which each mirrors the other, now displaces [Swinburne’s] interest in the specifically poetic imagination. … He deliberately narrows his focus to immediate experience” (5). Epistemological questions come to the fore, and Swinburne’s late poems are filled with assertions about the scope and limits of human knowledge, as well as questions about what might lie beyond our ken. These works do continual battle with the transcendental position, but they also engage worries and difficulties of significant importance to empiricists: “the illusoriness of perception, the limitations of perspective, and, ultimately, the possibility of solipsism” (Levine 247).

Ironically, the “victory of empiricism” at the end of the nineteenth century was accompanied by a proliferation of interest in the very questions that victory put to a metaphysical rest (Harris 20). Philosophers, linguists, painters, poets, and historians of art took up the questions about perception, perspective, and solipsism that had for centuries lent complexity to empiricist epistemology— a complexity too often missed by scholars eager to equate it with a crassly utilitarian materialism. As George Levine writes, “Modernist aestheticism and positivist science participate equally in … empiricism” (246). Thus Thomas Hardy insists on human rather than divine constructions of meaning in Jude the Obscure (1895), decadent poets cultivate their capacity for exquisite sensations, and Walter Pater redefines philosophy and art as means to “startle … the human spirit … to a life of constant and eager observation [in which] [n]ot the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end” (219).

The strand of poetry embracing imagination, subjectivity, and linguistic hermeticism exists in Swinburne’s oeuvre, as is does throughout late-eighteenth-and nineteenth-century poetry, in tandem with a strand embracing observation, particularity, and perspective—and both approaches are indebted to an empiricism whose theory of knowledge traces ideas to sense experience and mental actions. Rather than mistaking Swinburne, even in his most “effusive” and “dreamy” poems (Peters, Crowns 24), for a conscientious objector to Enlightenment empiricism, it is more accurate to see him as engaged both formally—particularly in relation to sound patterns and descriptive techniques—and thematically with its core questions. As his descriptive poems make explicit, Swinburne’s is an exploration, a defense, and a critique always mounted within empiricism’s own epistemological framework. Like Keats’s plea for “a Life of Sensations rather than of Thoughts” (365), Swinburne’s poems take up the problematic status of sensation, at once the opposite of rationality and, according to the theory of knowledge bequeathed to the nineteenth century by the Age of Reason, the origin of all our ideas.

* * *

Swinburne’s descriptive poems embrace a theory of knowledge rooted in sensation, which is founded upon observation and an aspiration toward mimetic fidelity to the world of experience and experience itself. These poems enunciate their mimetic ambitions in myriad ways typical of the “aesthetic of particularity” forged by Robert Browning and Gerard Manley Hopkins, most explicitly in their consistent use of the present tense, especially the emphatic use of the words “is” and “are”; in titles that point to particular times and places, such as Swinburne’s “March: An Ode. 1887” (1889), “In a Rosary” (1904), and “By the North Sea” (1880); and in their inclusion of the proper names of flowers, birds, towns, and bodies of water. Like the Greater Romantic Lyric to which they have been compared (Louis 140–43, Riede 191), Swinburne’s descriptive poems feature a “determinate speaker” in “a localized, outdoor setting” (Abrams 201). For example, the nine short lyrics collected in “A Midsummer Holiday” are among the most straightforwardly descriptive of all his works. In each poem, Swinburne’s powers of observation and reflection are awakened by a quotidian seaside sight: a solitary rock revealed at low tide, the cliffside path between his lodging and the sea, a sunbow in the sea spray. As in many of his descriptive poems, in “A Midsummer Holiday” Swinburne often places himself at a site between two opposing elements, usually sea and land, and at a moment of suspended cycle or transition, usually dusk. In “The Seaboard,” he stands at ebb tide on a spot usually covered with water; in “The Cliffside Path,” he looks ahead and behind him: “Low behind us lies the bright steep murmuring town, / High before us heaves the steep rough silent field” (Poems 6: 16). As the world hovers between tides, between night and day, between sea and cliff, Swinburne can “pause, to see” the contours of this time and place (“A Haven,” Poems 6: 7). These are special opportunities for observation, not because they present any supernatural or transcendent revelations, but because they are fleeting, elemental, and richly suggestive.

In his experiments with referential description, Swinburne develops a range of techniques for presenting acts of perception in a particularized time and place, an empiricist poetics of metaphor, simile, line, and syntax. His language reflects and reflects upon its role in mediating between sensation and ideal. “The Mill Garden,” for example, offers rich descriptions of the calls of sea mews and doves, the distant sounds of the sea, and the poppies, daisies, wallflowers, and other blooms in the garden. Swinburne’s opening description of the sunflowers thrusts the reader immediately into the sight before the poet’s eyes:

Stately stand the sunflowers, glowing down the garden-side,

Ranged in royal rank arow along the warm grey wall,

Whence their deep disks burn at rich midnoon afire with pride,

Even as though their beams indeed were sunbeams, and the tall

Spectral stems bore stars whose reign endures, not flowers that fall. (Poems 6: 11)

These are real flowers, the poem insists, seen at this “midnoon” in this particular garden. Though lines 4–5 reach outside the poem, they also accentuate its referentiality through the subjunctive tense, the elaborate flagging of the simile, and the return at the end of the sentence and the line to the “flowers that fall.” Moreover, the emphasis on the visual appearance of the sunflowers, conveyed not only through their name and verisimilar depiction, but also through the figurative associations they raise in the observer’s mind, anatomizes the process of seeing them. The abundant figurative language expresses the raw sensory data the flowers present to an observer: their “glowing” brilliance against the “grey wall,” their appearance as “deep disks burn[ing]” and “afire.” The flowers look like light arranged in lines and circles, but these raw sensations are already couched in language that gives them names, differentiates between what is really there and what the sight resembles, and arranges through syntax and lineation the various elements of the scene. In this way, the poem not only presents a visual event, but examines the interplay between sensation, language, and cognition in the act of seeing. “The Mill Garden” experiments with how the unique resources of poetic language— figures, images, lines, syntactic inversions—can reveal the universal but usually unconsidered process of making sense of sensation. It is a poetic exploration of the empiricist assertion that “perception and language are connected because in ‘seeing’ we convert raw optical sensations into normative perceptions, and language is not only an exemplary but in fact the chief normalizing factor in human experience,” as Jules David Law explains; “[w]e ‘see’ the world as it is described by ordinary language; not as mere shapes and colors but as nameable objects” (13).

“The Mill Garden” elongates this otherwise instantaneous conversion of shapes and colors into names in order to affirm the importance of language and thought to any act of perception. Directional words such as “down” and “arow,” similarly stake a claim to mimetic referentiality, and explore the relation between language, sensation, and thought. Many of the descriptive poems begin by carefully organizing the elements of the scene, as in “Neap-Tide” (1889):

Far off is the sea, and the land is afar:

The low banks reach at the sky,

Seen hence, and are heavenward high” (Poems 3: 238)

These lines arrange the sea, land, and hills around the poet’s point of view, and establish an interest in perspective from the outset. Such passages extend Swinburne’s exploration of the act of cognition involved in converting raw sensation into true perception, investigating the mind’s ability to interpret the overlapping and partial view of the objects in a visual field as an organized space, a three-dimensional world. “Far off” is a description of relative distance that translates into spatial terms the visual appearance of an object that presents itself to the eye as relatively small—“the finest discrimination within the compass of ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Knowledge and Sense Experience in Swinburne’s Late Poetry
• 2 “Quivering Web of Living Thought”: Conceptual Networks in Swinburne’s Songs of the Springtides
• 3 Solar Erotica: Swinburne’s Myth of Creation
• 4 Swinburne and the North
• 5 Swinburne’s Shakespeare: The Verbal Whirlwind?
• 6 A Channel Passage: Swinburne and France
• 7 Swinburne’s Friendships with Women Writers
• 8 Selecting Swinburne
• Afterword
• Index