Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837-1909) analysis of Poems and Ballads, Hymn to Proserpine, Hermaphroditus, Swinburne’s poetic techniques

Analysis of Poems and Ballads, Hymn to Proserpine, Hermaphroditus, Swinburne’s poetic techniques

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Introduction to Swinburne’s Role in English Literary History

Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837-1909) , a distinguished poet, dramatist, and literary critic, represents a remarkable synthesis of both Romantic and Classical traditions within Victorian poetry. Scholars credit Swinburne with heralding a revolutionary breakthrough in English literature, particularly in poetic substance and lyrical expression. 

Notably, Swinburne remains perhaps the only English poet to receive consecutive nominations for the Nobel Prize in Literature for five years from 1903 to 1907, with additional nominations in 1909. The public awe that Swinburne inspired upon his first appearance on the Victorian literary scene draws frequent comparisons to the charismatic Lord Byron, cementing his status as a transformative figure in 19th-century English poetry.

Biographical Sketch of Swinburne: 

Swinburne’s biography reveals a man of aristocratic heritage who boasted a royal lineage. His father, an admiral, traced descent to an old Northumberland family, while his mother was the daughter of the Earl of Ashburnham. During childhood holidays, Swinburne resided in Northumberland at the estate of his grandfather, the 6th Baronet, Sir John Swinburne. 

As President of the Literary and Philosophical Society, Sir John provided his grandson access to an extensive library, fostering the young poet’s intellectual development. Swinburne grew to regard Northumberland as his native land, and these early influences left indelible marks upon both his character and literary output.

Swinburne attended Eton and Balliol College, Oxford, but ultimately left the university without a degree after being rusticated for participating in an assassination attempt against Napoleon III. Despite this academic setback, Swinburne demonstrated exceptional intelligence at college, mastering Latin and Greek verse alongside French and Italian. He eagerly participated in literary competitions and began writing poetry at a young age while at Eton, initially imitating Alexander Pope. However, these early writings attracted little notice.

Initially identified as a member of the Pre-Raphaelite group of writers, Swinburne was drawn into this circle while at Oxford. For a time, he remained strongly under their influence—particularly that of the enigmatic Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Morris—but soon broke away. The diverse influences upon Swinburne included classical and national literary traditions, nationalist ideologies, and the Bible, all contributing to his emergence as the greatest lyrical poet since Percy Bysshe Shelley according to contemporary assessments.

As an individual, Swinburne possessed a highly excitable temperament, further damaged by excessive drinking. He deliberately cultivated a pseudo-identity as a homosexual and a bestializer, with some critics describing him as algolagnic. His legal advisor, Theodore Watts-Dunton, persuaded him to improve his lifestyle, and in 1879, Dunstan took Swinburne under his personal care, lodging him at his own house, The Pines, near London. Swinburne remained there until his death at age 72 from influenza in 1909. During his later years, Swinburne also suffered from deafness, which further isolated him from degenerate company. Consequently, his later life became more sedate, his rebelliousness subdued and replaced by a newfound air of social responsibility.

Swinburne’s Early Works: 

Swinburne’s early dramatic works include two plays, The Queen Mother and Rosamund, published in 1860, followed by Chasteland (1865), the first play of a trilogy on Mary Queen of Scots. These works initially passed without attracting significant attention. 

However, the next work, Atlanta in Calydon (1865), a lyrical drama closely following the form of Greek tragedy, deliberately developed pagan notions positioned in antithesis to conventional religious ideas. Swinburne’s manipulation of form and content aimed to create a show of scepticism, though critics understood this work as essentially a reproduction of Greek tragedy in the manner of Aeschylus and Sophocles. 

The actual appeal of Atlanta in Calydon lies not in its spiritual content but in its masterful style and metrical variety, creating a new world of sensuality and suggestiveness. Swinburne’s preoccupation with Greek literature echoed John Keats’ plea for the pagan ideal of beauty. This work has received unanimous praise as Swinburne’s finest achievement.

12.4 Poems and Ballads: First Series (1866): Victorian Sensationalism, Sexual Frankness, and Metrical Genius

The publication of Swinburne’s Poems and Ballads:

First Series in 1866 created a furore in Victorian literary circles due to its unconventional and boldly frank expression of passion and sensuality. This collection produced a scandalizing yet hypnotic effect on contemporary readers, presenting an unprecedented challenge of rebellion against conventional concepts of religion and morality. 

Swinburne appeared to be in deliberate revolt against Victorian themes and attitudes, presenting an entirely untouched aspect of love in which unrestrained passion, cruelty, and ruthlessness expressed a sadomasochistic approach. Travesty triumphed over the delicate sentimentalism that had characterized Victorian poetry until that point. The subject matter was explicitly sexual, perverted, and blasphemous.

This daring frankness met with mixed responses but certainly did not go unnoticed. Swinburne had truly arrived upon the literary scene with a bang. This publication made his name reverberate through its shock value while simultaneously establishing his singular lyrical and metrical genius. Poems such as Anactoria and Sapphics, written in homage to Sappho of Lesbos, proved sensational in effect. 

Other poems, including The Leper, St. Dorothy, and Laus Veneris, transport readers to a medieval world through their distinctive style and tone. Garden of Proserpine and Hymn to Proserpine also appeared in this volume. The Triumph of Time, one of the longest poems in Poems and Ballads, employs sea imagery powerfully and reflects Swinburne’s genuine love for the sea, which he called “the Great sweet mother.” 

Although severely criticized by Victorian readers for immorally explicit treatment of subject matter, these poems undeniably deserve credit for heralding a revolution in poetic expression and announcing a departure from the delicate narrations of contemporary verse.

Swinburne’s Middle Period Works: 

Swinburne’s poetic genius having been established, he was soon recognized as a possible successor to the great Victorian poets Alfred, Lord Tennyson and Robert Browning. 

Based on his two early works—Atlanta in Calydon and Poems and Ballads: First Series—Swinburne was lauded as the foremost poet of England. Whether he proved capable and worthy of such responsibility remains debated among literary critics.

During this prolific middle period, Swinburne turned to politics and philosophy for subject matter. Ave Atque Vale, a tribute to Charles Baudelaire in elegiac form, appeared in 1868, following Song of Italy (1867), a politically flavored poem exalting his admiration for Mazzini and characterized by the same excess of passion and expression seen in his earlier works. 

Songs before Sunrise (1871) collected smaller poems composed at various times, some previously published separately. These poems struck a different note, articulating Swinburne’s celebration of liberty and encouragement to Italian independence fighters. 

Though some poems contain a philosophical strain, philosophy was never Swinburne’s forte, and he relapsed into the declamatory and rhetorical frame that remained his strength. Poems on a more personal level—such as Hertha, discussing the poet’s own mood, and The Hymn of Man, extolling humanism—prove more interesting than those devoted specifically to Italian independence.

Having become associated with the Pre-Raphaelites at Oxford and participated in their impractical schemes, Swinburne defended Dante Gabriel Rossetti when the latter was attacked for sensuality in Robert Buchanan’s The Fleshly School of Poetry. Swinburne retaliated with Under the Microscope (1872), a prose defense. 

In 1872, Swinburne wrote and published Erectheus, again based on Greek models. Poems and Ballads: Second Series (1876) retained the paganism of his earlier works in an elegiac tone. During this period, Swinburne also wrote two novels: Love’s Cross-Currents: A Year’s Letters (1877) and Lesbia Brandon (published posthumously in 1952).

Swinburne’s Later Literary Career: 

By the time Swinburne reached age forty, he had become an alcohol addict, and his condition threatened to end his life had he not been taken in by Theodore Watts-Dunton and housed at the latter’s residence for the remainder of his life. 

Watts-Dunton, who became Swinburne’s legal and financial advisor, maintained such vigilance over him that Swinburne soon recovered his faculties, experiencing a great resurgence in creative powers.

Swinburne returned to the literary world with The Hepatologia or The Seven against Sense (1880), a series of parodies published anonymously. The same year saw the publication of Songs of the Springtides and Studies in Song, in which he sang of the sea. 

His metrical ingenuity remained unchanged, and the flood of language continued unfaltering as he produced a heap of suggestive imagery. However, as Swinburne aged, his language underwent gradual transformation, becoming less crude though losing some of its strong flavor and becoming more diffuse.

Tristram of Lyonesse (1882) retells the story according to Swinburne’s interpretation, deliberately different from Tennyson’s version or any other. Swinburne skirted past all tedious moralization of passionate love stories, which he abhorred. 

In A Century of Roundels (1883), Swinburne developed a new poetic form called the roundel. Poems and Ballads: Third Series (1889) appeared but did not match the impact of the first series. 

Other poetic works from this period include A Midsummer Holiday (1884), Astrophel (1894), The Tale of Balen (1896), and A Channel Passage (1904). Several verse plays also appeared: Marino Faliero (1885), Locrine (1887), The Sisters (1892), Rosamund Queen of the Lombards (1899), and The Duke of Gandia (1908).

Swinburne’s Literary Criticism: 

Swinburne also delved into literary criticism, displaying a discerning eye despite his inconsistency and impulsiveness. He wrote in fits and starts on various poets and men of letters, including Baudelaire, Byron, Victor Hugo, John Webster, Shakespeare, William Blake, Rossetti, Charles Dickens, and many others. 

His critical manner proved unpredictable: at times, he displayed great erudition and zeal, reflecting mastery over technical assessment; at other times, he went overboard with praise or denunciation, losing seriousness of tone and credibility.

Narrative Technique and Poetic Style:

Swinburne’s narrative technique reveals him as the master of bombast and rhetoric. His sensibility rotated on the two poles of sensuality and exaggeration of passion. He suffered a lack of control over his verbal outbursts, gushing on without stopping to give proper shape to his stream of lyricism, failing to structure it into an intelligible and sustained whole. 

Consequently, his works often appear as rant, deficient in gradual building to a pinnacle or gradual subsiding to closure. For Swinburne, everything began and ended in climax.

Swinburne possessed genius for alarmingly suggestive descriptions and cadenced chanting meant to seduce the reader verbally. He remained a poet of suggestion rather than exploration, carrying the tendency toward sensuality implicit in Romantic poetry to an explicit extreme. Critics have censured Swinburne for being sensual to the brink of vulgarity and verbose to the point of frenzied deliriousness.

Swinburne has been openly criticized for his florid style and condemned as superficial, his diction serving rhyme—of which he was a master—rather than conveying profoundness or depth of meaning. Some critics have summed up his contribution to literature as negligible, arguing that after the success of early works like Atlanta in Calydon, Swinburne was burdened with the responsibility of becoming England’s national poet—a role for which he lacked ability. 

He is often regarded as no more than a decadent poet. However, his mastery of vocabulary, metre, and rhyme remains undeniable, and even severe critics like A.E. Housman grudgingly acknowledge this. Swinburne finds a prominent place in George Saintsbury’s History of English Prosody.

Credit belongs to Swinburne for enriching English verse through his brilliant and effortless command of rhyme. He also developed a new poetic form called the roundel, a variant of the French rondeau. The roundel is a short poem consisting of three stanzas, each of three lines with alternating rhyme scheme [aba(r); bab; aba(r)], with an identical refrain at the end of the first stanza and the last stanza. 

Swinburne dedicated his book of roundels to Christina Rossetti, who also began writing roundels herself. Most of these roundels concerned babies or young children. Swinburne boldly experimented with new forms and is regarded as one of the few writers who took up arms against the literary prudery of the Victorian age.

Did You Know: Hymn to Proserpine in Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure

The poem Hymn to Proserpine is quoted by the character Sue Bridehead in Thomas Hardy’s novel Jude the Obscure, demonstrating Swinburne’s influence on later Victorian and Edwardian literature.

Critics’ Opinions on Swinburne

Oscar Wilde remarked: “Swinburne is a braggart in matters of vice who had done everything he could to convince his fellow citizens of his homosexuality and bestiality without being in the slightest degree a homosexual or a bestialiser.”

A.E. Houseman observed: “To Swinburne the sonnet was child’s play: the task of providing four rhymes was not hard enough and he wrote long poems in which each stanza required eight or ten rhymes, and wrote them so that he never seemed to be saying anything for the rhyme’s sake.”

Hymn to Proserpine: A Pagan Lament Against Christianity – Complete Analysis

Swinburne’s Hymn to Proserpine , bearing the dual title in parentheses After the Proclamation in Rome of the Christian Faith, was published in 1866 in Poems and Ballads: First Series and takes the form of a dramatic monologue. The image of Proserpine, the Roman goddess of death, is employed metaphorically, as she features in the entire narrative only twice—once at the beginning and once at the end. Proserpine is not invoked by the poet as a muse, despite the title’s implication.

The poem revolves around the assertion of Christianity’s impending death and serves as a lament for the passing of Paganism replaced by the rise of Christianity. The speaker, a follower of Proserpine, observes Christianity proclaimed in Rome as the new religion but insists that the Christian religion and its gods will die out just as their predecessors did. 

The poem begins with the Latin quotation “Vicisti, Galilaee” (“You have conquered, O Galilean”)—the dying words of Julian the Apostate, who opposed Constantine the Great’s imposition of Christianity as the official religion of the Roman Empire in 313 A.D. Julian made his best efforts to undo this damage when he became emperor. Realizing the futility of his attempt, he prays to Proserpine to take him from the world, believing himself the last pagan and concluding that death is preferable to anguish.

The speaker declares his weariness of life and desire to embrace death, offering tribute to Proserpine by surrendering to her. Comparing her powers to other gods, he concludes that no god is stronger than death. The reference to Proserpine creates the poem’s symbolic structure, relating the speaker’s death wish to the mythology of the goddess who is “Goddess and maiden and queen”—goddess of the seasons (duplicating her mother Demeter’s role), the maiden “Kore” gathering flowers in the field (as daughter of Jupiter when kidnapped by Pluto, king of the underworld), and Queen (as Pluto’s wife). Thus, Proserpine’s image remains in the background as structural and thematic line while the poem focuses on Christianity’s inescapable demise and the pagan follower’s death wish.

As a last determined bid to save paganism from total obliteration, Julian dismissed all Christians from his government and advised his countrymen to adopt the compassionate and moral way of life characteristic of the new religion to compete with it, though the implication is that Paganism has already surrendered to Christianity. 

Swinburne approaches irreverence when, through the pagan emperor’s voice, he criticizes Jesus (the Galilean) for turning the world grey and making humanity feed on death by taking away life’s passion. Julian laments that the world’s zest departed with the old gods and that he will cease to live simultaneously with paganism’s end. The dying emperor remains resolute that he will never bow to Christ but will continue his undying reverence to the pagan gods.

The poem contains descriptions and eulogies of numerous pagan deities, paying tribute especially to Apollo, god of medicine who can bring plague, and Venus, goddess of love after whom Rome is named (Rome spelled backward is amor, meaning love). Swinburne compares Venus (mother of Aeneas, founder of Rome) with Mary (mother of Christ), and the glory of Mary pales in comparison. 

Swinburne makes excellent use of sea imagery while describing religions’ fate and Christianity’s doom. In this verbal debate between polytheistic paganism and monotheistic Christianity, Swinburne’s chief argument concerns any religion’s transitory fate; his imagery of sea and seasonal cycles (symbolized by Proserpine) aptly reflects flux and change. 

This concept of the sea’s destructive power seems drawn from Christianity itself (Genesis 6:17), though Swinburne renders it absolute, uncontrolled by any greater power and capable of drowning out the gods themselves. The poem reaches blasphemous heights with Swinburne’s near-godly declaration of Christianity’s complete obliteration by sea waves under no control—not even that of the gods.

The poem, consisting of 110 lines, depends technically on evident paradox in individual lines and thought. Swinburne’s use of Proserpine’s paradoxical image—occupying both death’s world and the living, as goddess of cyclic seasonal change—is significant and cleverly orders the poem’s thematic structure, stressing time’s passage and every worldly order’s transience. He deliberately places Proserpine at beginning and end, making her a symbolic pattern for a poem concentrating generally on nature’s and life’s cycles and specifically on Rome’s conversion from pagan to Christian. 

Swinburne’s diction and versification are characteristically pompous and grandiose. His overtly irreligious and irreverent attitude toward the religion practiced by half the world, and the furore his sacrilegious attitude created in the Victorian mind, remain understandable and justified.

Hermaphroditus: Androgyny, Sexual Ambiguity, and Pre-Raphaelite Characteristics in Swinburne’s Sonnet Sequence

Swinburne’s Hermaphroditus , included in Poems and Ballads: First Series and probably written in 1863, contributed to the collection’s condemnation as the most immoral and obscene book of poetry in the English language upon publication. Swinburne uses themes of sexual deviation without equivocation—sufficient to shock the prudish Victorian readers. 

The immediate inspiration was the statue of the Borghese Hermaphroditus in the Louvre, dating from the 2nd century AD. Swinburne dated his poem “Au Musee du Louvre 1863” and dedicated it to the statue by Giovanni Lorenzo Bernini.

The legend of Hermaphroditus originates in Greek mythology, in which Swinburne was remarkably absorbed. His choice of subject matter, however, owes more to his desire to explore taboo topics like sex, masochism, and deviating sexual issues. Swinburne fully understood the Victorian concept of the perverted and grotesque in sexual and psychological terms. 

The sexual ambiguity of Hermaphroditus carries a poetic existence completely disconnected from Victorian sexuality, thus becoming more furtively gratifying.

In Greek mythology, Hermaphroditus was believed to be the son of Hermes, messenger of the gods, and Aphrodite, goddess of love. Recounting the Hellenistic legend, Ovid narrates how the exceptionally handsome boy attracted the amorous attention of the water nymph Salmacis, whose prayers for eternal union with him were granted when she embraced the boy and pulled him underwater, merging their bodies into one. Consequently, Hermaphroditus transformed into an androgynous creature with the figure and breasts of a female and the sex organs of a male. 

Thus, the term hermaphrodite has come to mean a bisexual creature and symbolizes androgyny—a favorite subject in Greek art, though without much cultic importance. Swinburne uses the idea in a multi-layered connotative sense.

The poem is written as a sequence of four sonnets in the Petrarchan mould, with some variation in rhyme scheme to suit the poet’s treatment. In the first sonnet, Swinburne describes the everlasting internal struggle at the heart of hermaphroditic experience, hinting at the grotesqueness and inadequacy of a hermaphrodite’s love life, suitable only for love blind to sexual bipolarity that can “choose of the two loves and cleave into the best” (Sonnet 1, line 6). The tragic nature of this state—physically and socially—is emphasized in the despair that inevitably befalls the androgyne’s lover.

The second sonnet continues Swinburne’s discourse on rejection and despair characterizing the hermaphrodite’s love life. The idealization of the androgyne’s body as a pleasure house for love of both sexes discovers its actual perversity in a figure that on one side is “man like death” (Sonnet 2, lines 11-12) and on the other “a woman like sin,” rejected by love.

In the third sonnet, the poet attempts to find redemption in the strange beauty of the hermaphrodite’s body, “a flower laid upon a flower.” Yet the amazement remains: “to what strange end hath some strange god made fair / The double blossom of two fruitless flowers?” (Sonnet 3, lines 9-10).

The final stanza ends unresolved, with mingled love and fear for the hermaphrodite—love for the perfect beauty of both sexes unified in one, and fear for the resulting frustration of that love: “So dreadful, so desirable, so dear?” (Sonnet 4, line 8). In the final sestet, Swinburne alludes to the Ovidian myth in Metamorphosis of the curse of hermaphroditism falling on all men who bathe in Salmacis’s pool.

Swinburne’s poem thus employs the hermaphrodite literally and figuratively—in physical form and as idea. He deliberately sidesteps traditional Victorian attitudes toward sexuality that emphasize incontrovertible compartmentalization of male and female sexual behavior and desire. 

The frequent appearance of sexually perverted or ambiguous subject matter in Swinburne’s works stems from his irrepressible fascination. The concept of the androgyne was greatly justifiable to Swinburne, as he “imagined a primordial sexlessness in man” (Landow) and identified with the notion of the “eternal androgyne”—the human being complete and perfect, undivided into male and female.

The poem also contains Pre-Raphaelite characteristics in its final rejection of sexual desire’s allure. The poem begins with strong sexual attraction toward the androgynous figure with its front turned away from sight but ends with a sigh of futility. The rhyme scheme in the four sonnets follows the pattern abbaabbacdcdcd. The changed rhyme pattern of the sestet from the traditional cdecde suggests entanglement rather than progression.