"Ear and heart with a rapture of dark delight": music and Wagnerian motives in the poetry of A. C. Swinburne

Abstract

The practical and theoretical aesthetics of the late Victorian poet A. C. Swinburne, which is based on an “inner harmony”, was announced and demonstrated in his Poems and Ballads of 1866, being always associated with a set of musical ideas and analogies. This paper intends to demonstrate that such musical metaphors are not arbitrary, or even uniquely associated to the often purely auditory music of Swinburne’s poetry. The famous aesthetic pronouncement of Walter Pater that “all art permanently aspires to the condition of music” (The Renaissance, 1868) seems to apply to this fin-de-siècle English poet that in his poem Tristram of Lyonesse (1882), and in a conscious and identifiable way, appropriated a dramatic and musical technique – the leitmotiv – derived specifically from the operas of Richard Wagner. Furthermore, his poem Laus Veneris (1864) had already precociously treated the transgressive confluence between the sacred and the profane usually present in Wagner. Finally, Swinburne’s central section of A Century of Roundels (1882-3) contains three formally and thematically interconnected poetic compositions, entitled respectively “The Death of Richard Wagner”, “Lohengrin” and “Tristan and Isolde”, constituting his most explicit tribute to Wagner and his music.