Swinburne's Apollo by Levin Yisrael;

Author:Levin, Yisrael;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group
Published: 2016-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

I The Beginning of an Apollonian Myth: Baudelaire and “Ave Atque Vale”

Even though Swinburne never met Charles Baudelaire or corresponded with him on a regular basis, he considered the French poet to be a “man whom [he] deeply admired and believed in” and as a dear, “though personally unknown friend” (Letters 1: 164, 4: 19). Indeed, as Rikky Rooksby informs us, Swinburne’s review of Les Fleurs du Mal in the September 1862 issue of The Spectator “was one of the first favourable reviews Baudelaire received in any language” (73). No wonder, then, that Swinburne was extremely upset when rumors about Baudelaire’s death reached British media in May 1867.1 “Ave Atque Vale” was composed, as Swinburne testifies, “with very sincere feelings of regret for the poor fellow’s untimely loss” (Letters 2: 282).

1 These rumors were premature; Baudelaire would die three months later on August 31. First published in the Fortnightly Review in January 1868, and then in Poems and Ballads, Second Series (1878), “Ave Atque Vale” is still considered to be “one of the finest and least understood elegies in the language” (Sacks 204). The poem’s stanzaic structure and metrical pattern make clear reference to the most famous Victorian poetic elegy, Tennyson’s In Memoriam (1849). Each stanza of Swinburne’s poem consists of two Tennysonian ABBA quatrains with an extra couplet following the first quatrain and an extra line following the second quatrain. In addition, the ten consecutive four-beat lines in each of Swinburne’s stanzas echo Tennyson’s iambic tetrameters. By simultaneously referring to and destabilizing the Tennysonian form, Swinburne expresses a sense of grief too intense to be contained within the strict poetic form we find in In Memoriam.

Interestingly, Swinburne did not seem to think highly of the poem. “I am very glad you like my elegy on Baudelaire,” he writes to the American poet and critic Edmund Clarence Stedman on February 23, 1874,

but in spite of your kind mention of it in this month’s Scribner’s Magazine, which I have just seen, I cannot believe it worthy to tie the shoes (so to speak) of the least, whichever may be the least, of the great English triad or Trinity of elegies—Milton’s, Shelley’s and Arnold’s. I am content if it may be allowed to take its stand below the lowest of them, or to sit meekly at their feet. (Letters 2: 282)

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