The poetry of Victorian masculinitiesWhereas Tennyson uses a symbolic landscape to multiply ambiguities
and ironies in the Idylls, Swinburne elaborates a symbolic seascape to
emphasize the supremacy of desire in Tristram of Lyonesse. In Book I,
"The Sailing of the Swallow," the lovers-to-be are surrounded by eroticized
waves - "rosy and fiery" (IV, 26), the waters "Throb," their "center
quiver[ing] with delight." The oxymoronic metaphor of "spirit in sense"
elevates Tristram and Iseult's passion above ordinary lust. Book II, "The
Queen's Pleasance," depicts female jouissance - Iseult of Ireland's "pleasure
of desire" is likened to "a leaping fire" - but the representation of male
pleasure is avoided as feminizing (IV, 44). Rather, Tristram incarnates the
heroic ideal of the medieval warrior-knight: "Heart-hungry for the hot-
mouthed feast of fight / And all athirst of mastery" (IV, 47). In Book III,
"Tristram in Brittany," a series of metaphoric equivalences suggests that
illicit love leads to death because moral laws attempt to deny individual
desire. If Arnold's Tristram is unmanned by melancholy, Swinburne's hero
overcomes it and escapes effeminization by stoically bearing his sorrow
"With unbent head" (III, 265). He remains a martial hero, "as from fight /
Crowned with hard conquest won by mastering might" (IV, 62). Swinburne
ventriloquizes the feminine at length in Book V, "Iseult at Tintagel";
moreover, the discourse is cross-gendered. Like the rebellious Tannhauser
in Swinburne's "Laus Veneris" (1866), Iseult declares that she adores her
lover more than she does Christ: "'Shall I repent? / Nay... for herein I am
blest, / That... I love him [Tristram] best - / More than mine own soul or
thy love or thee" (IV, 78). Just as Tannhauser's passionate and masochistic
subjectivity opposes the Victorian ideal of manliness, so Iseult's powerful
and non-conformist selfhood flouts the Victorian ideal of womanliness.
Like both Sappho and Tannhauser, Iseult parodies the language of Chris-
tianity by way of rejecting its morality and asserting free desire: "Blest am I
beyond women even herein, / That beyond all women born is my sin, / And
perfect my transgression."
Book VI, "Joyous Gard," revels in the lovers' "delight" (IV, 94) and
reemphasizes the transcendent nature of love. The way that morality
perverts desire - a central message in the first series of Poems and Ballads -
emerges in the "passionate holiness" (IV, 107) of Iseult of Brittany. In her
"righteousness of rage," she invokes the vengeful God of retribution whom
Iseult of Ireland has rejected in Book V (IV, 108). While the women display
a range of emotions, Tristram's continued questing and preoccupation with
maintaining his martial "Fame" underscores his virility in Book VIII, "The
Last Pilgrimage": "High-hearted with desire of happy fight / And strong in
soul with merrier sense of might / ... all his will was toward war" (IV,
115). Unlike Arnold's Tristram and Tennyson's Geraint, Swinburne's
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