I find it highly ironic that Swinburne would write poems like The Garden of Proserpine and A Forsaken Garden when his own life was anything but quiet and the only time he wasn’t deliberately trying to cause controversy by being as decadent as possible was when one of his friends forcibly put him under house arrest before he completely self-destructed. Despite this less than calm lifestyle, weariness and a desire for rest or sleep are ideas that recur in several of his poems: The Garden of Proserpine has “I am weary of days and hours,” (14), A Forsaken Garden has “We shall sleep.” (64) but there’s also Anactoria “I am weary of all thy words and soft strange ways, / Of all love's fiery nights and all his days,” (35/36), The Triumph of Time “I have put my days and dreams out of mind, / Days that are over, dreams that are done.” (49/50), Dolores “All the joys of the flesh, all the sorrows / That wear out the soul. (15/16) and Hymn to Proserpine, where the narrator states “I am sick of singing” (9). They all seem to suggest things that were bright and cheerful: the traditional joys of love and hope, can only last for so long before they fade and die as all things must and there is just no energy left to keep them going. There is no eternity here, just an inevitable passage from hope and life to weariness and death.
an appropriate post-script to Byron, though most of Byron's very dark poems are also self-ironizing (not a quality Swinburne is known for). If weariness is biographical, I wonder if it is also indicative of a different view of nature? Or of the relationship between nature and poetry--"I am sick of singing" when the voice is the poet's and the bird's suggests a weariness of seeing hope and regeneration or alternatives to humanity in nature. What has changed to bring about this change?
ReplyDelete