Poems and Ballads

The subtractive test goes badly for the book as a book. It is an assembly of a decade, not a made whole: early Pre-Raphaelite medievalisms such as “The Masque of Queen Bersabe” and “St Dorothy”, and the ballad pastiches, sit beside the mature lyrics in no order that requires them, and many could leave with no loss. Within the great poems the test fails in its own way: “Dolores” says its one thing in its first dozen stanzas and goes on long after, and “Laus Veneris” and “Anactoria” repeat their turns. Against this, “The Garden of Proserpine”, “Itylus” and “A Leave-taking” are compelled from end to end, and in “The Triumph of Time” the length is the tide the poem describes. What holds the axis at 7.2, the lowest of the twelve and below the Necessity Cap, is that excess is the book’s habit, not its occasional lapse.

Score: 7.2 / 10

What the book brings into the open can be stated. Desire is inseparable from cruelty and satiety, in “Anactoria”, “Dolores” and “Faustine”. Christianity was a historical victory with a cost, not a revelation: “Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilean; the world has grown grey from thy breath”. Death without an afterlife can be welcomed as rest, in “The Garden of Proserpine”. Said aloud in English verse in 1866, with a woman’s desire spoken from inside it by Sappho in “Anactoria”, and the body of a dying leper loved in “The Leper”, these were disclosures, and the outcry shows they were taken as such. Held at 8.0 because much of the book delivers mood rather than meaning: languor, the sweetness of exhaustion, a sensation renewed by sound. Here the mood is the larger share.

Score: 8.0 / 10

Elevation is frequent, and some of it is very high. “The Triumph of Time” reaches the sea as consolation and annihilation at once: “I will go back to the great sweet mother, / Mother and lover of men, the sea”. “Hymn to Proserpine” reaches a historical grandeur, the old gods going down under the new, in a long line no English poet had sustained at that pitch. “The Garden of Proserpine” reaches a still, cold peace that is one of the summits of English elegy; “Itylus” a piercing lyric height in eight rapid lines a stanza. The dreadful sublime is there in “The Leper”. Held below 9 because the height comes by one means, incantation, used so often that it dulls: “Dolores” and parts of “Laus Veneris” are loud without rising.

Score: 8.5 / 10

More is built than evoked. Proserpine bears load twice, as queen of the old order in the “Hymn” and as keeper of the sleep without dreams in the “Garden”, and the two poems together make a pagan underworld that answers the Christian heaven point by point. “Dolores” builds an anti-Madonna, “Our Lady of Pain”, by inverting the form of the litany, so the myth is in the structure and not only in the name. The sea as mother and lover in “The Triumph of Time” is an archetype made from a private loss. “Itylus” turns the story of Procne and Philomela on memory: the swallow forgets, the nightingale cannot. Held at 8.3 because much else is allusion as atmosphere: Faustine, the Hermaphroditus of the Louvre and the Venusberg of “Laus Veneris” stay decor more than structure, and the medieval pieces evoke without building.

Score: 8.3 / 10

The swerve was real and it was paid for. Against the Tennysonian settlement of moral seriousness, domestic feeling and the idyll, the book put sexual candour, sadism, sapphic desire, blasphemy and a frank paganism into a public book from the house that published Tennyson. It cost: the book was withdrawn within weeks, the notices made the author’s name a byword, and his reputation never wholly cleared. The prosodic swerve is as large: triple rhythms sustained at length, the long line of the “Hymn”, classical metres made to sing in English, a music denser in alliteration and feminine rhyme than any before it in the language. Held at 8.6 because the model was partly French, Baudelaire, whom Swinburne had reviewed in 1862, and Gautier, and partly Greek: the departure is from the English tradition more than from all traditions.

Score: 8.6 / 10

In the best poems the form is the knowledge. The lulling stanza of “The Garden of Proserpine”, short lines, paired double rhymes and a falling close, is itself the sleep it praises; change it and the poem loses its argument that rest is sweeter than hope. The long line of the “Hymn” carries the weight of a civilisation going under; cut it to pentameter and the scale goes. The litany form of “Dolores” is its blasphemy. Against this, the book’s music is often a medium that would carry any content, and the same anapaestic surge serves love, politics and grief alike; the poems to Landor and Hugo, the songs of revolution and the ballads would know no less in another form. Eliot’s objection, that the sound outruns the object, is answerable for the best dozen poems and not for the book.

Score: 8.1 / 10

The evidence is mixed. Two generations read the book with intoxication; then for half a century the modernists treated it as exhausted, a surface that gave everything at once. The return since the 1960s, in Victorian studies and in readings of gender, sexuality and classical reception, of “Anactoria” and “Hermaphroditus” above all, has found more in it than the dismissal allowed, and the “Hymn” and the “Garden” yield on rereading. But a large part of the book gives its whole effect at the first meeting. The depth of meaning is narrower than the sound suggests, and the yield is concentrated in perhaps a third of the poems. Held at 7.8: depth demonstrated, but of a bounded kind.

Score: 7.8 / 10

Intrinsic force is high. The book reorganised what English verse could say about the body and the gods, and what English metre could do at speed and at length; after it, the triple measure and the dense sound were a possibility every poet had to accept or refuse. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the aesthetic and decadent poets of the 1880s and 1890s wrote in its light, Wilde in his verse, Dowson, Symons and in part the early Yeats; Hardy’s poems kept its debt and named it; the young Pound and the young Eliot learned its music and defined their own against it, Eliot in “Swinburne as Poet”, in The Sacred Wood (1920). Influence by reaction is real influence, discounted. Held below 8.5 because the line it opened ran mainly into the Nineties and stopped there; the twentieth century’s main road went round it.

Score: 8.4 / 10

One hundred and sixty years have passed, and the text is whole, never lost and never in doubt; the withdrawal of 1866 delayed it by weeks, not more. A span of that length with ordinary presence would stand at 9.0 or a little above. The charge for a book read mainly in the academy applies. After about 1920 its presence fell sharply. It is taught in Victorian surveys and anthologised by five or six poems, “The Garden of Proserpine”, “Hymn to Proserpine”, “The Triumph of Time” and “Itylus” among them, but it is not read continuously as a book by the common reader, as the best of Tennyson and Browning are. Its surface is also partly fixed to its moment, the scandal of a Victorian decorum now gone. The axis stands at the foot of the charged band.

Score: 8.8 / 10

The command of metre, rhyme and sound is among the greatest in English, and the making bears load where it matters. “The Garden of Proserpine” is flawless in its kind; the feminine rhymes of “Itylus” turn without strain; the “Sapphics” and “Hendecasyllabics” make classical metres sing in English; the long line of the “Hymn” never collapses. The charge is as plain: a verbal glut, alliteration that runs on its own momentum, adjectives used for colour rather than sense, a diction of lips, fire, foam, flowers and blood that recurs until it becomes a manner. The signature of the book, “the lilies and languors of virtue / For the raptures and roses of vice”, is also its fault. Command includes restraint, and this is a master who too often lets the instrument play itself.

Score: 8.7 / 10

Take the two most distant poems: the political “A Song in Time of Revolution” and the sleep of “The Garden of Proserpine”, or the medieval “St Dorothy” and “Anactoria”. A law holds across most of the range: the world is ruled by desire and time, the gods, old or new, are cruel or absent, death is the only sure rest, and the senses are the measure. The pagan poems, the erotic poems and the elegies obey it, and the sea, the flower and the blood are one imagery throughout. The ballads and the Christian-medieval pieces, a saint’s legend told with devotion, a Christmas carol, sit outside it as relics of the Pre-Raphaelite years, and the political songs belong more to Songs before Sunrise (1871) than to this book. Where the law holds it is narrow, and narrowness is not coherence.

Score: 8.0 / 10

For a lyric book the range is wider than its reputation: the erotic consciousness in several modes, longing, cruelty, satiety and grief; the history of religion, in the passage from pagan to Christian in the “Hymn”; the natural order, the sea, the seasons, “The Sundew”; politics and revolution, in the songs and the poems to Landor and Hugo; art, in a poem for a painting by Whistler and the dedication to Burne-Jones; and death. In the best poems these are held together rather than listed: the “Hymn” holds history, the sacred and the body in one argument. What holds the axis at 7.3 is what is absent, family, labour, the state as lived and the social world, and that the orders present are mostly held one poem at a time. A low mark on a small form describes the form.

Score: 7.3 / 10