Aesthetic and Decadent poetrythe 1866 pamphlet that he published defending his poetry, where he
describes Dolores as "No Virgin, and unblessed of men." 10 This type of
femme fatale, discussed in detail by Bram Dijkstra and many other
critics, 11 manifests the male artist's hunger for total passionate immersion
in a female being who exerts greater power than himself, thus releasing him
from subjective agency and moral responsibility. Swinburne employs
hypnotic rhythms and phrasal repetitions to dramatize this desire for loss
of consciousness and loss of moral control, creating a situation in which
there appears to be no alternative but submission to the overwhelming
power of the senses. That is why Camille Paglia characterizes Swinburne's
meters as "an automaton driven by a female robotlike despot." 12 But
although it may appear that Swinburne willingly enslaves his art to an
alternative god, whereby the rejection of one religion involves the instantia-
tion of another, it should be emphasized that this enslavement is a
voluntary and contractual one, and the slave is in fact the master of the
situation. 13
This contradictory structure reveals that it is misleading to charge
Swinburne with writing simply for the sake of rebelliousness, as if he were
an adolescent poking fun at Victorian morality. His work instead analyzes
the bases of this morality and any of his other poems discloses the same
kind of complexity. "The Leper" (1866), for example, takes the familiar
medieval story of a clerk who has long been desperately in love with a
disdainful lady:
Mere scorn God knows she had of me,
A poor scribe, nowise great and fair,
Who plucked his clerk's hood back to see
Her curled-up lips and amorous hair. (ACS I, 119)Surprisingly, in this dramatic monologue, the lovelorn clerk eventually wins
the lady, and remains with her forever. But Swinburne has an altogether
more perverse hitch on this classic tale. The lady has become disfigured by
leprosy, and the enamored clerk continues to make love to her long after
she becomes ill and dies, reiterating his romantic cliches about her hair and
eyes over a rotting leprous corpse: "Yet am I glad to have her dead / Here in
this wretched wattled house / Where I can kiss her eyes and head" (I, 119).
"Nothing is better," he asserts in the opening of his poem, "Than love" (I,
119), and he repeats this statement as the details of his grotesque situation
unfolds. A clear parody of courtly love, "The Leper" goes to excruciating
lengths to identify the narcissistic nature of what is usually considered to be
selfless and ennobling passion.
This pattern repeats throughout many of Swinburne's works in Poems2-3 3