THE SWINBURNE SPELL

Otago Daily Times, Issue 23161, 10 April 1937, Page 12

THE SWINBURNE SPELL

The death of Algernon Charles Swinburne is recent history; so recent that the dutiful swarm of biographers which gathers around the bier of an artist is not yet done with investigating his poetic impulse and his private life. That strange partnership at the house on Putpey Hill, where for thirty years the passionate poet and the careful critic lived in productive harmony, provides enticing material for the modern school of chroniclers. But Swinburne, whose last writings—the vigorous “Age of Shakespeare”— appeared as late as 1909, is already the subject of a centenary. Of these celebrations any man may be entitled to two within a century of his death, and few would begrudge a practice which allows the thoughts to turn a moment towards the rapturous orchestration of Swinburne. In London, a cable message states, public readings of his poetry form a part of the present commemoration. It is the most apposite part. For one who sang the spirit of man and of Nature so sonorously, no better praise could be uttered than the songs themselves. On Swinburne’s poetic fertility and his contribution to the evolution of English prosody there can scarce be argument to-day. He fell under the influence of the pre-Raphaelites sufficiently to absorb their inspiration of resistance to the conventional forms in art.- He was never swayed by them into sterile acceptance of earlier conventions. The influences which moved him were many and diverse. Now Baudelaire, now the Hellenic legacy, next the Elizabethans, and France again, through Hugo—each is discovered in the shaping of his word. Yet “derivative” is an adjective that his work merits only in the technical sense. Any literary detective may trace the derivations, but be still far from capture of the essential Swinburne. To-day, as in the sixties, it is possible, re-reading him, to catch something of the excitement of “ these new, astonishing melodies.” Gone is the scandalous wonder at a singer who would renounce

The lilies and languors of virtue For the raptures and roses of vice. Even the green carnation of the decadents, it seems, is now lying faded and forgotten within the pages of a yellow book. But with the licence and revolt of the “ Poems and Ballads” and “Songs Before Sunrise ” potent no more to fire the mind, the shock-headed poet’s lyricism retains the power to thrill the senses. Philosophically he, may be an inconsiderable'force, and socially astray from post-War, thought. But his surrender to the intoxication, the sensuality and the nobility of language may always hold its urgent spell. In poetic rhetoric he has few English peers; and it should not be over-dangerous, in the role of prophet, to surmise that seventytwo years hence, when a second Swinburnian centenary is on record, the youthful lover of poetry will still answer awhile to the ecstatic clarion call of this great Victorian.