Tag Archives: Swinburne

Poeta Moquitur

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Poeta Loquitur

If a person conceives an opinion
     That my verses are stuff that will wash,
Or my Muse has one plume on her pinion,
     That person’s opinion is bosh.
My philosophy, politics, free-thought!
     Are worth not three skips of a flea,
And the emptiest thoughts that can be thought
        Are mine on the sea.

In a maze of monotonous murmur
     Where reason roves ruined by rhyme,
In a voice neither graver nor firmer
     Than the bells on a fool’s cap chime,
A party pretentiously pensive,
     With a Muse that deserves to be skinned,
Makes language and metre offensive
        With rhymes on the wind.

A perennial procession of phrases
     Pranked primly, though pruriently prime,
Precipitates preachings on praises
     In a ruffianly riot of rhyme
Through the pressure of print on my pages:
     But reckless the reader must be
Who imagines me one of the sages
        That steer through Time’s sea.

Mad mixtures of Frenchified offal
     With insults to Christendom’s creed,
Blind blasphemy, schoolboylike scoff, all
     These blazon me blockhead indeed.
I conceive myself obviously some one
     Whose audience will never be thinned,
But the pupil must needs be a rum one
        Whose teacher is wind.

In my poems, with ravishing rapture
     Storm strikes me and strokes me and stings:
But I’m scarcely the bird you might capture
     Out of doors in the thick of such things.
I prefer to be well out of harm’s way
     When tempest makes tremble the tree,
And the wind with omnipotent arm-sway
        Makes soap of the sea.

Hanging hard on the rent rags of others,
     Who before me did better, I try
To believe them my sisters and brothers,
     Though I know what a low lot am I.
The mere sight of a church sets me yelping
     Like a boy that at football is shinned!
But the cause must indeed be past helping
        Whose gospel is wind.

All the pale past’s red record of history
     Is dusty with damnable deeds;
But the future’s mild motherly mystery
     Peers pure of all crowns and all creeds.
Truth dawns on time’s resonant ruin,
     Frank, fulminant, fragrant, and free:
And apparently this is the doing
        Of wind on the sea.

Fame flutters in front of pretension
     Whose flagstaff is flagrantly fine:
And it cannot be needful to mention
     That such beyond question is mine.
Some singers indulging in curses,
     Though sinful, have splendidly sinned:
But my would-be maleficent verses
        Are nothing but wind.

• Algernon Charles Swinburne viâ Pseudopodium

Elsewhere Other-Accessible…

• Swinburne on Swinburne — “Poeta Loquitur” at Mind of Winter

The Cruddiness of Cormac (continued)

by in Book Reviews, English Usage, Literature and tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Cormac McCarthy was a bad writer and an interesting phenomenon. Why did so many people say that he was a great writer, a genius, a giant of American letters? The puzzle isn’t as big as it appears. As with most over-rated artists, some of the people who said they liked him could see or glimpse the truth. They knew that he was pretentious and posturing, that he chose words clumsily and carelessly, had no sense of rhythm or the ridiculous, and wrote with all the natural grace and beauty of a chimpanzee riding a tricycle.

But most of those who saw the truth about Mccarthy didn’t dare to speak it. They stood beside the procession of praise and prizes and stayed shtum, when they should have shouted: “The emperor has no clothes!” A critic called B.R. Myers did dare to speak the truth. He shouted “The emperor has no clothes!” at the Atlantic in 2001:

McCarthy relies more on barrages of hit-and-miss verbiage than on careful use of just the right words. […] No novelist with a sense of the ridiculous would write such nonsense. Although his characters sometimes rib one another, McCarthy is among the most humorless writers in American history. […] It is a rare passage that can make you look up, wherever you may be, and wonder if you are being subjected to a diabolically thorough Candid Camera prank. I can just go along with the idea that horses might mistake human retching for the call of wild animals. But “wild animals” isn’t epic enough: McCarthy must blow smoke about some rude provisional species, as if your average quadruped had impeccable table manners and a pension plan. […] All the Pretty Horses received the National Book Award in 1992. “Not until now,” the judges wrote in their fatuous citation, “has the unhuman world been given its own holy canon.” What a difference a pseudo-biblical style makes; this so-called canon has little more to offer than the conventional belief that horses, like dogs, serve us well enough to merit exemption from an otherwise sweeping disregard for animal life. (No one ever sees a cow’s soul.) – “A Reader’s Manifesto”, The Atlantic (July 2001)

Myers is also right on the money when he says that McCarthy “thinks it more important to sound literary than to make sense.” He lets the gas out of McCarthy’s bloated reputation like a bad simile firing a bazooka into a dead whale. If you can’t see the cruddiness of Cormac, I recommend that you read Myers’ essay. It covers more bad writers than McCarthy, though, so if you’re pressed for time, just search for “Cormac” and have your eyes opened. Or not, as the case may be.

As for me, I’d like to re-quote a passage from McCarthy’s Pulitzer-prize-winning The Road (2006). I’ve already looked at it in “King Cormac”, but I have more to say:

When he woke in the woods in the dark and the cold of the night he’d reach out to touch the child sleeping beside him. Nights dark beyond darkness and the days more gray each one than what had gone before. Like the onset of some cold glaucoma dimming away the world. His hand rose and fell softly with each precious breath. He pushed away the plastic tarpaulin and raised himself in the stinking robes and blankets and looked toward the east for any light but there was none. In the dream from which he’d wakened he had wandered in a cave where the child led him by the hand. Their light playing over the wet flowstone walls. Like pilgrims in a fable swallowed up and lost among the inward parts of some granitic beast.

Is that good writing? No, it’s cruddy writing. Please consider these two sentences:

Like the onset of some cold glaucoma dimming away the world. His hand rose and fell softly with each precious breath.

You’ve got the pretentious and portentous “some cold glaucoma” followed by the hackneyed, Oprah-esque “precious breath”. The noun didn’t need any adjective. This is far stronger:

His hand rose and fell softly with each breath.

With “precious breath”, McCarthy was telling his readers what to think about the feelings of a father for his son. With just “breath”, he would have let his readers think it for themselves. Now look at this sentence:

He pushed away the plastic tarpaulin and raised himself in the stinking robes and blankets and looked toward the east for any light but there was none.

Is that good writing? No, again it’s cruddy writing. The sentence has no grace or rhythm and ends as McCarthy’s sentences so often do: with a bathetic thud. As Myers says of another of Cormac’s cruds: it can’t be “read aloud in a natural fashion.” This re-write of the sentence is stronger:

He pushed away the tarpaulin and raised himself in the stinking blankets and looked toward the east for light. But there was none.

And the re-write can be “read aloud in a natural fashion”. The Road is full of sentences that cry out in vain for a re-write. So are McCarthy’s other books. Not that I’ve read those other books, but I can see it from Myers’ essay and from quotes like this:

You can appreciate the language in McCarthy’s fiction for its lexical richness, gothic rhythms, and descriptive precision. In Suttree, you positively live on the grimy shore of the Tennessee River, where the “water was warm to the touch and had a granular lubricity like graphite.” Same for Blood Meridian. The Southwest desert is your home, or prison. You look up at the night sky. “All night sheetlightning quaked sourceless to the west beyond the midnight thunderheads, making a bluish day of the distant desert, the mountains on the sudden skyline stark and black and livid like a land of some other order out there whose true geology was not stone but fear.” – “a href=”https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2023/06/16/on-cormac-mccarthy/”>On Cormac McCarthy”, The Paris Review (June 2023)

No, McCarthy’s language did not have “descriptive precision”. As B.R. Myers repeatedly demonstrates, it had the opposite: descriptive imprecision. That bit about the “true geology” being “fear” is, like so much of McCarthy’s writing, unintentionally funny. It suffers from the same fault as A.E. Housman identified in some of Swinburne’s more careless moments:

[M]uch worse can be said of another kind of simile, which grows common in his later writings. When a poet says that hatred is hot as fire or chastity white as snow, we can only object that we have often heard this before and that, considered as ornament, it is rather trite and cheap. But when he inverts his comparison and says that fire is hot as hatred and snow white as chastity, he is a fool for his pains. The heat of fire and the whiteness of snow are so much more sharply perceived than those qualities of hatred and chastity which have heat and whiteness for courtesy titles, that these similes actually blur the image and dilute the force of what is said. – “Swinburne” by A.E. Housman (1910)

A geology of stone is “much more sharply perceived” than a geology of fear. Whatever that is anyway. The cruddiness of Cormac also inspired cruddy writing by others. And still does:

McCarthy wrote figures, like Judge Holden, who were the genocidal tycoons of that brutal machine [of American history] and greased its wheels. Others, like Billy Parham, became its more indirect, melancholic grist. – “On Cormac McCarthy”, The Paris Review (June 2023)

Tycoons don’t grease wheels. That’s a job for underlings, not tycoons. And grist is what’s ground in a mill, not what fuels a brutal machine with wheels. “Indirect grist” doesn’t make sense. What do you do with indirect grist? Pretend to put it in a mill? As for “melancholic grist”: that’s both clumsy and funny. Cormac’s cruddiness continues. Le Roi Est Mort, Vive Le Roi!

Previously Pre-Posted (please peruse)

• King Cormac — a look at the malign influence of McCarthy on the far better writer Stephen King

Wotta Lotta Glotta

by in A.E. Housman, Language, Linguistics, Literature, Poetry and tagged , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

I once wrote a story about a drug called panglossium that allowed those who took it to speak all the languages that have ever existed – the living ones and the dead ones, the ones spoken by billions and the ones spoken by a dwindling remnant, the ones of which the hand of history holds a few tiny glittering feathers and the ones that have evaded the hand of history entirely. Panglossium would allow you to speak all of them, in every dialect and every mode. And to read and write them too, if they had an alphabet or an ideography.

One of the things I was interested in was what kind of literature users of panglossium would create for each other. I don’t think they would choose to write in a single language: they would mix languages (and it seems very unlikely that they would use much or perhaps any English). But I do think they would come closer to capturing the multitudinous flux of reality, which, in our reality, you can’t capture more than a sliver of when you use a single language. Or when you use a dozen languages, as some polyglots can in our reality. Maybe irreal panglossium would allow you to take a handful of reality or more.

I was reminded of panglossium recently because I wanted to write a poem about something I’d seen and been moved by: a band of white clouds and blue sky across which a gull slid swiftly on stationary wings. But I couldn’t do it to the standard I wanted. I couldn’t capture what I saw in two or three seconds: the grace of the gull gliding across the blue-and-white beauty of the sky. The gull wasn’t “gliding”, for example. That’s too slow a word. And I didn’t want to write a poem about my inability to capture that scene, because I’ve written one before about that inability:

Verbol

Green on green on green
The light befalls me clean,
Beneath the birds.

And how I can capture
This mute green rapture
In blinded words? (7viii21)

The title of that poem is panglossic, in a way. And the poem itself did reach the standard required, because not-reaching-the-standard is part of the point of the poem. And even the greatest poet can’t reach the full standard and fully capture a scene like that. But some can get much closer than others, as Housman explained in his study of Swinburne:

If even so bare and simple an object as the sea was too elusive and delicate for Swinburne’s observation and description, you would not expect him to have much success with anything so various and manifold as the surface of the earth. And I am downright aghast at the dullness of perception and lack of self-knowledge and self-criticism which permitted him to deposit his prodigious quantity of descriptive writing in the field of English literature. That field is rich beyond example in descriptions of nature from the hands of unequalled masters, for in the rendering of nature English poetry has outdone all poetry: and here, after five centuries, comes Swinburne covering the grass with his cartload of words and filling the air with the noise of the shooting of rubbish. It is a clear morning towards the end of winter: snow has fallen in the night, and still lies on the branches of the trees under brilliant sunshine. Tennyson would have surveyed the scene with his trained eye, made search among his treasury of choice words, sorted and sifted and condensed them, till he had framed three lines of verse, to be introduced one day in a narrative or a simile, and there to flash upon the reader’s eye the very picture of a snowy and sunshiny morning. Keats or Shakespeare would have walked between the trees thinking of whatever came uppermost and letting their senses commune with their souls; and there the morning would have transmuted itself into half a line or so which, occurring in some chance passage of their poetry, would have set the reader walking between the same trees again. Swinburne picks up the sausage-machine into which he crammed anything and everything; round goes the handle, and out at the other end comes this noise:

Ere frost-flower and snow-blossom faded and fell, and the splendour of winter had passed out of sight,
The ways of the woodlands were fairer and stranger than dreams that fulfil us in sleep with delight;
The breath of the mouths of the winds had hardened on tree-tops and branches that glittered and swayed
Such wonders and glories of blossomlike snow or of frost that outlightens all flowers till it fade
That the sea was not lovelier than here was the land, nor the night than the day, nor the day than the night,
Nor the winter sublimer with storm than the spring: such mirth had the madness and might in thee made,
March, master of winds, bright minstrel and marshal of storms that enkindle the season they smite.

That is not all, it clatters on for fifty lines or so; but that is enough and too much. It shows what nature was to Swinburne: just something to write verse about, a material for making a particular kind of sausage.

But what would Tennyson or Keats or Shakespeare have been able to write after taking panglossium?

Elsewhere other-accessible…

• Poems and Brickbats – Housman’s study of Swinburne
• Verbol – (commentary on) my poem about inability and inadequacy

Hymn to Heresy

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Hymn to Proserpine

After the Proclamation in Rome
of the Christian Faith

by ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE

Vicisti, Galilæe.

I have lived long enough, having seen one thing, that love hath an end;
Goddess and maiden and queen, be near me now and befriend.
Thou art more than the day or the morrow, the seasons that laugh or that weep;
For these give joy and sorrow; but thou, Proserpina, sleep.
Sweet is the treading of wine, and sweet the feet of the dove;
But a goodlier gift is thine than foam of the grapes or love.
Yea, is not even Apollo, with hair and harpstring of gold,
A bitter God to follow, a beautiful God to behold?
I am sick of singing; the bays burn deep and chafe: I am fain
To rest a little from praise and grievous pleasure and pain.
For the Gods we know not of, who give us our daily breath,
We know they are cruel as love or life, and lovely as death.
O Gods dethroned and deceased, cast forth, wiped out in a day!
From your wrath is the world released, redeemed from your chains, men say.
New Gods are crowned in the city; their flowers have broken your rods;
They are merciful, clothed with pity, the young compassionate Gods.
But for me their new device is barren, the days are bare;
Things long past over suffice, and men forgotten that were.
Time and the Gods are at strife; ye dwell in the midst thereof,
Draining a little life from the barren breasts of love.
I say to you, cease, take rest; yea, I say to you all, be at peace,
Till the bitter milk of her breast and the barren bosom shall cease.
Wilt thou yet take all, Galilean? but these thou shalt not take,
The laurel, the palms and the pæan, the breasts of the nymphs in the brake;
Breasts more soft than a dove’s, that tremble with tenderer breath;
And all the wings of the Loves, and all the joy before death;
All the feet of the hours that sound as a single lyre,
Dropped and deep in the flowers, with strings that flicker like fire.
More than these wilt thou give, things fairer than all these things?
Nay, for a little we live, and life hath mutable wings.
A little while and we die; shall life not thrive as it may?
For no man under the sky lives twice, outliving his day.
And grief is a grievous thing, and a man hath enough of his tears:
Why should he labour, and bring fresh grief to blacken his years?
Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilean; the world has grown grey from thy breath;
We have drunken of things Lethean, and fed on the fullness of death.
Laurel is green for a season, and love is sweet for a day;
But love grows bitter with treason, and laurel outlives not May.
Sleep, shall we sleep after all? for the world is not sweet in the end;
For the old faiths loosen and fall, the new years ruin and rend.
Fate is a sea without shore, and the soul is a rock that abides;
But her ears are vexed with the roar and her face with the foam of the tides.
O lips that the live blood faints in, the leavings of racks and rods!
O ghastly glories 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.
All delicate days and pleasant, all spirits and sorrows are cast
Far out with the foam of the present that sweeps to the surf of the past:
Where beyond the extreme sea-wall, and between the remote sea-gates,
Waste water washes, and tall ships founder, and deep death waits:
Where, mighty with deepening sides, clad about with the seas as with wings,
And impelled of invisible tides, and fulfilled of unspeakable things,
White-eyed and poisonous-finned, shark-toothed and serpentine-curled,
Rolls, under the whitening wind of the future, the wave of the world.
The depths stand naked in sunder behind it, the storms flee away;
In the hollow before it the thunder is taken and snared as a prey;
In its sides is the north-wind bound; and its salt is of all men’s tears;
With light of ruin, and sound of changes, and pulse of years:
With travail of day after day, and with trouble of hour upon hour;
And bitter as blood is the spray; and the crests are as fangs that devour:
And its vapour and storm of its steam as the sighing of spirits to be;
And its noise as the noise in a dream; and its depth as the roots of the sea:
And the height of its heads as the height of the utmost stars of the air:
And the ends of the earth at the might thereof tremble, and time is made bare.
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 shall ye pass and be past;
Ye are Gods, and behold, ye shall die, and the waves be upon you at last.
In the darkness of time, in the deeps of the years, in the changes of things,
Ye shall sleep as a slain man sleeps, and the world shall forget you for kings.
Though the feet of thine high priests tread where thy lords and our forefathers trod,
Though these that were Gods are dead, and thou being dead art a God,
Though before thee the throned Cytherean be fallen, and hidden her head,
Yet thy kingdom shall pass, Galilean, thy dead shall go down to thee dead.
Of the maiden thy mother men sing as a goddess with grace clad around;
Thou art throned where another was king; where another was queen she is crowned.
Yea, once we had sight of another: but now she is queen, say these.
Not as thine, not as thine was our mother, a blossom of flowering seas,
Clothed round with the world’s desire as with raiment, and fair as the foam,
And fleeter than kindled fire, and a goddess, and mother of Rome.
For thine came pale and a maiden, and sister to sorrow; but ours,
Her deep hair heavily laden with odour and colour of flowers,
White rose of the rose-white water, a silver splendour, a flame,
Bent down unto us that besought her, and earth grew sweet with her name.
For thine came weeping, a slave among slaves, and rejected; but she
Came flushed from the full-flushed wave, and imperial, her foot on the sea.
And the wonderful waters knew her, the winds and the viewless ways,
And the roses grew rosier, and bluer the sea-blue stream of the bays.
Ye are fallen, our lords, by what token? we wise that ye should not fall.
Ye were all so fair that are broken; and one more fair than ye all.
But I turn to her still, having seen she shall surely abide in the end;
Goddess and maiden and queen, be near me now and befriend.
O daughter of earth, of my mother, her crown and blossom of birth,
I am also, I also, thy brother; I go as I came unto earth.
In the night where thine eyes are as moons are in heaven, the night where thou art,
Where the silence is more than all tunes, where sleep overflows from the heart,
Where the poppies are sweet as the rose in our world, and the red rose is white,
And the wind falls faint as it blows with the fume of the flowers of the night,
And the murmur of spirits that sleep in the shadow of Gods from afar
Grows dim in thine ears and deep as the deep dim soul of a star,
In the sweet low light of thy face, under heavens untrod by the sun,
Let my soul with their souls find place, and forget what is done and undone.
Thou art more than the Gods who number the days of our temporal breath;
Let these give labour and slumber; but thou, Proserpina, death.
Therefore now at thy feet I abide for a season in silence. I know
I shall die as my fathers died, and sleep as they sleep; even so.
For the glass of the years is brittle wherein we gaze for a span;
A little soul for a little bears up this corpse which is man.
So long I endure, no longer; and laugh not again, neither weep.
For there is no God found stronger than death; and death is a sleep.
So long I endure, no longer; and laugh not again, neither weep.
For there is no God found stronger than death; and death is a sleep.

Elsewhere Other-Accessible…

• “Hymn to Proserpine” (1866) at Wikipedia

HMortuis

by in Literature, Poetry, Swinburne and tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

“The Garden of Prosperpine”

By Algernon Charles Swinburne

Here, where the world is quiet;
         Here, where all trouble seems
Dead winds’ and spent waves’ riot
         In doubtful dreams of dreams;
I watch the green field growing
For reaping folk and sowing,
For harvest-time and mowing,
         A sleepy world of streams.

I am tired of tears and laughter,
         And men that laugh and weep;
Of what may come hereafter
         For men that sow to reap:
I am weary of days and hours,
Blown buds of barren flowers,
Desires and dreams and powers
         And everything but sleep.

Here life has death for neighbour,
         And far from eye or ear
Wan waves and wet winds labour,
         Weak ships and spirits steer;
They drive adrift, and whither
They wot not who make thither;
But no such winds blow hither,
         And no such things grow here.

No growth of moor or coppice,
         No heather-flower or vine,
But bloomless buds of poppies,
         Green grapes of Proserpine,
Pale beds of blowing rushes
Where no leaf blooms or blushes
Save this whereout she crushes
         For dead men deadly wine.

Pale, without name or number,
         In fruitless fields of corn,
They bow themselves and slumber
         All night till light is born;
And like a soul belated,
In hell and heaven unmated,
By cloud and mist abated
         Comes out of darkness morn.

Though one were strong as seven,
         He too with death shall dwell,
Nor wake with wings in heaven,
         Nor weep for pains in hell;
Though one were fair as roses,
His beauty clouds and closes;
And well though love reposes,
         In the end it is not well.

Pale, beyond porch and portal,
         Crowned with calm leaves, she stands
Who gathers all things mortal
         With cold immortal hands;
Her languid lips are sweeter
Than love’s who fears to greet her
To men that mix and meet her
         From many times and lands.

She waits for each and other,
         She waits for all men born;
Forgets the earth her mother,
            The life of fruits and corn;
And spring and seed and swallow
Take wing for her and follow
Where summer song rings hollow
         And flowers are put to scorn.

There go the loves that wither,
         The old loves with wearier wings;
And all dead years draw thither,
         And all disastrous things;
Dead dreams of days forsaken,
Blind buds that snows have shaken,
Wild leaves that winds have taken,
         Red strays of ruined springs.

We are not sure of sorrow,
         And joy was never sure;
To-day will die to-morrow;
         Time stoops to no man’s lure;
And love, grown faint and fretful,
With lips but half regretful
Sighs, and with eyes forgetful
         Weeps that no loves endure.

From too much love of living,
         From hope and fear set free,
We thank with brief thanksgiving
         Whatever gods may be
That no life lives for ever;
That dead men rise up never;
That even the weariest river
         Winds somewhere safe to sea.

Then star nor sun shall waken,
         Nor any change of light:
Nor sound of waters shaken,
         Nor any sound or sight:
Nor wintry leaves nor vernal,
Nor days nor things diurnal;
Only the sleep eternal
         In an eternal night.

Lorn This Way

by in Limericks, Literature, Poetry, Swinburne and tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

There was a young man of Cape Horn,
Who wished that he’d never been born;
     And he wouldn’t have been,
     If his father had seen
That the end of the rubber was torn.

(Possibly by Swinburne)

Performativizing Papyrocentricity #67

by in Book Reviews and tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Papyrocentric Performativity Presents:

• Killer Chiller Thriller – Night Without End, Alistair MacLean (1959)

• Above and Below – The Archaeology of Underground Mines and Quarries in England, John Barnatt (Historic England 2019)

• Wannabe Wonder-Weaver – The Best of Robert Westall Volume One, Robert Westall (1993)

• All Glitter, No Glow – A.C. Swinburne: A Poet’s Life, Rikky Rooksby (Scolar Press 1997)

• Recycle, Repeat – Revival, Stephen King (2014)

• Gained in Translation – Cuentos de Averoigne: Todos los Cuentos de Averoigne de Clark Ashton Smith, traducción de Enric Navarro (Pickman’s Press 2019)

• Sean of the Head – Am I Evil? The Autobiography, Brian Tatler with John Tucker (2009; second edition 2017)

Posted at Overlord of the Über-Feral:

• Maximal Moz – Morrissey in Conversation: The Essential Interviews, ed. Paul A. Woods (Plexus 2016)

• Absence and Essence – Abandoned: The Most Beautiful Forgotten Places from Around the World, Mathew Growcoot (Ebury Press 2017)

Or Read a Review at Random: RaRaR

Sins of the Sesh

by in Literature, Poetry and tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

THE SESSION OF THE POETS.—August, 1866.

Dî magni, salaputium disertum* — CAT[ullus]. Lib. LIII.

AT the Session of Poets held lately in London,
   The Bard of Freshwater† was voted the chair:
With his tresses unbrush’d, and his shirt-collar undone,
   He loll’d at his ease like a good-humour’d Bear;
“Come, boys,” he exclaimed, “we’ll be merry together!”
   And lit up his pipe with a smile on his cheek;
While with eye like a skipper’s cock’d up at the weather,
   Sat the Vice-Chairman Browning, thinking in Greek.

The company gather’d embraced great and small bards,
   Both strong bards and weak bards, funny and grave,
Fat bards and lean bards, little and tall bards,
   Bards who wear whiskers, and others who shave.
Of books, men, and things, was the bards’ conversation
   Some praised Ecce Homo, some deemed it so-so —
And then there was talk of the state of the nation,
   And when the unwash’d would devour Mr. Lowe.

Right stately sat Arnold — his black gown adjusted
   Genteelly, his Rhine wine deliciously iced, —
With puddingish England serenely disgusted,
   And looking in vain (in the mirror) for “Geist.”
He heark’d to the Chairman, with “Surely!” and “Really?”
   Aghast at both collar and cutty of clay, —
Then felt in his pocket, and breath’d again freely,
   On touching the leaves of his own classic play.

Close at hand lingered Lytton, whose Icarus-winglets
   Had often betrayed him in regions of rhyme —
How glitter’d the eye underneath his grey ringlets,
   A hunger within it unlessened by time!
Remoter sat Bailey — satirical, surly —
   Who studied the language of Goethe too soon,
Who sang himself hoarse to the stars very early,
   And crack’d a weak voice with too lofty a tune.

How name all that wonderful company over —
   Prim Patmore, mild Alford — and Kingsley also?
Among the small sparks who was realler than Lover?
   Among misses, who sweeter than Miss Ingelow?
There sat, looking moony, conceited, and narrow,
   Buchanan, — who, finding when foolish and young,
Apollo asleep on a coster-girl’s barrow,
   Straight dragged him away to see somebody hung.

What was said? what was done? was there prosing or rhyming?
   Was nothing noteworthy in deed or in word?
Why, just as the hour for the supper was chiming,
   The only event of the evening occurred.
Up jumped, with his neck stretching out like a gander,
   Master Swinburne, and squeal’d, glaring out through his hair,
“All Virtue is bosh! Hallelujah for Landor!
   I disbelieve wholly in everything! — there!”

With language so awful he dared then to treat ’em, —
   Miss Ingelow fainted in Tennyson’s arms,
Poor Arnold rush’d out, crying “Sæcl’ inficetum!”‡
   And great bards and small bards were full of alarms;
Till Tennyson, flaming and red as a gipsy,
   Struck his fist on the table and uttered a shout:
“To the door with the boy! Call a cab! He is tipsy!”
   And they carried the naughty young gentleman out.

After that, all the pleasanter talking was done there
   Whoever had known such an insult before?
The Chairman tried hard to re-kindle the fun there,
   But the Muses were shocked, and the pleasure was o’er.
Then “Ah!” cried the Chairman, “this teaches me knowledge,
   The future shall find me more wise, by the powers!
This comes of assigning to younkers from college
   Too early a place in such meetings as ours!”

CALIBAN, The Spectator, September 15, 1866

*Dî magni, salaputium disertum = “Great gods, an eloquent mannikin!”
†”The Bard of Freshwater” is Tennyson, who lived at Freshwater on the Isle of Wight
‡”Sæcl’ inficetum!” = “Uncouth age!”

Caliban was Robert Buchanan (1841-1901), later the author of “The Fleshly School of Poetry”, an attack on immorality and sensuality in the poetry of Swinburne and Rossetti.

Purple Poesy

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DIVERSIONS OF THE RE-ECHO CLUB

It is with pleasure that we announce our ability to offer to the public the papers of the Re-Echo Club. This club, somewhat after the order of the Echo Club, late of Boston, takes pleasure in trying to better what is done. On the occasion of the meeting of which the following gems of poesy are the result, the several members of the club engaged to write up the well-known tradition of the Purple Cow in more elaborate form than the quatrain made famous by Mr. Gelett Burgess:

“I NEVER saw a Purple Cow,
I never hope to see one;
But I can tell you, anyhow,
I’d rather see than be one.”

[…]

MR. A. SWINBURNE:

Oh, Cow of rare rapturous vision,
Oh, purple, impalpable Cow,
Do you browse in a Dream Field Elysian,
Are you purpling pleasantly now?
By the side of wan waves do you languish?
Or in the lithe lush of the grove?
While vainly I search in my anguish,
Bovine of mauve!

Despair in my bosom is sighing,
Hope’s star has sunk sadly to rest;
Though cows of rare sorts I am buying,
Not one breathes a balm to my breast.
Oh, rapturous rose-crowned occasion
When I such a glory might see!
But a cow of a purple persuasion
I never would be.

Elsewhere other-engageable:

• The Purple Cow Parodies
• Diversions of the Re-Echo Club
• Such Nonsense! An Anthology (c. 1918) — with this and other parodies

Sept-Ember

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“The Palace of Pan”

by Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837-1909)

September, all glorious with gold, as a king
In the radiance of triumph attired,
Outlightening the summer, outsweetening the spring,
Broods wide on the woodlands with limitless wing,
A presence of all men desired.

Far eastward and westward the sun-coloured lands
Smile warm as the light on them smiles;
And statelier than temples upbuilded with hands,
Tall column by column, the sanctuary stands
Of the pine-forest’s infinite aisles.

Mute worship, too fervent for praise or for prayer,
Possesses the spirit with peace,
Fulfilled with the breath of the luminous air,
The fragrance, the silence, the shadows as fair
As the rays that recede or increase.

Ridged pillars that redden aloft and aloof,
With never a branch for a nest,
Sustain the sublime indivisible roof,
To the storm and the sun in his majesty proof,
And awful as waters at rest.

Man’s hand hath not measured the height of them; thought
May measure not, awe may not know;
In its shadow the woofs of the woodland are wrought;
As a bird is the sun in the toils of them caught,
And the flakes of it scattered as snow.

As the shreds of a plumage of gold on the ground
The sun-flakes by multitudes lie,
Shed loose as the petals of roses discrowned
On the floors of the forest engilt and embrowned
And reddened afar and anigh.

Dim centuries with darkling inscrutable hands
Have reared and secluded the shrine
For gods that we know not, and kindled as brands
On the altar the years that are dust, and their sands
Time’s glass has forgotten for sign.

A temple whose transepts are measured by miles,
Whose chancel has morning for priest,
Whose floor-work the foot of no spoiler defiles,
Whose musical silence no music beguiles,
No festivals limit its feast.

The noon’s ministration, the night’s and the dawn’s,
Conceals not, reveals not for man,
On the slopes of the herbless and blossomless lawns,
Some track of a nymph’s or some trail of a faun’s
To the place of the slumber of Pan.

Thought, kindled and quickened by worship and wonder
To rapture too sacred for fear
On the ways that unite or divide them in sunder,
Alone may discern if about them or under
Be token or trace of him here.

With passionate awe that is deeper than panic
The spirit subdued and unshaken
Takes heed of the godhead terrene and Titanic
Whose footfall is felt on the breach of volcanic
Sharp steeps that their fire has forsaken.

By a spell more serene than the dim necromantic
Dead charms of the past and the night,
Or the terror that lurked in the noon to make frantic
Where Etna takes shape from the limbs of gigantic
Dead gods disanointed of might,

The spirit made one with the spirit whose breath
Makes noon in the woodland sublime
Abides as entranced in a presence that saith
Things loftier than life and serener than death,
Triumphant and silent as time.

(Inscribed to my Mother) Pine Ridge: September 1893