Victorian Poetry

Poetry in the late nineteenth century

That the "romance of oneself" is the subject seems to have been widely
accepted among members of Symons's coterie, with the result that, even
when the apparent matter is derived from night-time London, the focus is
really on the poet-creator. As Dowling observes, Herbert Home transmutes
a slum girl into an image of pastoral delight:

She laughs through a summer of curls;

She moves in a garden of grace:

Her glance is a treasure of pearls,

How saved from the deeps of her face!

And the magical reach of her thigh

Is the measure, with which God began

To build up the peace of the sky,

And fashion the pleasures of man. 47

"A blithe rhythm out of Herrick," Dowling says, transforms this girl's life
into "urban pastoral." 48 But is it straight out of Robert Herrick's seven-
teenth-century lyrics? Surely the early Swinburne is nearer to hand. The
three-stress (predominantly anapestic) line is one that Swinburne made very
much his own, most famously perhaps in those lines that T. S. Eliot would
mock in 1920:

Before the beginning of years
There came to the making of man
Time, with a gift of tears;
Grief, with a glass that ran
(Atalanta in Calydon; ACS IV, 25 8 ) 49
Eliot was no doubt right to deride the chorus from Swinburne's verse-
drama Atalanta in Calydon (1865), which is styled on Aeschylus's trage-
dies, that contains these lines. As Eliot says, this passage "has not even the
significance of commonplace" (148). And for good measure he adds that,
although the Chorus appears to be making "a tremendous statement, like
statements made in our dreams," it is the case that "when we wake up we
find that the 'glass that ran' would do far better for time than for grief, and
that the gift of tears would be as appropriately bestowed by grief as by
time" (148-49). True, all true. Yet there is something slightly odd in the
fact that Eliot's essay, written in 1920, when he was already brooding over
the poem which would become The Waste Land (1922), has nothing to say
about Swinburne's subject matter, above all Swinburne's readiness to
handle sexual transgressiveness. Eliot appears to be solely concerned with
the sound of Swinburne's words. But appearances, of course, can be
deceptive. Swinburne's poetry, Eliot says, is "not morbid, it is not erotic, it
is not destructive. These are adjectives which can be applied to the material,

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