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334 The nineteenth century
Her robe, ungirt from clasp to hem
No wrought flowers did adorn,
But a white rose of Mary’s gift,
For service meetly worn;
Her hair that lay along her back
Was yellow like ripe corn.
The Pre-Raphaelite influence, however, was stronger on the visual
arts than on writing. It was an attitude to visual art and representation
which had a profound and lasting effect, but the Brotherhood’s writings
had a much less enduring impact on literature.
The poetry of Algernon Swinburne brings together many of the ideas
of the Pre-Raphaelites, with what Tennyson called a ‘wonderful rhythmic
invention’. But, more than any of the works of the Pre-Raphaelites, his
writings shocked the Victorians, with their emphasis on sadism, sexual
enchantment, and anti-Christian outlook. A prolific poet, using a wide
range of forms from drama to ballad, Swinburne had a considerable
influence on the generation of the 1890s, by which time his own inspiration
was failing. But, from the drama Atalanta in Calydon (1865) and Poems
and Ballads (1866) to his second series of Poems and Ballads (1878),
Swinburne was the new original spirit in English poetry, a spirit of luscious
sensuality which was both a moral and spiritual challenge to the ethos of
the day. His love poems, in particular, do not so much celebrate the
nature of love as explore the pain which often comes with human love.
Here is an example from Swinburne’s A Forsaken Garden (1878):
And men that love lightly may die – but we?
And the same wind sang and the same waves whitened,
And for ever the garden’s last petals were shed,
In the lips that had whispered, the eyes that had
lightened,
Love was dead.
In his own life, Swinburne rebelled against established codes, rather
in the manner of Shelley. In religion he was a pagan, and in politics
he wanted to see the overthrow of established governments. In poetry,
his work confirms a collapse of conventional Victorian poetic standards.
The poem Ave Atque Vale, an elegy to the nineteenth-century French