Poems & Ballads

by Algernon Charles Swinburne

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Genres: Poetry, Victorian, Classics, 19th Century, Literature

292 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1866

About the author

In musical, often erotic verse, British poet and critic Algernon Charles Swinburne wrote and attacked the conventions of Victorian morality.

This controversial Englishman in his own day invented the roundel form and some novels and contributed to the famous eleventh edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algerno...

Reviews

[Bryn Hammond · Rating 5 out of 5]

As the lost white feverish limbs
Of the Lesbian Sappho, adrift
In foam where the sea-weed swims,
Swam loose for the seas to lift...

This is typical: it has Sappho, it has death, it has the sea. He was as much fixated on Sappho because she threw herself into the sea, as because in her he has a spokeswoman for himself and his explorations. Sappho's perfect for him, it's not just that he's a perv.

Swinburne writes endlessly about the sea. I tried his novels and remember a few pages on a drowning man, than which, I thought at the time, I never expect to find a more lifelike experience written down. But the sea's everywhere, and I bet he set himself the task to be like the sea: similar, yes, to itself, yesterday, but infinitely different, and who's bored by the sea? I don't know better sea descriptions.

Poems & Ballads was his first splash and highly notorious. He's more attached to French Decadents than the English Pre-Raphaelites – he was Baudelaire's champion in England. In brief he explores cruelty; first the cruel instincts in love, then outward to the cruelty of the world. His pagans attack Christianity as too optimistic a religion, and in that untrue – as well as being life-negative and anti-sensual.

'Faustine' is about a decadent Roman, a female Faust, a queen given over to evil and evil lusts, but magnificent. One of his gaudy poems, that can be quite funny:

You seem a thing that hinges hold,
A love-machine
With clockwork joints of supple gold –
No more, Faustine.

Is that steampunk?
More gaudy is 'Dolores', a tribute to Our Lady of Pain...

What tortures undreamt of, unheard of,
Unwritten, unknown?

Not any more. And published in Victorian England.
But onto more serious poetry. 'Hymn to Proserpine' has a note 'After the proclamation in Rome of the Christian faith'. It's a pagan's lament for things past and lost, and uses the sea again, with ocean-rhythms:

Will ye bridle the deep sea with reins, will ye chasten the high sea with rods?
Will ye take her to chain her with chains, who is older than all ye Gods?
All ye as a wind shall go by, as a fire ye shall pass and be past;
Ye are Gods, and behold, ye shall die, and the waves be upon you at last.

I've spent most time with 'Anactoria', which is Sappho in first person to her absconded lover. She too moves from cruelty towards Anactoria, in her abandonment, to a metaphysical statement. I think 'Anactoria' is a great poem. And once you get past the lesbian sadism, it culminates in Sappho's triumph as a poet. That may be an old claim – I shall not die. I'm a poet – but where is the claim made better?

Sappho is not the weary sort, weary of life and sensation like Faustine; she's healthy, she has far too much self for that. Yes, she swings between moods, and has her exhausted death-moods:

I would the sea had hidden us, the fire
(Wilt thou fear that, and fear not my desire?)
Severed the bones that bleach, the flesh that cleaves,
And let our sifted ashes drop like leaves.

But she's a presence, a personality, as the other women in this book aren't. She has a voice. Though at her lover's feet in one sentence, in the next she is above her, above her love. In her throes she can say, Last year when I loved Atthis, and this year/ When I love thee. You can see why Anactoria ran away. She has Aphrodite under thumb: Mine is she, very mine. Aphrodite offers her redress:

...and she bowed,
With all her subtle face laughing aloud,
Bowed down upon me, saying, 'Who doth thee wrong,
Sappho?'

She's nothing if not possessive:

That I could drink thy veins as wine, and eat
Thy breasts like honey! that from face to feet
Thy body were abolished and consumed
And in my flesh thy very flesh entombed!

Her own cruelty morphs into that of God (singular):

For who shall change with prayers or thanksgivings
The mystery of the cruelty of things?

And she goes on with a vision of the universe's cruelty. With a God behind it:

Is not his incense bitterness, his meat
Murder? his hidden face and iron feet
Hath not man known, and felt them on their way
Threaten and trample all things and every day?

On behalf of the suffering she declares,

Him would I reach, him smite, him desecrate;
Pierce the cold lips of God with human breath
And mix his immortality with death.

The last third shifts to her victory over Anactoria, and over death, and over God in fact.

Yea, thou shalt be forgotten like spilt wine,
Except these kisses of my lips on thine
Brand them with immortality; but me –
Men shall not see bright fire nor hear the sea...

and so on and so on, without they think of Sappho, or know her, for I Sappho shall be one with all these things. This is her conquest of God:

But, having made me, me he shall not slay...
Of me the high God hath not all his will.

[AH · Rating 5 out of 5]

I wasn't interested in reading his works but now I just can't put the book down. I'm in love with Swinburne. Nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in every year from 1903 to 1907 and again in 1909 . his poems are so emotionally lifelike and his a such master in creating pictures within pictures within pictures.I'll definitely read his novels which I would bet that if Not better than his poems is at least as great as them.


"If yet these twain survive your worldly breath,
Joy trampling sorrow, life devouring death,
If perfect life possess your life all through
And like your words your souls be deathless too,
To-night, of all whom night encompasseth,
My soul would commune with one soul of you.
...
But if the riddles that in sleep we read,
And trust them not, be flattering truth indeed,
As he that rose our mightiest called them,—he,
Much higher than thou as thou much higher than
we—
There, might we say, all flower of all our seed,
All singing souls are as one sounding sea.
...
Yet love and loathing, faith and unfaith yet
Bind less to greater souls in unison,
And one desire that makes three spirits as one
Takes great and small as in one spiritual net
Woven out of hope toward what shall yet be done
Ere hate or love remember or forget.
...
For love we lack, and help and heat and light
To clothe us and to comfort us with might.
What help is ours to take or give? but ye—
O, more than sunrise to the blind cold sea,
That wailed aloud with all her waves all night,
Much more, being much more glorious, should
you be.
...

"A SONG IN SEASON" was just magnificent.
and THE BRIDE'S TRAGEDY:

"The wind wears roun', the day wears doun,
The moon is grisly grey;
There's nae man rides by the mirk muirsides,
Nor down the dark Tyne's way."
In, in, out and in,
Blaws the wind and whirls the whin. ..."


he really pours his heart out on paper ,pouring it all over the words
I wish I could give this 6 stars.

[Marten Hoyle · Rating 4 out of 5]

Astonishing, outstanding, extraordinary; pure genius. Swinburne is a sadly forgotten voice who was beyond any doubt one of the greatest practitioners of poetry. I hope more people will explore this beautiful soul.

[Humphrey · Rating 4 out of 5]

There is no other poet like Swinburne, love him or hate him. Even with just a cursory awareness of 19th century poetry, you can imagine the earthquake this collection caused in 1866. I find many of Swinburne's poems to drag on, even some of the classics like "Dolores." Redundancy is always a problem for Swinburne, yet it's relatively easy to forgive given that it's a redundancy all his own. He is, no doubt, a "batting average" poet. There are the trite end-stopped rhymes and smiles (and the perpetual goings-on about the sea), but the consonance and internal rhymes are effective. "Hymn to Prosperine," with its iconic "pale Galilean," is as powerful as it is irreverent. "Anactoria" is undoubtedly one of the most accomplished ten poems of the century.

[Miles Taylor-Charlemagne · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting works!

Love the poetry included, both rhymes and non-rhyming! Algernon truly went beyond the works here although some were very long and it took a while to get the story through some of it.

[Michael A. · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5/5. Good rhythm and decent rhyme but the poems, with the exception of a few, bled together for me.

[Rocio Puebla]

leí el de Himno a Proserpina

[Merinde]

I think I chose the wrong place to start Swinburne. I feel like I should like it better but to be honest I was quite simply bored most of the time, although The Witch-Mother was nice.

...I really feel as though I ought to reread this. I mean, it's Swinburne. What is even wrong with me.

[Sananab · Rating 2 out of 5]

I think that this could have been edited down into a five star book a third the size.

[Cynthia Moore · Rating 1 out of 5]

well not read but given up on. ugh no flow in the words- really tough for me to get into/