Taking back the Ballad: Swinburne in the 1860s. (2024)

Despite its title, Algernon Charles Swinburne's inaugural 1866collection, Poems and Ballads, contains very few ballads. Some poemsentitled "ballad" arc in fact versions of continental lyricforms like the canzone ("A Ballad of Life") or the ballade("A Ballad of Burdens"). Indeed, the 1866 Poems and Balladsincludes an astonishing number of different lyric forms: not onlyballads, ballades, and canzoni, but songs, rondeaux, a carol, alamentation, a litany, a hymn, and poems in sapphics andhendecasyllabics (after Sappho and Catullus, respectively). In his firstcollection, Swinburne was exploring a broad range of the forms thatlyric poetry might take. In demonstrating through creative imitation hismastery of so many different lyric forms, Swinburne was doing somethingvery much like Tennyson in his first major collection of 1830, Poems,Chiefly Lyrical. Some of Swinburne's and Tennyson's best-knownshort, narrative, ballad-like poems in their respective early volumes,though they differ markedly in their engagements with earlier balladmaterials, both direct readers to continental models, even though bothpoets were intimately familiar with the old ballads collected, edited,and published in Walter Scott's Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border(1802).

In the early 1860s, however, Swinburne edited a number of olderballad texts from Scotland and the north of England and composed somestartlingly similar poems of his own. They included not onlystory-ballads but other songs arising from situations those storiessuggested: a Northumbrian widow's lament, a condemnedJacobite's farewell, a song for a wake, and the last words or"neck-verse" for a border thief betrayed by his lover andabout to be hanged. His verse caught with remarkable acuity the soundand the sense of older popular ballads from Northumbria and the bordercounties of Scotland that, if we believe Swinburne'ssemi-autobiographical novel (also dating from the early 1860s), he hadfirst encountered as a boy visiting his grandfather Swinburne'sNorthumbrian estate, Capheaton. (1) Swinburne's balladry in theseyears, I argue, sets itself against the lyricizing and balladizingpractices of both editors and popular poets in the ballad revival of theeighteenth and nineteenth centuries, insisting instead on returningpoetry to the harsh landscapes of feeling and forceful rhythms he foundin the old songs of England's North. In this, one might say, he wascloser to creative poet-editors and emulators like James Macpherson,Thomas Chatterton, or John Clare. (2)

Swinburne's imitations depended not only on what he may haveheard, but also on his more recent study of ballad and song texts in theBritish Museum. The projected ballad edition on which he was working in1861 was intended, he wrote, "to contain all the best northernpoems." (3) For each edited ballad, Swinburne seems to have studiedmultiple different versions earlier published by ballad scholars fromBishop Thomas Percy (1765) to Scott and his successors in the nineteenthcentury, especially William Jamieson (1806), William Motherwell (1827),George R. Kinlock (1827), Peter Buchan (1828), and, most recently, theAmerican scholar of early English literature Frances James Child, thesecond edition of whose initial collection of English and Scottishballads, in eight small volumes, had just been published in London. (4)Unlike his larger and better-known later collection of 1882-1898,Child's initial publication was part of a series intended to coverthe whole history of English poetry; by including ballads and songs heextended that history from literary to popular traditions. Like many butnot all of his predecessors (and like Swinburne), in this first effortChild, who did not at first confine himself strictly to narrativeballads, focused on words, not music, and relied primarily on printedsources. (5) Swinburne used the 1861 London edition of Child, but he didnot follow all of Child's scholarly practices, still less hisaesthetic and political preferences. Where Child collected ballads fromall over England and Scotland, Swinburne concentrated on the region justsouth of the border with Scotland, where Swinburnes had lived since theMiddle Ages. And where Child, unlike earlier editors, printed multipleversions, Swinburne's aim was fundamentally a poet's: torecover the old songs by selecting and combining variants for the sakeof the most effective poem. Swinburne's versions, as Anne HenryEhrenpreis has aptly described them, are "intricate conflations ...with additional interpolations of his own" (p. 559). Still morethan Child, Swinburne meant to insert the old ballads into the historyof literary poetry-but not only as poetry's past. Ballads were tobe a productively disruptive force to shape poetry's future.

In what follows, I first consider how we might best think ofSwinburne's work with ballads in the early 1860s before turning tolook at some examples. Swinburne was heir not only to the immediate(eighteenth-century and Romantic) ballad revival but also to much olderpractices of exchange and crossbreeding between literary poetry andpopular song, sometimes welcomed and sometimes resisted by literatepoets and their readers. Such crossbreeding, we do well to remember, wasfacilitated by the equally long dependence by popular songs and balladson a combination of oral and print transmission. (6) Ballads,distributed as broadsides as well as performed in the streets, hadinhabited a shared culture with poetic texts since at least thesixteenth century. Ballad audiences extended from the rural or urbanpoor to the educated merchant or aristocrat, and ballads were both heardand read at many points along that spectrum. Poets from Shakespeare toWilliam Blake drew on the resources of popular song. Nor was the trafficsimply one-way: poems by major poets, including Shakespeare, ChristopherMarlowe, and Robert Herrick, enjoyed an extensive popular life throughbroadsides or song sheets and were performed in homes, streets, andtheaters (often without the name of the author attached). In the secondhalf of the eighteenth century, the traffic between popular and literaryverse quickened, and the stakes were raised, as poets and collectors,editors, publishers, and readers looked with new interest at old balladsas both repositories of national memory and the remains of an original,perhaps purer poetry: the language, thoughts, and feelings of a peoplenot yet touched by modernity, whatever that might be. From Percy toChild, ballad editors sought to recover traces of this presumptivelypre- or nonliterate national verse from what were viewed as its ruins inarchives or the memories of rural singers. They also sought to recastit* roughness of form and feeling into more acceptable poeticforms-usually into short rhyming lines, most commonly in four beatsknown as ballad meter. These lines were often but not always arrangedinto what became by the twentieth century known as "balladstanza": alternating, usually rhyming lines of iambic tetrameterand trimeter. Balladizing might mean silently collating, amending, and(re)constructing a ballad from one or more sources (Percy's method,and Swinburne's) or presenting that ballad in multiple versionscollected from different print and oral sources (since Child, the modernmethod). In either case, it implied some accommodation with modernreaders' tastes. Swinburne, however, resisted such accommodations.

In the greatly simplified idea of lyric that we have loved tocastigate in recent years-in which all lyric genres arc reduced to one,the subjective poem of feeling-there seems little place for the ballad.Virginia Jackson, Yopie Prins, Meredith Martin, and Jonathan Culler,among others, have rightly objected to any Romantic or post-Romanticassumptions that overlook the multiple genres and forms that make up amuch longer lyric tradition, together with the variety of socialpractices they have solicited and functions they have served. (7)Certainly ballads, while distinct from epic and dramatic verse, are not"feeling confessing itself to itself, in moments of solitude."(8) Yet short poems in a simplified ballad stanza derived fromAnglo-Scottish collections like Scott's and Child's accountedfor a significant part of verse writing and reading in Victorian

Britain and America. (9) This ballad verse generated reading andperformance practices distinct from the expectations of intimacysurrounding lyric poems written and read in solitude. From early in thecentury, verses for British school children, for example, began to adoptballad forms and narrative conventions--considered simple and easy tolearn-to tell national history and teach moral values, while the songsand recitation verse of musical taverns, working-men's glee clubs,and the music hall, as well as much Victorian comic verse, similarlyused ballad forms and conventions. (10) A great deal of other popular aswell as literary poetry and song followed suit.

Michael Cohen and Meredith Martin argue that these compositionsshould be understood to imply a ballad theory of history in which arough or primitive early culture is reshaped into a more civilizedmodern one. But not all poets who turned to old ballads embraced theuseful simplicities of modern ballad meter and ballad narration, muchless their promise of a civilizing history. Some valued the tensionbetween literary poetry and older popular song for its potential todisrupt poetry's matter and manner. These poets were fascinated bythe strangeness of ballad subjects, ballad feelings, ballad rhythms, andstyles of narration-the pastness of the past as it might be used tocounter stale conventions in verse. Wordsworth and Coleridge imaginedencounters with an earlier poetic culture by staging, in lyrical balladsof varying stanzaic forms, dramas of sometimes tragic incomprehension inwhich the human confronts the nonhuman ("Christabel,"), thesane are waylaid by the obsessed ("The Ancient Mariner,""The Thorn"), poets are baffled and then inspired by ancientpeasants ("Resolution and Independence"), and adultsinstructed by children ("We Are Seven," "The IdiotBoy"). Later poets, pursuing similar effects of productivedisorientation, looked beyond the traditions of Anglo-Scottishminstrelsy and folk ballads to medieval Provencal, French, and Italianmodels. Keats ("La Belle Dame Sans Merci"), Tennyson("The Lady of Shalott"), and Dante Gabriel Rossetti ("TheBlessed Damozel") composed ballad-like poems drawing from Europeanmedieval sources to restage the fatal clash of two mutuallyuncomprehending worlds: human and fairy, or Shalott and Camelot, or anineteenth-century lover and a beloved ascended to an apparentlymedieval heaven in which her lover cannot believe. (11)

Like their Romantic predecessors, Swinburne's Pre-Raphaelitefriends Rossetti and William Morris experimented in the 1850s with avariety of rhythmic patterns and stanza shapes, both European andEnglish, using ballad-like meters and styles of narration to introducefrom the past disconcertingly different concepts of space, time,feeling, and belief. In the medievalizing lyrics of Morris's TheDefence of Guenevere (1858), for example, vivid visual images (a gashedorange on a fold of green tapestry, yellow flowers stained with red, ahone-white skull buried with its coif of gold) recur like imperfectlyrepressed memories, mixing past with present to gradually insinuatestartling scenes of violence and passion beneath the deceptivelydecorative surface of the poem's formal stanzas. Repetitions andretrains become the means of exposing gaps and fissures in amind's-or a community's-civilized controls, in poems whosepsychological complexities recall Browning, while their formal andnarrative conventions look to both Anglo-Scottish balladry and toEnglish and continental medieval verse ("The Wind," "TheGillyflower of Gold," "Concerning Geffray Teste Noire,""Two Red Roses Across the Moon," "The Tune of SevenTowers"). Rossetti's "Sister Helen" (composed1851-1852, originally published 1853, revised a number of times in thefollowing decades), is perhaps the most compelling (and the earliest) ofPre-Raphaelite ballad imitations, set in Ireland on the banks of theBoyne. Swinburne particularly admired it. Rossetti's verses pullreaders inside a slowly unfolding scene of revenge murder by proxy:

 "Why did you melt your waxen man, Sister Helen? To-day is the third since you began." "The time was long, yet the time ran, Little brother." (O Mother, Mary Mother, Three days to-day, between Hell and Heaven!) (ll. 1-7) (12)

In subsequent stanzas, the melting of the wax image takes place inthe real time of reading, its progress presented cryptically andindirectly through the watching brother's questions and thesister's answers in the first five lines of each stanza. We aredrawn in to imagine the encroaching flames and the melting wax thatmeasure out Helen's faithless dying lover's painful lastmoments. Rhythmic metrical beats, in lines of varying length arranged ina pattern repeated from stanza to stanza, provide a simulacrum of thesound and feel of a world outside tuned to the same pulsing force thatprevails inside the siblings' closed room, where fire and thesister's passionate hatred burn to the tempo of language. In theboy's reports ("In the shaken trees the chill starsshake"; "I hear a horse-tread, and I see ... Three horsem*nthat ride terribly") the repetitions (shaken/shake;horse-tread/horsem*n) amplify the metrical beats with alliteration andassonance, while the chiasmus (I hear ... I see/) foregrounds the strongaccentuation in the first and last feet of the line (ll. 52, 57-59). Inthe final two lines of each stanza, set off by parentheses, achorus-like third voice sounds the sentence of the fate that the sisterembraces as the price of her revenge, in a world as much pagan asChristian. The repeating final phrase (between Hell and Heaven) rhymeswith the repeating second line (Helen/Heaven), bur that pairing isbelied by the punning echo of Helen's name that precedes it(Helen/Hell and). By the final stanza, the difference between saying anddoing, representing and acting, has, like the image itself, collapsed,forcing sister together with lover-a ghostly "white thing"whose arrival the watching brother reports-into the fire that is theirshared doom:

 "Ah! what white thing at the door has cross'd, Sister Helen? Ah! what is this that sighs in the frost?" "A soul that's lost as mine is lost, Little brother!" (O Mother, Mary Mother, Lost, lost, all lost, between Hell and Heaven!) (ll. 288-294)

It's a powerful performance, where the indirection of thestory's telling--murder committed by representation, doublydisplaced from the actual event into the siblings' dialogicexchanges, yet lived in the real time of reading by the reluctantreader-combines with the force of strongly stressed, rhythmicrepetitions and refrains to pull us into a wholly different, violentworld. Rossetti and Morris were drawn to the violence of an earlier erafor its potential to disrupt restrictive habits of thinking andfeeling-the social, sexual, and political norms of Victorian Britain,but also formal habits of thinking and feeling in Victorian verse. Liketheir Romantic predecessors, they took it for granted that old songs andballads retained traces of a more primitive but potentially valuableculture- possibilities of belief, ways of living and feeling in theworld, and forms of verse- now largely confined to the rural or colonialperipheries of Britain and Europe. Unlike the ballad editors and thepopular versifiers, however, they had little interest in national oruniversal narratives of civilizing progress. Poetry's measures,they believed, should not smooth over the difference of old ballads andsongs.

As both editor and poet working with a tradition of northern song,Swinburne too in the 1860s pushed back against the improving message ofballadizing histories, but he also set himself against what heconsidered the softer measures of lyrical ballad-inspired verses fromWordsworth (Lyrical Ballads, 1798) to the immensely popular Thomas Moore(Irish Melodies, 1808-1834) and Thomas Babington Macaulay (The Lays ofAncient Rome, 1842), insisting that poems for modern readers, howeversophisticated their manipulation of ballad narration and ballad form,should not lose sight of the different intensities of old songs stark intheir settings, violent in their passions, crude in their occasionalhumor, and rhythmically forceful in their prosody. His selections aseditor are pointedly critical of Child (and implicitly of other balladeditors) in several respects. Where Child in his first collectionsuppressed all or parts of some ballads for their supposed indelicacy,Swinburne restored offending verses. More importantly, Swinburne'sselection of ballads to edit or imitate presents a very different imageof the lives and landscapes from which the old songs and storiesemerged. If Wordsworth's Cumbria finds its visual embodiment in J.M. W. Turner's lovely watercolors of its limpid lakes, capturingtheir isolation and their silence in still reflections from surroundingmountains, Swinburne's Northumbria can be found in Turner'sstormy paintings of its turbulent, strife-torn coasts, where smugglersevade customs officers and wreckers salvage hard livings from theviolent conflict of wind, rock, and water (see Fig. I). (13) In thatworld, a spirit of resistant independence, enforced by conditions ofpunishing seas, rocky shores, and infertile pastures, meant constant warwith border guards, customs officers, and other local enforcers ofdistant national authority. Hatred of outside control and absoluteloyalty to one's own were the breeding grounds for a highly localmedieval culture of warfare, smuggling, salvage, and cattle raiding thatpersisted through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The Catholicsympathies of the local populace and its leaders, including theSwinburnes, added to a rebellious local sense of a way of life underassault, making the area a hotbed of Jacobite sympathies during theuprising of 1715. (14) The ballads Swinburne chose to edit or imitatedramatize that spirit of antinational, antimonarchical, anti-Protestantresistance, together with the stoic endurance of grim fates suffered bythose whose desires for the socially or politically forbidden-includingincestuous or adulterous passions-subjected them to retribution. InSwinburne's poems, shipwrecks, betrayals personal and political,border raids and punishments, political executions and exile unfold inbleak sea and moorland settings north of the Tyne.

What Swinburne is after, and what he finds in the old ballads, isnot only their harsher landscapes of feeling, however, but thosesettings brought home on the pulses by sound.

 God send the sea sorrow, And all men that sail thorough. God give the wild sea woe, And all ships that therein go. My love went out with dawn's light; He went down ere it was night. God give no live man good That sails over the sea's flood. God give all live men teen That sail over the waves green. God send for my love's sake All their lovers' hearts break. (ll. 1-12) (15)

The lines (from an untitled ballad composed for his posthumouslypublished, unfinished novel, Lesbia Brandon) seem to sound twoalternative scansions at once, as if iambic trimeter were contendingwith a more powerful dimetrical possibility. As readers, we seem presentas voice-concrete and human vocal utterance-is permeated, taken over bythe impersonal temporal movement or force of a driving rhythm, analternative possibility of metrical scansion or perhaps a super- orsubmetrical cadence. The woman's voice becomes that of thepitiless, sounding sea that she wishes would take all women'slovers as it has taken hers. We might say that Swinburne's old-newballads and songs, particularly those he wrote for Lesbia Brandon,aspire to a condition of lyric that requires the "decentring of thevery language which would articulate subjective experience" into"a life in which the soul, singing, becomes non-human, approachesthe state of the tree, the bird and the sea," in David NowellSmith's paraphrase of Baudelaire. (16) In an essay Swinburne almostcertainly read, Baudelaire had written of lyric as a state "almostsupernatural," "that intensity of life where the soul sings,where it cannot but sing, like the tree, the bird and the sea." ForSwinburne, ballads offer that absorption of individual voice intononhuman, impersonal life in the movement, the animation, the strangeother life that rhythm and repetition can give to language. (17)

Swinburne is aware of the peculiarly impersonal subject positionoffered by the ballad, where neutral narration sets out storiesimplicitly appealing to experiences and emotions shared by listeners andreaders. Like other nineteenth-century literate poets who wrote in oneof the older, socially performative forms, Swinburne understood himselfto be invoking a more coherent physical and cultural world than hisreaders could be assumed to inhabit. Modern poems, adopting the olderforms in a later age of personal expression and private reading by anexpanded and more disparate public, necessarily repeat with a differencethat Swinburne wanted to acknowledge and use. While his ballad editionremained unfinished when he abandoned it, probably at the end of 1861,it had already served a lyric poet's purpose. "Imitation, tobe worth much," he wrote at about this time, "must begin fromwithin and not from without." (18) Selecting, conflating, andinterpolating from traditional ballads, he taught himself to write in anolder, harsher manner "from within." For Swinburne, thatharsher manner should retain its alien accents; the community it speaksof should not be comforting for a modern reader. Swinburne insisted onpreserving the differences between what he called, in Lesbia Brandon, a"lyrical tradition ... soft of speech [and] demure of step"and "the fresh and strong meat of ballads" (p. 77). While thisis especially evident in the poems he composed for Lesbia Brandon, wecan also see it at work in two Anglo-Scottish ballads that he didinclude in Poems and Ballads in 1866.

"The King's Daughter" and "TheSea-Swallows" are stories of transgressee passion invoking a cruelfate stoically suffered. In "The Sea-Swallows," for example,the setting is explicitly northern and the narration is mostlyconducted, with admirable indirection and compression, through atraditional ballad format of questions and replies:

 "O what is this thing ye have on, Show me now, sweet daughter of mine?" "O father, this is my little son That I found hid in the sides of Tyne." (ll. 13-16) (19)

"The King's Daughter" similarly provides a minimumof narrative information; we do not learn until the last stanza, givenin the voice of the tenth of ten maidens encountered by the king'sson, who gets her with child, that she is in fact the king's childtoo; her ravisher is her brother:

 "Ye'll make a grave for my fair body," Running rain in the mill-water; "And ye'll streek my brother at the side of me," The pains of hell for the king's daughter. (ll. 53-56)

Swinburne is following his own advice, put in the mouth of LadyWariston in Lesbia Brandon: "All those stories are best half-told;they frighten more and stick closer" (p. 43). (20) So, too, in"The Sea-Swallows," where a daughter repeatedly asks herfather what he will give her for the son she has "found hid in thesides of the Tyne"-how he will feed him, clothe him, line his bed,endow him with land. His answers-"Fen-water and adder'smeat," "A weed and a web of nettle's hair,""Two black stones at the kirkwall's head," "Threegirl's paces of red sand"-refuse to acknowledge or endow thefoundling, and subsequent parts of the exchange make clear that thedaughter has in fact borne and perhaps killed her illegitimate childthere by the river (II. 16, 19, 23, 27, 31). The closing four stanzas ofthat poem begin in the voice of the father:

"O daughter, if ye have done this thing, I wot the greatergrief is mine." (ll. 49-52)

The father directs his daughter to make a grave for him beside thathe would have her make for her ill-gotten child. The last stanza reads,in the 1866 edition,

"Tread twelve girl's paces out for three, Red rose leaveswill never make wine; For the pit I made has taken me, The ways are sairfra' the Till to the Tyne." (ll. 61-64) (21)

Who is speaking, the father or his daughter? Punctuation in the1866 version leaves the speaker unclear. For the Chatto & Windus1904 edition of his poems, Swinburne altered the punctuation to make thefinal speaker the daughter, but the 1860s version, by refusing tocompromise the cryptic indirection of an older tradition of oralperformance, allows the suggestion of possible incest between father anddaughter. Swinburne's original version is more resistant to bothhalladization and lyricization.

In other respects, though, both these poems resemble less theabruptness of the unornamented northern ballad than the more artful oldFrench songs that Swinburne, like Morris and Rossetti, had learned towrite in the late 1850s and early 1860s. (22) Swinburne insists,however, that even these softer songs of love (as he has his characterLady Wariston describe them in Lesbia Brandon) should nonetheless bemarked by their historical difference from contemporary poetry. They tooshould puzzle modern hearers and readers; they should unsettle, again inthe words of Lady Wariston, as if "a sense of pleasure and offear" were to "hover and tremble" over the lines (p.134). (23) Lady Wariston's hovering, trembling "sense ofpleasure and of fear" registers the modern reader's discomfortin the form of clashing affects arising from felt differences ofsentiment, belief, and poetic practice.

The alternation of narrative with refrain lines in "TheSea-Swallows" may also strike modern readers as mixing pleasureswith fears. Sharply aestheticized lyric pleasures alternate with theunsoftened language and bleak story of a northern ballad from the firststanza:

 This fell when Christmas lights were done, (Red rose leaves will never make wine) But before the Easter lights begun; The ways are sair fra' the Till to the Tyne. (ll. 1-4)

The redness of those seemingly irrelevant rose leaves is artfullycontrasted with the lights of lines 1 and 3, but this apparentlydecorative opening comes up short against the strongly foreboding,unornamented dialect speech of the fourth line. The unlikely rhyming isnot only of sounds but of styles, and of the utterly different worldsfrom which they arise. Here historical consciousness is forced on thereader by the incongruities of combining medieval French songs intendedfor aristocratic audiences with traditional Anglo-Scots ballads.

"The King's Daughter" further works the distancesbetween northern ballad, the medieval court song, and the modern reader.Though as already noted, the poem tells a bleak story of rape, incest,and death, probably inspired by some of the traditional balladsSwinburne studied in 1861, its half-nonsense refrains, carefully craftedand subtly varied, point to the work of a literate poet:

 We were ten maidens in the green corn, Small red leaves in the mill-water: Fairer maidens never were horn, Apples of gold for the king's daughter. (ll. 1-4)

Subsequent stanzas repeat the "in the mill-water" /"for the king's daughter" rhyming phrases of the secondand fourth lines but vary the items named. Even more than in "TheSea-Swallows," here both refrain lines deploy an unexpectedspecificity in naming objects meant for the eye as well as the ear(small red leaves, apples of gold; small white birds, rings of red;seeds of wheat, white bread and brown; fair green weed, white wine andred). But the changing items also serve to intimate the darkening moodof the story: by the fifth stanza, the "Small red leaves" and"Small white birds" of the second line refrain become"Fallen flowers," then "Fallen fruit," "Alittle wind," "A little rain," "Rain thatrains," and finally "Wind and hail," "Snow thatsnows," "Broken boats," and "Running rain" inthe mill-water (ll. 22, 26, 30, 34, 38, 44, 50, 54, 58). The weatherchanges drastically, and color disappears-first anticipating and thenenacting the dissolution of an innocent maidenly world in the wake ofthe demand by the king's young son: "Out of ten maidensye'll grant me one" (1. 31). Subtle changes with eachrepetition enlist the refrain lines, for all their interest ineuphonious repetition and visual pleasure, as a form of indirectnarration. Such elaborate variation is more characteristic ofprofessional trouvere or troubadour medieval poems of courtly love (andtheir imitations in Morris's The Defence of Guenevere volume of1858) than of Anglo-Scottish border ballads. Yet whether writing in themode of medieval court song or in that of the old northern ballads (orboth, as in these poems), Swinburne is careful to honor the differencesbetween particular pasts and the present. Old ballads and songs newlywritten will not be heard as they might once have been, but neithershould they be made to sound modern. The difference offers its ownexpressive possibilities.

This is particularly evident in the poems Swinburne composed forLesbia Brandon. In that novel, everyone's desires are misdirected,with every character at least semirelated to every other. Desire, thusforbidden or denied, is prolonged and intensified. The title character,object of the boy Herbert's hopeless devotion, is in fact only onein a central group composed of the passionate youth; his married oldersister, Lady Wariston; and his tutor, Denham, who is not onlyHerbert's and his sister's half-brother on their father'sside but also his sister's lover and Lesbias half-brother on hermother's side as well. It's in this hypercharged atmospherethat Swinburne has Lady Wariston sing old ballads and songs, first toher enraptured younger brother, Herbert, and then to her own twochildren. They interrupt and counterpoint a modern novel of incestuous,adulterous, and hom*osexual desire. These songs and ballads, with theirstark depictions of an alien older world of love and loss, weresupposedly first learned from their nurse by Herbert and his sister aschildren in Northumbria (though actually composed by Swinburne).Swinburne later published a few of them in his Poems and Ballads, ThirdSeries (1889); others-and the important discussions with which they wereframed in the novel-remained unpublished until after his death.

On each occasion, the songs Lady Wariston sings do specificperformative work relative to events and relationships at that moment inthe novel. The first time she sings, she starts with a sea song (latertitled "The Winds"):

 O weary fa' the east wind And weary fa' the west: And gin I were under the wan waves wide I wot weel wad I rest. (ll. 1-4, p. 40)

Her singing is part of her intention to make "herself pleasantbeyond words to the boy": she is both rewarding and protectingHerbert, an avid swimmer, who has pulled a fisherman's boy fromrough waters and been whipped for disobeying orders to stay on land byhis new tutor, Denham. The very sounds of "ballads and seasongs" bring back an earlier period of their shared childhood inNorthumbria, when neither was as yet subject to the constraints ofmodern socialization (a marriage and children for her; tutoring inpreparation for Eton and Oxford for him). As she sings, "Old wordspassed and old things revived; there was nothing yet of bitter or blackin the memory of either. In the past time towards which they had turnedback, their thoughts and lives had not been more clean and frank andsweet" (pp. 39-40).

Her second song (later titled "The King's Ae Son")is a ballad strongly resembling "The Twa Corbies," the grimmerScots version of the English traditional ballad "ThreeRavens." A "bracken-bush" and a "wan well-head"discuss, in question-and-answer format, the fate of the king's onlyson, whose body lies between them, murdered at the behest of his formerlover (1. 1, p. 42). In dialect couplets, it's '"a bleaklittle piece of verse,'" as Lady Wariston accurately describesit (p. 43). Rut for both Herbert and Lady Wariston, there is somethingdeeply satisfying in the performance ('"It's so jollyvicious,'" Herbert comments)-as if the force of their ownfrustrations at the constraints they now endure had found outlet in therhythms and rhymes through which another culture made a more enablingorder out of cruel deeds and strong feelings.

"What shall he get when the birds fly in?" "Deathfor life and sorrow for sin."

"What to his leman, that garr'd him be slain?""Hell's pit and hell's pain." (ll. 17-18, 23-24, p.42)

Here language has the force of a performative curse, long meditatedand carefully shaped to stick fast in the collective mind, uttered notso much to harm a particular individual (the story is very obliquelytold) as to invoke the harsh justice of a bleak, fate-governed world.

Part of what it does for the brother and sister is tied to theirshared knowledge that the song comes from a past other to their presentand brings with it the memory of previous iterations-in their childhoodbut also long before, repetitions by other voices in still more distanttimes. Later that night, after brother and sister have spent the eveningwith a pair of cynical urban rouees, whose witty conversation displaysmodern corruptions of both behavior and literature, Lady Wariston againsings to the boy. This time she chooses what she describes as a still"older and more battered fragment of verse" (p. 76), the tersecouplets previously quoted above, which call down a bitter curse in thevoice of a woman widowed by the sea:

 God send the sea sorrow, And all men that sail thorough. God give the wild sea woe, And all ships that therein go. (ll. 1-4, p. 77)

The song's "tierce crude expressions of sorrow andanger," Swinburne writes, "shocked neither boy nor woman, bredup as their minds had been in border air on the fresh and strong meat ofballads" (p. 77). Both sister and brother relish what he calls the"dropped syllables and rough edges" of the song's meter,"worn half away in the passage of the poem downward into modernlips and changed accents." In the early 1860s, Swinburne takespains to retain this feature-the dropped syllables and rough meterproduced by an oral tradition-in many of his imitations, refusing toreplace lost syllables in order to smooth the old verses into lyricfluency.

But he seems to retreat from this position toward the end of hislife, it we compare what Swinburne wrote for his novel with versions ofthe same poems as he published them in the six-volume collected Poems of1904. As with the later version of "The Sea-Swallows,"Swinburne introduced changes when he included these songs in a printedcollection of lyric poems for educated readers. In "The Lyke-WakeSong," as Swinburne wrote it for his novel:

 Ye sang songs a' the day: Sit down at night in the worm's way. Proud ye were a' day long; Ye'll be but lean at evensong. Ye had gowd kells on your hair; Nae man kens what ye were. Ye set scorn by the ruby ring; Now the worm is a sweet thing. (ll. 3-8, 11-12, p. 150)

In the third volume of Poems (1904) this becomes:

 Ye sang songs a' the day: Sit down at night in the red worm's way.

and

 Ye set scorn by the rubis ring: Now the worm is a saft sweet thing. (ll. 3-4, 11-12; italics added)

There is, however, an explanation for Swinburne's decision torestore the dropped syllables in the 1904 collected Poems. In the firstversion, where the surrounding fiction asks readers to imagine the verseas sung, readers are asked to hear (with the ear of the mind) the linesas a singer or reciter would perform them, slowing and dwelling on eachcouplet's last two words and thus keeping the established strongfour-beat line. Without that imagined performance, as Swinburne musthave realized, readers accustomed to the greater metrical sophisticationof literary verse might stumble. Adding a syllable in the second line ofeach of these last couplets assures that readers correctly grasp whatSwinburne valued most highly of all: the forceful, unforgiving rhythmsthat once shaped landscapes, lives, and songs.

Perhaps the most telling observation for our understanding ofSwinburne's balladry and its rhythms is again Lady Wariston's,when she sings for the last time in the novel. By this point she hasbroken through the restraints of marriage to embark on a passionateaffair with Herbert's tutor Denham. The two have just discoveredthat they are half-siblings and painfully agree to end their affair.With barely concealed desperation, she turns once again to the oldsongs, this time singing to her children. Two of her songs are tragediesof betrayed women. The second, "The Witch-Mother," is aparticularly gruesome Anglo-Scots version of the Medea story crossedwith Philomela's. Cast aside by the father of her children, thewitch-mother kills and serves them to him:

 Says-Eat your fill of your flesh, my lord, And drink your fill of your wine; For a' thing's yours and only yours, That has been yours and mine. (ll. 5-8, p. 147) (24)

Lady Wariston's spoken comments draw attention to theperilously thin line between song and life-between what the balladnarrates and what, in her own tormented state, she might do to thefascinated, frightened children to whom she sings: "Then she killedthem, Ethel, both, and put their blood in a little brass dish ... insome pot or pan, with the blood of a little white chicken, like you ...You see that she didn't kill them for fun at all. It's notevery witch that kills little unweaned babies; yes, it was hard, that. Imight kill you if I tried; take care; be good" (p. 147). As hernext comments show, however, what really tempts her is the power thatwords, arranged into verse, acquire to physically, viscerally strikesingers and listeners alike. The old songs are powerful not in what theysay (though their stories of loss and betrayal obscurely echo her own)but how.

"Things in verse hurt one, don't they? hit and sting likea cut ... It's odd that words should change so just by being putinto rhyme. They get teeth and bite; they take fire and burn. I wonderwho first thought of tying words up and twisting them back to makeverses, and hurt and delight all people in the world for ever.... onecan't see why this ringing and rhyming of words should make all thedifference in them: one can't tell where the pain or the pleasureends or begins." (p. 148)

Blocked in life from resisting her individual tragedy (the doublyforbidden affair that must remain secret), Lady Wariston turns toballads. The violence of her feeling thrives on the visceral pleasuresand pains of words tied up and twisted back into metrical lines,disciplined into verse by an unusually forceful rhythmic beat that givesrhymed words teeth to bite, until language is decentered from the selfof subjective feelings to become one with the impersonal forces of aharsh, retributive world.

Swinburne, like his character, understood the deep satisfactions oftransforming strong private feeling into ballad and song. Suchsatisfactions, I've argued, he sought to recall to modern lyricreaders deprived of both the physical and the social experience onceprovided by the performance of old songs and ballads. Swinburne'sballadry of the early 1860s strenuously resisted the civilizing designsof those who would lyricize or balladize them. Embedding private griefin forms of social sharing, the driving, impersonal rhythms of oldballads and songs became Swinburne's way of reaching whatBaudelaire had called "that almost supernatural state, thatintensity of life where the soul sings, where it cannot but sing, likethe tree, the bird and the sea."

Notes

(1) Brian Burton notes the uncanny accuracy of the poet's earfor Northumbrian accents and ballad verse rhythms. "Swinburne andthe North," in A. C. Swinburne and the Singing Word: NewPerspectives on the Mature Work, ed. Yisrael Levin (Farnham: Ashgate,2010), p. 76. Swinburne's semi-autobiographical fiction, titled andpublished only posthumously, is Lesbia Brandon, ed. Randolph Hughes(London: Falcon Press, 1952).

(2) I am grateful to Michael Hansen for this suggestion. Thesepoet-editors, like Swinburne, so absorbed the external and internallandscapes of their ballad models that their imitations read likeundiscovered historical poems-though unlike the less privileged poets,whose access to publication in their own names was restricted, Swinburneallowed himself to pass his ballads off as authentic only within thecontext of a novel. As I go on to argue, in imitating the rhythmic formsas well as the feeling of their older models, Swinburne and othercreative poet-emulators differ from poets like Wordsworth, Coleridge, orThomas Moore, who tended to smooth out the harsh measures of old balladsto lyricized hybrids-even when, as for Wordsworth and Coleridge, theyvalued the strangeness and difference of ballads.

(3) Cancelled note to "The Keach in the Creel" in the1861 British Library manuscript of Swinburne's unfinished balladedition (Ashley 5070). The two early twentieth-century publications inwhich some of Swinburne's edited ballads first appeared (as didsome of his imitative ballads) both contain numerous errors oftranscription and classification; see Posthumous Poems, ed. Edmund Gosseand Thomas James Wise (London: William Heinemann, 1917); and Ballads ofthe English Border, ed. William A. Machines (London: William Heinemann,1925). For the best discussion of these problems and of Swinburne'sediting practices more generally, see Anne Henry Ehrenpreis,"Swinburne's Edition of Popular Ballads," PMLA 78, no. 5(1963): 559-571.

(4) Percy, Reliques of Ancient English Poetry: Consisting of OldHeroic Ballads, Songs, and other Pieces of Earlier Poets, 3 vols.(London: J. Dodsley, 1776); Jamieson, Popular Ballads and Song, FromTradition, Manuscripts, and Scarce Editions; with Translations ofSimilar Pieces from the Ancient Danish Language, 2 vols. (Edinburgh:Archibald Constance, 1806); William Motherwell, Minstrelsy, Ancient andModern (Glasgow: John Wylie, 1827); George R. Kinlock, Ancient ScottishBallads Recovered from Tradition, and Never before Published, 7 vols.(London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, & Green, 1827); Peter Buchan,Ancient Ballads and Songs of the North of Scotland, Hitherto Unpublishedwith Explanatory Notes, 2 vols. (Edinburgh: William Paterson, 1875).Francis James Child's English and Scottish Ballads was published ineight volumes in Boston in 1857-1858, with a second edition in 1860; Iquote from the London publication of that edition (Sampson Low, 1861),p. 861.

(5) Working from Boston, Child did not have direct access to oralcollectors or to manuscript sources. For the later collection, he hadinformants in England who consulted the manuscripts and did a littlecollecting. For a good and thorough account of collecting, selecting,and editing practices among nineteenth-century ballad- and songhunters,see E. David Gregory, Victorian Songhunters: The Recovery and Editing ofEnglish Vernacidar Ballads and Folk Lyrics, 1820-1883 (Lanham, Md.:Scarecrow Press, 2006).

(6) On this point, see David Atkinson, The Anglo-Scottish Balladand its Imaginary Contexts (Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2014), pp.48-88. On the two-way traffic between poetry and song, see alsoHeisinger, "Poem Into Song," New Literary History 46, no. 4(2015): 669-690.

(7) For these arguments, see Virginia Jackson, "Lyric,"in The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, eel. Roland Greeneet al., 4th ed. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 2012), pp.826-834; and, more briefly, Jackson and Yopie Prins, introduction to TheLyric Theory Reader: A Critical Anthology, ed. Jackson and Prins(Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2014), pp. 1-8; and JonathanCuller, Theory of the Lyric (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press,2015).

(8) J. S. Mill's much-cited description of poetry, by which hemeant lyric poetry, as opposed to eloquence, with its self-consciousperformativity, in "Thoughts on Poetry and Its Varieties," inDissertations and Discussions: Political, Philosophical, and Historical,vol. 1 (London: John W. Parker and Son, 1859), p. 71.

(9) See Michael C. Cohen, The Social Lives of Poems inNineteenth-Century America (Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), andMeredith Martin, '"Imperfectly Civilized': Ballads,Nations, and Histories of Form," English Literary History 82, no. 2(2015): 345-363. On the widespread use of ballad meter and stanza inVictorian popular verse and song, see also J. S. Bratton, The VictorianPopular Ballad (Totowa: Rowman and Littlefield, 1975). Derek Attridgeargues for the influence on Victorian poetry of what others call balladmeter and what he refers to as the beat patterns of folk or popularform, a strong four-beat rhythm that resists scansion in regularmetrical feet. "Beat," in The Oxford Handbook of VictorianPoetry, ed. Matthew Bevis (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2013), pp. 36-55.

(10) See Meredith Martin, The Rise and Fall of Meter: Poetry andEnglish National Culture, 1860-1930 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ.Press, 2012), pp. 109-144; and Bratton.

(11) On Tennyson's Italian sources, see Levine, this issue.

(12) Rossetti, Collected Poetry and Prose, ed. Jerome McGann (NewHaven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, 2003), pp. 6-7.

(13) Swinburne particularly admired Turner's paintings, withwhich he had been familiar since childhood. The painter may have visitedSwinburne's ancestor on the northern tour in 1797 that, accordingto David Hill, Turner himself acknowledged as the trip on which "hediscovered himself and his future direction as a painter oflandscape." Turner's Wreckers-Coast of Northumberland (Fig.1), based on sketches and memories from that tour, shows thestorm-battered Castle of Dunstanborough, not far from Capheaton. Hill,Turner in the North: A Tour through Derbyshire, Yorkshire, Durham,Northumberland, the Scottish Borders, the Lake District, Lancashire andLincolnshire in the Year 1797 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press), p.1.

(14) As Burton points out, Swinburne's ballads, both editedand imitated, are not representative of the more urban and industrialworking-class northern balladry of his own day; they look to a pastwhose radically independent spirit he undoubtedly romanticizes in his"self-proclaimed affiliation with the Jacobite movement.""Swinburne and the North," p. 77. The then-Catholic Swinburnesof Capheaton (the poet's greator great-great-grandparents) wereinvolved in the 1715 rising: they were among early strong, local,Catholic, and aristocratic Jacobites. At one point, two Swinburnesisters apparently served as couriers, riding the countryside to warnother Jacobites of impending government action against them. See"The Leading Local Jacobites," The Northumbrian JacobiteSociety (2009), http://northumbrianjacobites.org.uk/pages/detail_page.php.?id=46&section=25.

(15) References to these poems are drawn from Swinburne, LesbiaBrandon, unless otherwise indicated, with line numbers and page numbersgiven in the text. This poem is untitled in Lesbia Brandon, pp. 77-80.

(16) David Nowell Smith, On Voice in Poetry: The Work of Animation(Houndsmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), p. 164.

(17) The Baudelaire passage is from the poet's essay"Theodore de Banville," published in the Revue Fantaisiste ofJuly 15, 1861, and the Boulevard of August 24, 1862. Baudelaire isexpanding on the meaning of a word central for understanding Banville:"La lyre exprime en effet cet etat presque surnaturel, cetteintensite de vie ou l'ame chante, ou elle est contrainte dechanter, comme l'arbre, l'oiseau et la mer." OeuvresCompletes, ed. Y.-G. Le Dantec et Claude Pichois (Paris: EditionsGallimard [Bibliotheques Pleiades], 1961), pp. 735-736. Swinburne'sessay "Charles Baudelaire: Les Fleurs du Mal" was published inthe Spectator on September 6, 1862. It opens with a reference toBanville and to Baudelaire's sanity and eloquence as a critic,indicating that he has been following the poet's criticism ofcontemporary poets. On the force of rhythm, see also Culler, esp. pp.138-171; on animation (in a double sense: movedness, and animation,life, otherness), see Smith, for example, pp. 11-12.

(18) Swinburne, "The Progress of Art in Modern Times,"quoted by Georges Lafourcade, La Jeunesse de Swinburne (1837-1867), vol.2, Societe d'Edition (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1928), p. 224.

(19) Unless otherwise indicated, quotations for poems from the 1866Poems and Ballads are taken from Swinburne, The Poems of AlgernonCharles Swinburne, 6 vols. (London: Chatto & Windus, 1904), 1: 288.Line numbers given in the text.

(20) The half-told or obliquely told story, however, has itsdangers. Ehrenpreis cautions: "In a closely-packed story like'The Sea-Swallows' ... it is essential to keep track of who issaying what." "Introduction," The Literary Ballad(London: Edward Arnold, 1966), p. 12. While in performance gaps in thestory can be overleapt and the identity of shifting speakers clarifiedby change of voice or gesture, the printed poem can be trickier:inattention can lead to confusion. Witness some ingenious(misinterpretations of "The Sea-Swallows" found on the web,for example, at www.enotes.com /topics/kings-daughter, accessedSeptember 8, 2014.

(21) Swinburne, Poems and Ballads (London: John Camden Hotten,1866), p. 88.

(22) On Pre-Raphaelite influences in these poems, see alsoConstance Rummons, "The Ballad Imitations of Swinburne," PoetLore: A Magazine of Letters 33 (1922): 61-62; Lafourcade, 2: 70-71; andEhrenpreis, "Swinburne's Edition," p. 171.

(23) Walter Pater, describing Morris's imitations of oldFrench songs in his Defense of Guenevere volume, testifies to asimilarly unsettling effect on nineteenth-century readers occasioned bywhat he identifies as a peculiarly medieval conflation of what to modernProtestant English readers might be most properly kept apart, thwartedsecular passion and eroticized religious feeling. "Poems by WilliamMorris," Westminster Review 90, n.s. 34 (1868): 300-312, reprintedas "Aesthetic Poetry" in Pater, Appreciations (London, 1889).

(24) In the novel, the stanzas sung are not in the same order asthey are in the poem as Swinburne later published it; this is the secondstanza she sings in the novel, the thirteenth of "TheWitch-Mother" as printed in Poems and Ballads, Third Series(London: Chatto & Windus, 1889) and the fourteenth in the collectedPoems of 1904.

Caption: Fig. I. J. W. Turner, Wrecker--Coast of Northumberland,with a Steam-boat Assisting a ship off Shore (1833-1834), Yale Centerfor British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.