The Works of Algernon Charles Swinburne: Poems

by Algernon Charles Swinburne

This volume comprises the poetic works of Swinburne, with the exception of Rosamund, Balen, and a few minor poems. Castigated by his contemporaries for his treatment of moral, spiritual and political rebellion, and his sometimes sadistic and blasphemous subject matter, his poetry is imaginative through both classical and romantic traditions.

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

661 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1925

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]

I love Swinburne. I memorised most of 'Anactoria', 300 lines of Sappho being sadistic and blasphemous:

Cruel? But love makes that all that love him well
As wise as heaven and crueller than hell.
Me hath love made more bitter towards thee
Than death towards man; but were I made as he
Who hath made all things to break them one by one,
If my feet trod upon the stars and sun
And souls of men as his have always trod,
God knows I might be crueller than God.

After that I loved his 'Hymn to Proserpine', spoken by the last pagan of Rome: Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilean... Swinburne was a pagan.

O lips that the live blood faints in, the leavings of racks and rods!
O ghastly glory of saints, dead limbs of gibbeted Gods!
Though all men abase them before you in spirit, and all knees bend,
I kneel not neither adore you, but standing, look to the end.

His incantatory style calls to be spoken aloud and makes him easy to memorise.

[Christine · Rating 4 out of 5]

I think there is a reason why I never read more Swinburne poetry than I did while in college and getting my Master’s. It’s not the poetry is bad. It isn’t, but if you compare it to the Brownings, to Donne, to Marlowe, to Chaucer, and so on, it doesn’t quite match them.
Well, most of his poetry doesn’t. Swinburne’s take on the Tristan and Iseult legend, “Tristram of Lynonesse” should be read by any lover of the Arthurian myth.

“And their four lips became one burning mouth.”



And while Swinburne is not Shakespeare’s equal, he is a Shakespeare fan boy. His ode to the months is in the tradition of the Romantics. The poems are pleasant if not great. It is great to read his poems on the Elizabethans.


Crossposted at Booklikes.

[Alexis Hall]

Swinburne was kind of a little bitch.

I wouldn't normally gendered language so I apologise.

But ... he just was.

Wilde called him a "a braggart in matters of vice, who had done everything he could to convince his fellow citizens of his homosexuality and bestiality without being in the slightest degree a homosexual or a bestializer."

And he's kind of right. Swinburne got a lot of mileage out of sexual ambiguity until things got socially nasty whereupon he DENIED EVERYTHING ALL THE TIME. And was randomly mean about people.

I think he and Burton were kinky as fuck together though. I mean, just as mates y'know. A little friendly flogging.

He's kind of a shrill, one note poet. But it's a good note. Technical precision and peculiar, occasionally morbid eroticism. I can dig that.

Could you hurt me, sweet lips, though I hurt you?
Men touch them, and change in a trice
The lilies and languors of virtue
For the raptures and roses of vice;
Those lie where thy foot on the floor is,
These crown and caress thee and chain,
O splendid and sterile Dolores,
Our Lady of Pain.

(Also part of the thing that makes me love GK Chesterton more than any reasonable human being should is that he resoundingly takes the piss out of Swinburne).

[Valentina · Rating 4 out of 5]

And the best and the worst of this is
That neither is most to blame,
If you have forgotten my kisses
And I have forgotten your name.

[Xio · Rating 4 out of 5]

So, I'm online at work researching the topic 'erotic spanking' (!) and Wikipedia tells me that not only was Rousseau a fan but this Swinburne wrote extensively on the topic of erotic anguish/torture, etc. So, distracted, I plug the name into a search engine and set to reading between taking orders for porn and chatting with coworkers and lo and behold I am hooked:

PHÆDRA.

Nay, but this god hath cause enow to smite:
If he will slay me, baring breast and throat,
I lean toward the stroke with silent mouth
And a great heart. Come, take thy sword and slay;
Let me not starve between desire and death,
But send me on my way with glad wet lips;
For in the vein-drawn ashen-coloured palm
Death's hollow hand holds water of sweet draught
To dip and slake dried mouths at, as a deer
Specked red from thorns laps deep and loses pain.
Yea, if mine own blood ran upon my mouth,
I would drink that. Nay, but be swift with me;
Set thy sword here between the girdle and breast,





Let me not starve between desire and death? Ahhhhh, I recline, stretch my arms up and grandly yawn. Mmm, I'm thinking I read all that Baudelaire and never Swinburne?

How could I have missed this?

[The Literary Chick · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mesmerizing, hypnotic poetry. Let nothing stand in your way of obtaining the version illustrated by Harry Clarke.

[Grady Chambers · Rating 4 out of 5]

So many truly gorgeous sequences, like this one (full poem below it). From "August":

"...I too felt
(As water feels the slow gold melt
Right through it when the day burns mute)
The peace of time wherein love dwelt."




AUGUST

There were four apples on the bough,
Half gold half red, that one might know
The blood was ripe inside the core;
The colour of the leaves was more
Like stems of yellow corn that grow
Through all the gold June meadow’s floor.

The warm smell of the fruit was good
To feed on, and the split green wood,
With all its bearded lips and stains
Of mosses in the cloven veins,
Most pleasant, if one lay or stood
In sunshine or in happy rains.

There were four apples on the tree,
Red stained through gold, that all might see
The sun went warm from core to rind;
The green leaves made the summer blind
In that soft place they kept for me
With golden apples shut behind.

The leaves caught gold across the sun,
And where the bluest air begun,
Thirsted for song to help the heat;
As I to feel my lady’s feet
Draw close before the day were done;
Both lips grew dry with dreams of it.

In the mute August afternoon
They trembled to some undertune
Of music in the silver air;
Great pleasure was it to be there
Till green turned duskier and the moon
Coloured the corn-sheaves like gold hair.

That August time it was delight
To watch the red moons wane to white
’Twixt grey seamed stems of apple-trees;
A sense of heavy harmonies
Grew on the growth of patient night,
More sweet than shapen music is.

But some three hours before the moon
The air, still eager from the noon,
Flagged after heat, not wholly dead;
Against the stem I leant my head;
The colour soothed me like a tune,
Green leaves all round the gold and red.

I lay there till the warm smell grew
More sharp, when flecks of yellow dew
Between the round ripe leaves had blurred
The rind with stain and wet; I heard
A wind that blew and breathed and blew,
Too weak to alter its one word.

The wet leaves next the gentle fruit
Felt smoother, and the brown tree-root
Felt the mould warmer: I too felt
(As water feels the slow gold melt
Right through it when the day burns mute)
The peace of time wherein love dwelt.

There were four apples on the tree,
Gold stained on red that all might see
The sweet blood filled them to the core:
The colour of her hair is more
Like stems of fair faint gold, that be
Mown from the harvest’s middle floor.

[Amirhoseyn Hz]

"Dolores", subtitled "Notre-Dame des Sept Douleurs", is a poem by A. C. Swinburne first published in his 1866 Poems and Ballads. The poem, in 440 lines, regards the figure of the titular "Dolores, Our Lady of Pain"(wiki). this poem is what inspired torment. greatest role playing game in history of video games and its novel which is purely conversations and lore directly taken from game . the novel is a cult classic tbh and hugely underrated.so you may want to check that out too.

[Redsteve · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a "complete works" so while it's got all of Swineburn's "good stuff" it's also got some real dogs as well. I have to admit that I'm more a fan of his goth-y/mythological poems more than I am of his lengthy odes to people (although his epitaph to rival Oscar Wilde is a marvel of brevity) and places.

[Evan · Rating 5 out of 5]

I think I like the idea of Algernon Charles Swinburne more than his poetry. Arrogant, so cocksure of his genius, commanding a pub of adherents who had long ago fallen away -- false visions of disciples in his fantastic mind. Imagine walking into a public house and seeing this guy with his sharp beard and foppish clothes, probably shopworn and smelling of mold, a sixpence Shakespeare, regaling Dickensian trollops and chimney sweeps drunken on cheap ale and sherry, and he himself emboldened to greater heights of dramatic effusion from a bit of tawny port.

Actually, in the prime of his career, Swinburne was very popular; he was the consummate Victorian craftsman; fulsome in his powers of imagery and oh-so-correct in his rhyme schemes. He is so un-hip now that he is overdue for a revival. Maybe steampunk will help him.

To be honest, I've never read everything in this collection, which I own, but do have an abiding love for "The Forsaken Garden," with its Gothic gloomy garden mirroring all life's (and love's) impermanence. It is one of my favorite poems, admittedly, and it's hard to not feel full after reading Swinburne, even if our ways of filling up have changed since the days of Beef Wellington.

(KevinR@Ky 2016)

[Darius · Rating 3 out of 5]

Like most anthologies, I liked a small subset of the poems.

My favorite is "Dolores". The theme -- where the whore is praised -- is not novel, but I love the execution. Swinburne contemplates love and lust -- explores the positives of the "body" side of this mind-body duality. The poem reads like a hymn to lust and bodily pleasure. While worshiping Dolores, the courtesan, Swinburne labels her "Our Lady of Pain", possibly seeing that she is only half the story. Yet, he knows she's important and complains about the Platonic Christian ethic that has sought to ban her, asking "What ailed us, O gods, to desert you ... For creeds that refuse and restrain"

"A Child's Laugther" is a sweet poem, though not in the same class.

I skipped over a lot of the poems that would require knowledge of back-story to be fully appreciated. I wish anthologies would come with notes that at least provided a footing to appreciate the context of such poems.

[Patrick Gibson · Rating 4 out of 5]

For always thee the fervid languid glories
Allured of heavier suns in mightier skies;
Thine ears knew all the wandering watery sighs
Where the sea sobs round Lesbian promontories,
The barren kiss of piteous wave to wave
That knows not where is that Leucadian grave
Which hides too deep the supreme head of song.
Ah, salt and sterile as her kisses were,
The wild sea winds her and the green gulfs bear
Hither and thither, and vex and work her wrong,
Blind gods that cannot spare.

[Scott Cooperstein]

Swinburne is a master of rhyming poetry. But, like most poetry, not every piece in this collection is lovable. However, the thought that this man wrote "A Match," quite possibly the greatest short form poem I've ever read, is enough to make me fall in love. My god.

[Kelly Swinburne Pullen · Rating 5 out of 5]

I could read it a thousand times.