The poetry of Victorian masculinitiesLeave their God rotten to the bone" (II, 87). In contrast to the Christian
God's abject masculinity stands the Hellenic god Apollo's splendid virility,
figured throughout Swinburne's poetry in the 1870s and 1880s in Romantic
metaphors of fire, light, dawn, and poetic "song." Swinburne draws on
Carlyle's concept of the poet and the prophet as heroes. The poet's
manhood is reinvigorated by republican vision in Songs Before Sunrise; he
speaks as an oppositional sage who recognizes only the human imagination
as "god." In "The Last Oracle" (from the second series of Poems and
Ballads [1878]), the speaker receives the call of Apollo and confirmation of
his own heroic status as poet-seer. Now worthy of joining the all-male
group of singers apotheosized in "In the Bay" (1878), Swinburne's poetic
persona attains union with the principle of poetic manhood, symbolized by
Apollo, in "Thalassius" (1880).
The all-male literary tradition presided over by Apollo in "Thalassius" is
inflected by the oscillations of gender identity undergone by the poetic
persona in "On the Cliffs" (1880). Swinburne deploys classical Greek
literature to burst the constraints of Victorian gender ideology, exploring
the femininity within the masculinity of "song" or lyric poetry. Located
"between" sea and land, day and night, mortal and divine, the speaker
appropriates Sappho and Aeschylus, lyric and tragic poetry, the positions of
both the transgressive feminine and the traditional masculine, by ventrilo-
quizing each through fragmentary translations of their work at various
points in his own poem. An alternation of Greek intertexts and Swinbur-
neian intratexts (primarily "Anactoria") parallels an extensive series of
metaphorical equivalences among Apollo (the principle of poetry), Sappho
("soul triune, woman and god and bird" [ACS III, 322]), the nightingale
(heard singing on the cliffs by the sea at the time of the dramatic
monologue), and the speaker himself (who claims kinship with the "bright
born brethren" [III, 324] of birds as well as with Sappho). 18 "Because I
have known thee always who thou art" (III, 318), he confides, "thy gods
... be my gods, and their will / Made my song part of thy song" (III, 319).
The speaker seeks the power which he believes that divinely poetic knowl-
edge will yield in order to transcend suffering and death. As "Love's
priestess, mad with pain and joy of song" (III, 318), Sappho has won
immortality through her poetry, the "Lesbian word" (III, 318) whose
subject is sublime perversion of the body. Through identification with her,
the speaker declares at the end of "On the Cliffs," he has learned "Song,
and the secrets of it, and their might" (III, 324).
But has he risked his masculinity in so closely merging with the feminine?
Yes and no. Consider the several exchanges of power and desire in the
poem. Heterosexual violence between Cassandra and Apollo, and between
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