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Victorian Poetry 41.1 (2003) 131-150



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Une Fleur du Mal?
Swinburne's "The Sundew" and Darwin's Insectivorous Plants

Jonathan Smith


IN AN 1884 ARTICLE FOR THE CORNHILL ENTITLED "QUEER FLOWERS," A SURVEY of some of the extraordinary discoveries in recent botany, the popular science writer and novelist Grant Allen opened his discussion of insect-eating plants with a description of the cultural importance of the most common English species, the sundew:

On most English peaty patches there grows a little reddish-leaved odd-looking plant, known as sundew. It is but an inconspicuous small weed, and yet literary and scientific honours have been heaped upon its head to an extent almost unknown in the case of any other member of the British floral commonwealth. Mr. Swinburne has addressed an ode to it, and Mr. Darwin has written a learned book about it. Its portrait has been sketched by innumerable artists, and its biography narrated by numerous authors. And all this attention has been showered upon it, not because it is beautiful, or good, or modest, or retiring, but simply and solely because it is atrociously and deliberately wicked. . . . It owes its vogue entirely to its murderous propensities. Sundew, in fact, is the best known and most easily accessible of the carnivorous and insectivorous plants. 1

Allen refers to Swinburne's "The Sundew," originally published in The Spectator on July 26, 1862, but revised four years later for Poems and Ballads, and Charles Darwin's Insectivorous Plants (1875). As the passage makes clear, both Swinburne's poem and Darwin's book were prominent elements in a cultural fascination with the sundew that extended from the 1860s well into the 1880s. Appearing before Darwin's work definitively confirmed the plant's "murderous propensities," "The Sundew" is nonetheless haunted by that possibility, a possibility that brings the poem into closer relation with the more notorious pieces in Swinburne's scandalous collection. While this relation was overlooked or unappreciated at the time of Poems and Ballads, it soon became apparent with the publication and popularization [End Page 131] of Darwin's work. Suddenly "The Sundew" could be read in the context of Darwin's discovery and the anxieties raised by the plant's "atrociously and deliberately wicked" ways. While judgments about Darwin's book and Swinburne's poem differed, in the aftermath of Insectivorous Plants the potentially subversive moral and cultural implications of "The Sundew" became more difficult to ignore.

The common English sundew (Drosera rotundifolia) inhabits boggy, marshy, or peaty areas throughout Britain. It can be encountered near three places Swinburne knew well: his boyhood homes on the Isle of Wight; the Swinburne family's country seat in Northumberland, Capheaton Hall; and Ashburnham Place in Sussex, a residence of the fourth Earl of Ashburnham, his maternal uncle. 2 While Darwin launched his own investigations of the sundew on a Sussex heath in the summer of 1860, Swinburne associated the plant most closely with the Northumbrian landscape. Although he calls it a "marsh plant" in his poem, Swinburne clearly depicts a north-country moor rather than a low-lying bog. The "black water" protecting the sundew is "faint." Heather and blown grass surround it. Moorhen and cattle that have "strayed up" to it are its visitors. Years later, Swinburne referred to the subject of his poem as "the little 'sundew' of the borders," and it appears again in "Winter in Northumberland." 3

Each plant has just a handful of small, round leaves that generally extend horizontally. The upper surface of the leaf is covered with hairs or filaments; the short filaments at the center of the leaf stand upright and are green, while the longer ones closer to the edge extend outwards and are red. Each filament has a gland at the end that secretes a large drop of a thick, sticky liquid. These drops of liquid, glittering in the sun, give the plant its common name. They also trap insects, primarily flies, that alight on the leaf. In the early 1860s, when Swinburne was composing his poem...

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