is more than girlish. Her much-anthologized songs such as ‘When I am dead, my
dearest’, ‘My heart is like a singing bird’ and ‘Does the road wind up-hill all the way?’
show a fine lyric gift. Her many lyrics perfect a disciplined version of the ballad style
introduced by the Romantics. The richness and quality of her art have until recently
been underrated. Virginia Woolf, who cannot have cared for Christina’s deep
Christian piety, thought her the best English woman poet.
Algernon Charles Swinburne
Algernon Charles Swinburne(1837–1909) was an anti-Victorian immoralist; he
referred to Tennyson’s Morte d’Arthur as the Morte d’Albert. A libertarian aristocrat
and amateur of Greek lyric poetry, he followed Shelley and Landor. Victorian restric-
tiveness produced in him an extreme reaction. Swinburne was a hedonist, a literary
aesthete and an expert in Greek impropriety, favouring the ecstastic Greek cults
above that of ‘the pale Galilean’, Jesus Christ. Metrically he was a virtuoso, and his
Songs and Ballads were in vogue in the 1860s, but his appeal lay in his inversion of
respectability and of moral ‘uplift’. In him, the Victorian cult of the dead takes a
post-erotic tinge. To intone, in appropriate circumstances, the chants by which he is
represented in anthologies, ‘When the hounds of spring are on winter’s traces’ and ‘I
will go back to the great sweet mother’ and ‘The Garden of Proserpine’, can be fun.
But re-reading shows them to be vague in sense, fond of their own manner, and
VICTORIAN ROMANTIC POETRY 281‘Buy from us with a golden curl’,Goblin Market
a volume of Christina Rossetti’s verse Goblin
Market(1862), published by Morris, Marshall,
Faulkner and Co. Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s
illustration is based on a line from the title poem.