Swinburne’s Love of Sin and Religion
Algernon Charles Swinburne was a one of a kind poet who used themes such as sin, religion, and love in his poetry. These themes don’t seem too abnormal or grotesque at first glance, but once you read a Swinburne poem such as “Laus Veneris” or “The Leper” the themes take on a new, more vibrant meaning. Swinburne uses alliteration to strengthen the meaning of these topics throughout his poetry, especially in “Laus Veneris.” Each of the above poems encompasses all three themes but show different views of them.
Swinburne was born into aristocracy in 1837 in London, England. “His appearance was very unusual and in some ways beautiful, for his hair was glorious in abundance and colour and his eyes indescribably fine,” (Hyder, Algernon). This description makes the poet sound very effeminate and in certain ways he was. His hair was his most famous feature because of the bright red color and its long length. He was a fairly small child and when all grown, also a small man at only five feet tall. After being expelled from Oxford because his “behaviour became more and more extravagant and he failed to pass his exam in classics…” (Henderson 37), he started writing poetry that was very different than the other poetry being published at the time by authors like Tennyson and Browning. His first publication came in 1865 and was entitled, Atalanta in Calydon to which was received well by Tennyson who said, “he envied his ‘wonderful rhythmic invention’,” (Henderson 106).
Shortly after Atalanta in Calydon was published, Swinburne went on to publish Poems and Ballads in 1866 which included “Laus Veneris” as well as “The Leper.” This work was not taken as well as Atalanta in Calydon because of the themes that the poems contained which rooted from his classical education. Morley states of Swinburne’s Poems and Ballads, “He is so firmly avowedly fixed in an attitude of revolt against the current notions of decency and dignity and social duty that beg him to become a little more decent…” (Henderson 118). His religious views were not of Christian origin and this shined through in his poetry. He became what most thought of as an atheist, but still had vast knowledge of the scripture in the bible though “…Swinburne, however, often outrageously satirizes, parodies, and directly attacks both Christian belief and the Christian establishment,” (Landow). This is true in both “Laus Veneris” and “The Leper” which is a good reason to discuss both poems in accordance with religion. Darwinism could have had something to do with the turning about of Swinburne’s belief (though not a proven fact) since Origin of Species” was published in 1859, shortly before Poems and Ballads came about.
The end of Swinburne’s life lasted about 30 years. After becoming a well-known poet, he began, “drinking past excess to unconsciousness,” (Everett). Eventually his legal advisor, Theodore Watts-Dunton took him in and got him to start living a healthier lifestyle. Swinburne died at the age of 72 from influenza in 1909 after becoming less sociable because of deafness. He is still remembered today because of his versatility in technique and addictive personality (Everett).
“Laus Veneris” was published in 1866 when Swinburne was just 29 years old. This poem includes the themes of sin, religion, and love because the main character, Tannhauser, is obsessed with the goddess Venus but his love for God is trying to overcome his obsession for lust throughout the poem. In the end, his love for God prevails, but when he asks the Pope for forgiveness for staying with Venus and being her lover, the Pope denies him and says that he will not be forgiven unless flowers bloom from his papal staff. Thinking this miracle could never happen, Tannhauser returns to Venus to continue his life of sin not knowing three days after asking for forgiveness, flowers did bloom from the Pope’s staff. This poem is a reinterpretation of a German legend (Houghton 659-660) of one man vying for two loves: Christ and Venus.
Tannhauser is considered a sinner in this poem because he is a knight and truly believes in God, yet he goes with Venus to her home and stays with her for a year because he feels that he is in love. His love for Venus isn’t real because it is not love he is feeling, it is lust which is one of the seven deadly sins. This sin would be one of the worst a knight could commit because he is to remain faithful to his religion, but Tannhauser doesn’t represent this in the poem. “In these first stanzas Tannhauser introduces the major preoccupations of the poem – the conflict between Christ and Venus, the erotic power of the latter, and also the sterility of that eroticism,” (Roberts 89). His temptation is most clear during the beginning of the poem when he says, “Inside the Horsel here the air is hot; / Right little peace one hath for it, God wot; / The scented dusty daylight burns the air, / And my heart chokes me still I hear it not,” (25-28). Here the reader can tell Tannhauser knows he is sinning but he is choosing to ignore it so he can be with Venus, the goddess of beauty.
Religion and sin go hand in hand so religion is also a major theme in this work. Tannhauser is contemplating his faith in Christ throughout the poem because why would God put him in such a position if he truly existed? After being with Venus for a year, Tannhauser realizes that God is the way he should choose, “For I was of Christ’s choosing, I God’s knight, / No blinkard heathen stumbling for scant light; / I can well see, for all the dusty days / Gone past, the clean great time of goodly fight,” (209-212). Tannhauser can see that God is right and Venus is wrong and he knows that he must make his life right again. His days of lust (dusty days) are gone and he wants to become a knight of God once more. Hyder states, “…one can find a reflection of religious heterodoxy in the insistence on conflict between the claims of Christ and those of Venus,“ (Hyder, Swinburne). The relationship between Tannhauser, Venus, and Christ is a tangled one that intertwines because of love.
Love is the third major theme of the poem and one of the most important since it involves sin and religion. Tannhauser has a love for two people, Christ and Venus. Though he feels that the love he feels for Christ is the same as the love he feels for Venus, he is mistaken. He feels true love for Christ because he renounces his belief in Christ towards the end of the poem and asks for forgiveness. What he feels for Venus is lust, not love. He only goes back to Venus because he feels that if forgiveness can’t be obtained, he has no other choice. His love for Christ is still present after he returns to Venus to be with her until the end of time because he states, “For till the thunder in the trumpet be, / Soul may divide from body, but not we / One from another; I hold thee with my hand, / I let mine eyes have all their will of thee,” (417-420). His belief in the Last Judgment is evident in the first line, and only those who believe in Christ believe in the Last Judgment. The entire stanza sums up the poem as a whole because Tannhauser’s “love” for Venus is also present since he doesn’t want to leave her. His love is a false love though since he is only deciding to love her because there is no other option.
There is much to praise in “Laus Veneris” for technical merit because style and alliteration. “Laus Veneris” takes its stylistic form from “The Rubaiyat” by Omar Khayyam with an aaba rhyme pattern in quatrains. In most of the quatrains, the lines spill over showing the speaker’s conflict in the style of the poem as well as the dialogue and speaker’s thoughts. “Laus Veneris” is full of alliteration to reinforce the themes of sinful lust, obsession, and sex. Alliteration is in every stanza, but more so when Tannhauser is pondering his obsession with Venus such as, “Her gateways smoke with fume of flowers and fires,” (125). Tannhauser is emphasizing the “F” and speaking of the beauty and the lust that he encounters when he is with Venus. The flowers represent Venus’ beauty and the fires represent the lust that Tannhauser feels as well as the fire in his heart for Christ. Alliteration happens again when Tannhauser is consumed by love but is starting to realize his mistakes, “Brief bitter bliss, one hath for a great sin,” (171). Tannhauser begins to contemplate knighthood and what it means and when he does this, the alliteration appears again: “I smell the breathing battle sharp with blows, / With shrieks of shafts and snapping short of bows; / The fair pure sword smites out in subtle ways / Sounds and long lights are shed between the rows” (213-216). The use of the letter “B” and the letter “S” are the most common throughout the entire poem and this quatrain has both sounds repeated multiple times. Alliteration is an important part of Swinburne’s writing style and his use of it in “Laus Veneris” is effective. “Another way of describing this structure is to think of the sections advancing in pulses, just as each stanza does,” (Roberts 91). Roberts’ statement is very true especially if the poem is read aloud. A reader can easily get caught up in the rhythm and rhyme of the poem and ignore the content.
“The Leper” also encases the themes of sin, religion, and love but in a much more diverse way than “Laus Veneris.” Though the poem is only 140 lines, each line has special meaning. The poem is spoken by a man who is in love with a woman who has leprosy. This man also happens to be her servant and has known her previous to her contracting the disease. There is another man whom the woman loved, but this is the man that gave her leprosy: “That knight’s gold hair she chose to love / His mouth she had such will to kiss,” (27-8). The servant ends up having the leper all to himself because the other man is ashamed to be with her. Soon after this her life comes to an end and the speaker is distraught with God and why he had to love this woman so much. The poem is both corrupted and beautiful at the same time as Richardson states, “”The Leper” is not revolting but strangely poignant. In order to be repelled by the corruption and closeness seemingly inherent in the situation, one must step outside the speaker’s hallucinatory detachment and deliberately–and with some difficulty–reliteralize the narrative,” (Richardson).
Sin is an underlying theme in this poem, but the sin is once again lust but there are also hints of envy in the lines as well. The servant is lusting after this woman who loves another man and he also envies the other man because the leper loves him. It’s a very confusing love triangle that can only end up badly. The speaker is putting himself in an awkward position by loving a woman with a fatal disease. Wrath can also be found when he is speaking to God because he says, “Yea, though God hateth us, he knows / That hardly in a little thing / Love faileth of the work it does / Till it grow rip for gathering,” (90-3). His scorn for God is one of the biggest sins that a Christian man can have.
Religion covers a big part of this poem because the speaker is constantly asking God, “Why me? Why her?” He wants to know the answer to why God has betrothed such an awful disease on the woman he loves. He is pondering if he is committing a sin or not by loving a woman with leprosy as well. His religion conflicts with everything he is feeling as well as everything he is doing. Throughout the poem he mentions that God hates him, “Yea, though God always hated me, / And hates me now that I can kiss,” (14-5). I believe that the speaker wants to believe in God, but he feels as if he can’t because of all the bad luck he has had both now and in his past.
Love is the third theme of the poem and also the most talked about by the speaker. It is important to understand that the speaker is obsessed with not only the leper but the idea of love in general. The very first line of the poem says, “Nothing is better, I well think, / Than love;…,” (1-2). After being able to kiss the leper, the speaker goes on to say once more, “Nothing is better, I well know, / Than love…,” (21-2). Only one word changes which is the word “think” becomes the word “know” since he has been able to be with her, he now knows the act of love rather than just being able to think about it. All he wants is for the woman to feel no shame about her disease and before she dies, he gets his wish, “And she is dead now, and shame put by,” (113).
“The Leper” is written in quatrains like “Laus Veneris” and has a rhyme pattern of abab with only eight syllables in each line. The lines do not spill over because of the use of shorter words and very technical style pattern. This writing style helps the poem become more understandable to the reader since Swinburne’s use of vocabulary is limited because of the specific rhyme scheme and syllable count. Each poem has its own rhyme scheme and pattern, but “The Leper” is much more technical in style and form than “Laus Veneris.” This could be because of the subject matter or because the thoughts of each speaker are so different in the two poems.
Alliteration is sparse in “The Leper” but repetition is not. The word “sweet” and the different forms of the word are repeated constantly as to remind the reader of the leper’s soul not just the way she looks. It is often used multiple times in the same line such as, “How sweeter than all sweet she is,” (56). There is also alliteration in this line emphasizing the meaning of the line which is “don’t judge a book by its cover.” The speaker knows the leper isn’t beautiful on the outside, but he seems to think she makes up for it on the inside. He is jaded by his love for her and can’t see that she also loves another man and is using him for servant purposes at her will. By making this point, a reader can go back and re-read the poem and go away with a completely different meaning. The language flows well as Richardson says, “Often severely beautiful as dew on steel, his language is narrowed to invoke a world of clarity, purity, and violence.” Swinburne was a master of the grotesque in his early writing career and this poem is a prime example of that.
The speaker in “Laus Veneris” and the speaker in “The Leper” both have a few of the same qualities, yet they differ in how they handle the situations they are put in. Tannhauser is put into a situation where he is presented with the question of whether or not he is going to commit a sin and go against God’s will. He chooses to commit the sin but later on repents and asks for forgiveness. The speaker (who is nameless) in “The Leper” is already sinning before he is presented with the question of loving the leper because he is scornful of God and what has been brought upon him as his life as a scribe. Tannhauser only goes back to Venus because he has no other choice in his mind, not because of the fact that he loves her. He forces himself to feel love for her so he has a way out. The speaker of “The Leper” is different in this aspect because he feels true love for the leper woman and chooses her because of this emotion. They compare in the fact that they are both faced with a tough situation and they both act on instinct rather than using their better judgment to make a decision. Swinburne uses the characters to help the reader relate to problems of sin, religion, and love in their own lives.
“Laus Veneris” and “The Leper” both encompass the themes of sin, religion, and love much like other poems in the Victorian era. The only difference is that Swinburne used grotesque images and dysfunctional main characters to portray his messages. In Hyder’s book Algernon Swinburne the Critical Heritage he has a quote saying, “He is now, with all his wonderful gifts the most wretched man I ever saw,” (16). Swinburne did have many gifts but poetry was by far the best he was given.
Works Cited
Everett, Glenn. “A. C. Swinburne: Biography.” The Victorian Web: An Overview. Victorian Web. Web. 27 Apr. 2011. <http://victorianweb.org/authors/swinburne/acsbio1.html>.
Henderson, Philip. Swinburne; Portrait of a Poet. New York: Macmillan, 1974. Print.
Houghton, Walter E., and G. Robert Stange. “”Laus Veneris” by Algernon Charles Swinburne.”Victorian Poetry and Poetics. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1968. 659-65. Print.
Hyder, Clyde Kenneth. Algernon Swinburne the Critical Heritage. London: Taylor & Francis E-Library, 2005. Virtual_SU PDF.
Hyder, Clyde K. “Swinburne’s Laus Veneris and the Tannhäuser Legend.” PMLA 45.4 (1930): 1202-213. JSTOR. Web. 24 Mar. 2011.
Landow, George P. “A. C. Swinburne — Religion.” The Victorian Web: An Overview. 25 Aug. 2003. Web. 14 Apr. 2011. <http://victorianweb.org/authors/swinburne/religion1.html>.
Richardson, James. “Purity and Pain.” Vanishing Lives: Style and Self in Tennyson, D. G. Rossetti, Swinburne, and Yeats. University Press of Virginia, 1988. 116-136. Rpt. in Poetry Criticism. Ed. Laura A. Wisner-Broyles. Vol. 24. Detroit: Gale Group, 1999. Literature Resource Center. Web. 12 Apr. 2011
Roberts, Adam. “A Note on the Intrinsic of Swinburne’s “Laus Veneris”" Victorian Poetry 28.1 (1990): 89-92. MLA International Bibliography. Web. 24 Mar. 2011.
Swinburne, Algernon Charles. “The Leper by Algernon Charles Swinburne.” PoemHunter.Com – Thousands of Poems and Poets.. Poetry Search Engine. Web. 02 Apr. 2011. <http://poemhunter.com/poem/the-leper/comments.asp>.
