Between the island and Oxford
Born in London in 1837, Swinburne grew up between family homes on the Isle of Wight and in Northumberland. The sea became a recurring physical presence in his poems. At Balliol College, Oxford, he came to know William Morris and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Their interests in medieval stories, painting and bookmaking helped give his own experiments a sympathetic audience.
He left Oxford without a degree and wrote plays in London. Atalanta in Calydon, his English verse tragedy on a Greek subject, established his reputation in 1865. Poems and Ballads followed the next year. He went on to write political verse and literary criticism. When his health deteriorated, he moved to Putney with his friend Theodore Watts-Dunton, and continued writing there until late in life.
Poems that borrow a speaker
In Hymn to Proserpine, a pagan watches Christianity displace the gods he has known. The lines are spoken from inside that loss, and their long rhythms allow the speaker to linger over what is vanishing. Elsewhere in the collection love and death acquire bodies and voices of their own. The library printing carries no secure date. The year 1866 belongs to the collection’s first appearance.
