In lieu of a new Blake essay that I was planning to give you, but which has opened up possibilities to be developed beyond my original intention, I feel it is appropriate to draw notice to an oft-overlooked player of the late Romantic era, which is less a digression from Blake so much as a mere side-step.

Algernon Charles Swinburne was born in London in 1836, nine years after the death of William Blake. He was born in Grosvenor Place, just a short distance from Blake's former home in South Molton Street, but in stark contrast to Blake, he was of privileged stock. A child prodigy, he was sponsored by Wordsworth and educated at Eton, where he wrote his first published work, "The Unhappy Revenge", at the age of twelve. At fifteen he won the coveted Prince Consort Prize for Modern Languages. He continued his education at Oxford, where he met the artist and poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Rossetti had come into the possession of several unpublished notebooks belonging to Blake (later published as "The Rossetti Manuscript"), and idolised Blake the painter/poet. Swinburne subsequently fell under Blake's spell. In Blake's poems he found the passion that was lacking in the works of the major contemporary poets like Wordsworth, Tennyson and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. In agreeing with Blake's observations (those "dark satanic mills"), he began to view the privileges of social class and educational institutions as the cause of this stagnation, and quickly lost interest in his previously promising academic career. He supported himself writing reviews for The Spectator, wherein he also began to publish his poems and essays. However, following the death of his sister Edith, the only person to whom he had confessed his emerging homosexuality, he began his descent into alcoholism. At 31 he published "William Blake: A Critical Essay", a seminal appreciation of his hero which would become a touchstone work for the generation of writers and artists that followed, from Oscar Wilde and T.S. Eliot, to D.H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf. Three years later Swinburne published what would prove to be his best volume of poetry; "Songs Before Sunrise" was again clearly influenced by Blake's work, notably "Songs of Innocence and Experience" and "Jerusalem". Swinburne would continue to write, but would publish more infrequently, as he became increasingly a victim of his addiction. Unable to earn money due to his frequent ill health, he moved out of central London to Putney, south west of Chelsea, which was then a somewhat impoverished neighbourhood. There he would remain for the rest of his life. Despite his poor health and diminished circumstances, he lived to the age of 72, eventually succumbing to pneumonia in 1909, just three years before the publication of Woolf's first novel "The Voyage Out", and six years after Wilde's death in exile in Paris. It is Swinburne who bridges the gap between Blake and Bloomsbury; it was he who brought Blake out of the shadows and elevated him to iconic status. Yet Swinburne himself is now little read. His poetry seems to belong to an earlier age to that in which it was created, and this apparent lack of contemporary zeitgeist could be largely to blame for his relative obscurity. That, and his alcoholism. But read today, and compared to the likes of Browning and Tennyson, his words seem alive with the spirit of the Romantic ideologies, brimming with an invention that deserves renewed appreciation.


"Now assuredly I see
My lady is perfect, and transfigureth
All sin and sorrow and death,
Making them fair as her own eyelids be,
Or lips wherein my whole soul's life abides;
Or as her sweet white sides
And bosom carved to kiss.
Now therefore, if her pity further me,
Doubtless for her sake all my days shall be
As righteous as she is.

Forth, ballad, and take roses in both arms,
Even till the top rose touch thee in the throat
Where the least thornprick harms;
And girdled in thy golden singing-coat,
Come thou before my lady and say this;
Borgia, thy gold hair's colour burns in me,
Thy mouth makes beat my blood in feverish rhymes;
Therefore so many as these roses be,
Kiss me so many times.
Then it may be, seeing how sweet she
That she will stoop herself none otherwise
Than a blown vine-branch doth,
And kiss thee with soft laughter on thine eyes,
Ballad, and on thy mouth.

Kneel down, fair Love, and fill thyself with tears,
Girdle thyself with sighing for a girth
Upon the sides of mirth,
Cover thy lips and eyelids, let thine ears
Be filled with rumour of people sorrowing;
Make thee soft raiment out of woven sighs
Upon the flesh to cleave,
Set pains therein and many a grievous thing,
And many sorrows after each his wise
For armlet and for gorget and for sleeve.

O Love's lute heard about the lands of death,
Left hanged upon the trees that were therein;
O Love and Time and Sin,
Three singing mouths that mourn now underbreath,
Three lovers, each one evil spoken of;
O smitten lips wherethrough this voice of mine
Came softer with her praise;
Abide a little for our lady's love.
The kisses of her mouth were more than wine,
And more than peace the passage of her days.

O Love, thou knowest if she were good to see.
O Time, thou shalt not find in any land
Till, cast out of thine hand,
The sunlight and the moonlight fail from thee,
Another woman fashioned like as this.
O Sin, thou knowest that all thy shame in her
Was made a goodly thing;
Yea, she caught Shame and shamed him with her kiss,
With her fair kiss, and lips much lovelier
Than lips of amorous roses in late spring.

The tears that through her eyelids fell on me
Made mine own bitter where they ran between
As blood had fallen therein,
She saying; Arise, lift up thine eyes and see
If any glad thing be or any good
Now the best thing is taken forth of us;
Even she to whom all praise
Was as one flower in a great multitude,
One glorious flower of many and glorious,
One day found gracious among many days."

- Swinburne, 1866

19.11.04