Tag: Lying asleep between the strokes of night

 

by Algernon Charles Swinburne

 

What secret thing of splendour or of shade

       Surmised in all those wandering ways wherein

       Man, led of love and life and death and sin,

Strays, climbs, or cowers, allured, absorbed, afraid,

Might not the strong and sunlike sense invade

       Of that full soul that had for aim to win

       Light, silent over time’s dark toil and din,

Life, at whose touch death fades as dead things fade?

O spirit of man, what mystery moves in thee

That he might know not of in spirit, and see

       The heart within the heart that seems to strive,

The life within the life that seems to be,

       And hear, through all thy storms that whirl and drive,

       The living sound of all men’s souls alive?

 

 

 

Swinburne had an eccentric reputation as a young man in London’s middle class drinking establishments.   An Oxford educated spectacular drunk, he cultivated an image of hyper-sexuality and depravity, which if it was believed likely would have landed him in jail, but because nobody did, just added to his muddled mystique. (Don’t ask about the story about the monkey….)  Short, slight, sickly in appearance, with a head too large for his body, Swinburne physically was a caricature of a bon vivant.   His temperament was erratic, his mental health disposed to what today might be diagnosed as bi-polar and he suffered from seizures and chronic clumsiness that altogether often left him bruised and bloodied in appearance.  Combine all of that with his tendency towards excessive intake of alcohol, it is remarkable he was productive as a poet at all.  But productive he was and his talent had fans, most notably Theodore Watts-Dunton, his friend and literary agent, who intervened at a time when Swiburne was dangerously ill.  Watts-Dunton took him in his early 40’s and helped him to sobriety.  The two forged a remarkable friendship, with Swinburne living with him in relative calm for the next three decades.   It was said that Watts-Dunton saved the man, but killed the poet, as Swinbure published very little in the following years.  

 

I find Swinburne’s poetry erratic, not a surprise based on that history.   But there are some  lovely poems and given his ill health, his love poems are all the more charming in my mind.