Swinburne’s “A Nympholept” in the Making

Writing to William Sharp, in October 1901, Swinburne expressed great pleasure at finding the lengthy poem “A Nympholept” included, in a “leading place,” in the Tauchnitz edition of his verse, Lyrical Poems, edited by Sharp. Swinburne characterized this poem as “one of the best and most representative things I ever did.” Sharp himself thought well of “A Nympholept,” stating that it was “nobly ordered verse” and that it was a “splendid and strangely ignored nature-poem,” one that “once for all should do away with . . . foolish misstatements” about any supposed decline in the poet’s powers during his later years when he was ensconced in the orderly life, directed by Watts Dunton, at Putney.¹ Sharp’s remarks provide counters to what was in the early twentieth century a widespread conception—and one that has continued into the present among many readers. These readers would cast Swinburne as a poet whose poetic accomplishments of the 1860s and 1870s were the sole part of his work worth serious attention and preservation because his later poems suffered a steep decline in art, thanks to Watts’s taming of Swinburne, his housemate, after 1879. “A Nympholept” demonstrates that that long-standing attitude is by no means authoritative, and increasingly other poems from Swinburne’s later publications have also been credited with serious substance and artistic technique.

Among noteworthy modern scholarly assessments of “A Nympholept” is that by Clyde K. Hyder, who in 1933 suggested that, with A Tale of Balen and other “meritorious poems” written late in his life, Swinburne’s lasting fame owed much to “A Nympholept.”² In the seventy-odd years since, just one study has focused on this poem alone. In 1958 Paull F. Baum interpreted “A Nympholept” as an exemplification of Swinburne’s methods in mingling sound with sense, and most subsequent commentators have been content to combine their observations regarding the poem with larger issues that involve clusters of other works. Even one of Swinburne’s recent biographers, Philip Henderson, quickly passes by the Putney period, during which the poem would have been composed, as one not worth extended consideration.³

What we encounter in “A Nympholept,” is, however, one of those startling poems that reflects numerous currents typical, for many, of the arts in the 1890s. The poem is replete with themes of Pan’s powers, compelling sexuality, dream visions, and deft minglings of pleasure with pain and ecstasy with fear. Baum, and S. C. Chew before him,⁴ viewed the work as a mood poem, one in which the metrics and stanzaic pattern function as attempts to impose an order upon chaos—no mean feat that, to concretize a dream, but one that should not astonish anyone who is acquainted with, say, works by Beardsley, Dowson, Yeats, Poe or Faulkner—or, for that matter, with a whole host of postmodern and contemporary literary and other artistic achievements. As long ago as 1894, in reviewing the Astrophel volume, Edmund Gosse commented that “A Nympholept” is “perhaps the most magical poem” in the book, adding that it may “seem odd to compare Mr. Swinburne with a Symbolist; but the only poem which in any degree resembles ‘A Nympholept’ is the ‘Après-midi d’un Faune’ of M. Stéphane Mallarmé.”⁵ “A Nympholept” is also a poem about the creative process in art; no wonder, therefore, that what it holds forth has often baffled readers.

My intent in the present study is to offer remarks about the significance in the manuscripts for this increasingly famous poem, which John Rosenberg designates “the greatest and strangest” of Swinburne’s later lyrics.⁶ An examination of these documents may shed light on Swinburne’s long-lasting “Fundamental Brainwork,” to use D. G. Rossetti’s term for the poetic process.⁷ Others, as well as myself, have demonstrated how valuable Swinburne’s manuscripts may be for such studies.⁸ Two manuscripts of “A Nympholept” exist. One, in the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library, we know little about; Dr. Berg kept no records for many of the items in his collections. Another, in the...