“Thou has conquered O Pale Galilean” Swinburne`s poem "Hymn to Proserpine"

Swinburne's "Hymn to Proserpine" presents the transition from Roman paganism to

Christianity. The poem takes the form of a dramatic monologue, using a hexameter metre,

with a conflicted speaker who writes of "Gods dethroned and deceased, cast forth, wiped out

in a day" and the rise of new, "young compassionate Gods" who "are crowned in the city"

(13-16). The speaker fastens on several images and juxtaposes their Christian and pagan

meanings. He says that "Sweet is the treading of wine, and the feet of the dove/But a goodlier

gift is thine than foam of the grapes or love" (5) The dove is associated with the Goddess

Aphrodite and while it may also be linked to the story of Noah and the flood there is also a

link with the flood from a Greek myth. The Deucalion legend as told by Apollodorus

has some similarity to Noah's Ark: Prometheus advised his son Deucalion to

build a chest. All others perish except for a few who escaped to high mountains.

Swinburne's speaker uses the image of the dove a few lines down in a purely pagan

manner when he says that nymphs have "breasts more soft than a dove's" (25).This in sharp

contrast to St Paul`s claim “That it is good for a man to not touch a woman” (cited in Goldhill

p119 2004) Similarly, he plays with language in the line "For the Gods we know not of, who

give us our daily breath" (11). Breath suggests that divinity exists within while bread echoes

a meagre and client like dependence on the Galilean. The neo- pagan view of Swinburne sees

the gods and goddesses as both immanent and transcendent. The pun references pagan Gods

giving the "daily bread" of the Christian Lord's Prayer. The speaker's juxtaposition of

paganism and Christianity reaches its peak towards the end of the poem, in his contrasting of

Venus and the Virgin Mary.

....”Of the maiden thy mother men sing as a goddess with grace clad around;
Thou art throned where another was king; where another was queen she is crowned.
Yea, once we had sight of another: but now she is queen, say these.
Not as thine, not as thine was our mother, a blossom of flowering seas,
Clothed round with the world's desire as with raiment, and fair as the foam,
And fleeter than kindled fire, and a goddess, and mother of Rome.
For thine came pale and a maiden, and sister to sorrow; but ours,
Her deep hair heavily laden with odour and colour of flowers,
White rose of the rose-white water, a silver splendour, a flame,
Bent down unto us that besought her, and earth grew sweet with her name.
For thine came weeping, a slave among slaves, and rejected; but she
Came flushed from the full-flushed wave, and imperial, her foot on the sea.
And the wonderful waters knew her, the winds and the viewless ways,
And the roses grew rosier, and bluer the sea-blue stream of the bays.”.... (75-88)

Swinburne compares "ours" to "thine," Venus to the Virgin Mary, beauty and splendour to

sorrow and rejection. Yet most importantly the speaker fills the descriptions of Venus with

imagery of nature, specifically flowers and water while the Virgin Mary belongs very much

exclusively to the world of men, "a slave among slaves.” (85)

For Swinburne moments of vision or epiphany often take the form of moments of loss.

"The Triumph of Time" dramatizes the mind of one who experiences the loss of his

beloved, and "Hymn to Proserpine" presents the experience of a Roman of the fourth century

(ACE) who is losing his gods, the old pagan deities, now that Christianity has become the

official religion of the state. This poem dramatizes the thoughts and emotions of a person

experiencing the destruction of an entire culture and its beliefs. In line 7 the speaker praises

Apollo but the irony is that the God is also the bringer of plagues and destruction. Perhaps he

implies that this too will happen to Christianity.

Like Browning and Tennyson, Swinburne employs dramatic monologues in which

historically reconstructed characters serve as representative individuals. The characters in

Tennyson's "Tithonus" (1860) and "Ulysses" (1842), however, are, strictly speaking, not

historical embodiments of different periods of culture but mythic dramatizations of possible

answers to problems troubling them. (cited in Victorian Poetry a research guide)

Swinburne employs not new versions of well-known mythic figures but imagined characters

who represent a certain historical situation. The speakers in Browning's "Cleon" (1855),

"Karshish" (1855), and "The Bishop Orders His Tomb at St. Praxed's" capture what the

poet considers the essential ideas and attitudes of a particular lost age, for each in its own way

instantiates the Victorian crisis of faith. Levin (2003 p 147) argues “However, while

Darwin’s environment is natural .....Swinburne’s is theological”

Swinburne also concerns himself to embody specific historical conditions by means of a

fictional character who thus becomes a representative individual. Furthermore, again like

Browning, he chooses a figure living in an age of transition from one religion to another.

However, when Browning looks at men of late antiquity to learn what they can tell his

contemporaries about the needs and difficulties of the human spirit. He wishes to

demonstrate, for example, what the experience of life in these earlier times can tell his

audience of man's essential, defining need for religious faith. Moreover, Browning looks at

the transition from the Pagan to the Christian world as an essentially good thing, but

Swinburne, who had little sympathy with Christianity, does not. The "Hymn to Proserpine"

and similar poems identify with the position of the imagined historical character far more

than do Browning's works. Whereas Browning's "Cleon" takes the form of high intellectual

satire, as do many of his other poems such as "Caliban upon Setebos" (1864) and

"The Bishop Orders His Tomb at St. Praxed's Church," Swinburne's poem both makes us

understand the Pagan's point of view and suggests that it is one suitable for the nineteenth

century. In particular, "Hymn to Proserpine," which questioned contemporary beliefs in both

Christianity and progress, shows that change is not always improvement. To the Pagans of

the fourth century, Christianity came as a form of barbarism, and the passion with which

Swinburne invests his speaker's objections against the new religion makes them seem

credible. He enforces his historical pessimism by having this embodiment of a dying age turn

prophetic and warns that Christian gods, too, will in their turn find themselves submerged

beneath the waves of time. (cited in Victorian Poetry a research guide) He contrast the new

religion with the beautiful and terrible gods of the Pagan world,

...”For thine came weeping, a slave among slaves, and rejected; but she

Came flushed from the full-flushed wave, and imperial, her foot on the sea.”....

(85-86)

In the progression of Swinburne's "Hymn to Proserpine" the poem's structure undergoes s

ome unexpected turns. Although the title of the poem causes us to anticipate a tribute to

Persephone (perhaps similar to thr hymns of Hesiod), Swinburne does not spend the

majority of poem's physical space on invoking this goddess as a muse. Rather, the poem is

largely taken over with the theme of Christianity's usurpation of the Greco-Roman gods and,

of course, the speaker's insistence that Christianity and the Christian god will die out just like

its predecessors. This is similar to Nietzsche’s `Eternal Return` it is a concept which

argues that the universe has been recurring, and will continue to recur in a self-similar form

an infinite number of times.

The poem does invoke the epithets of a number of gods and goddesses, but most of these

are tributes to Venus and Apollo rather than to Persephone. Proserpina, or Persephone, shows

up in two places: at the beginning and the end of the poem. Nevertheless, once we understand

the function of Persephone as a metaphor within the poem, this helps us to better understand

the need for this thematic structure.

There are two main techniques to note in the poem before it can take into account its

thematic and structural dependence on the symbolic character of Persephone. First, we see

that the individual lines in the poem depend heavily upon an obvious use of paradox. Within

the first four lines of the poem, we see such conflicting descriptions as "the day or the

morrow," (3) "seasons that laugh or that weep," the deliverance of "joy and sorrow," and even

a description of Persephone as both a "Goddess and maiden and queen." This last paradox is

true to the mythology of Persephone, for indeed in the context of her primary myth, she plays

the role of the maiden gathering flowers in the fields, the Goddess of the earth and the

seasons (for she acts also as an echo of her mother, Demeter), and the queen of the

underworld. Thus Swinburne is quick to remind us of Persephone as a paradoxical figure in

mythology; she is a liminal figure in the fact that she occupies both the world of the dead and

the living, and, furthermore, she becomes the queen of the dead and also the goddess of

rebirth.

These paradoxes also highlight another important characteristic of Persephone as the

goddess of cycles. Although Swinburne uses a lot of language centred on the passage of time

(for example when he describes the passing of the laurel tree and the death of a new

generation of gods), he does not allow us to fall too easily into a typically Victorian

insistence on transience. Lines 47-48 of the poem key us into Swinburne's view of time as

something which passes swiftly but also which cycles and spirals through space: "All delicate

days and pleasant, all spirits and sorrows are cast / Far out with the foam of the present that

sweeps to the surf of the past." This somewhat complex and abstract image of time as the surf

allows us to think of the past and present as forms which overlap or cycle into and out of one

another like a wave crashing on the shore. Thus by placing the figure of Persephone at the

beginning and the end of the poem, Swinburne is in some way structurally mimicking the

patterns of the goddess herself who generates the cycles of the seasons by traversing both the

worlds of the dead and the living. at the very end of "Hymn to Proserpina," we, therefore, see

how the Persephone becomes a symbol for the pattern of the poem, the natural cycles of life,

and the historical transition from an ancient Rome to a Christian Rome:

...”Thou art more than the Gods who number the days of our temporal breath;
For these give labour and slumber; but thou, Proserpina, death.
Therefore now at thy feet I abide for a season in silence. I know
I shall die as my fathers died, and sleep as they sleep; even so.
For the glass of the years is brittle wherein we gaze for a span;
A little soul for a little bears up this corpse which is man.
So long I endure, no longer; and laugh not again, neither weep.
For there is no God found stronger than death; and death is a sleep.” (103-110)

The first difficulty which this passage presents is the interchange between "death" and

"sleep." The final phase of the poem "death is a sleep" can perhaps help in this question.

There also seems to be a transition here in the function of the speaker who up until line 90 or

so focuses more on the general topic of the gods but who centres the poem's ending more so

in his own, personal life and death with a parallel to Demeter in line 105 In line 108 In his

note, Swinburne acknowledges that he is here using the phrase of the Greek philosopher

Epictetus: "You are a little soul, carrying around a corpse."

An interesting technical shift also happens between lines 105 and 106, for this is the first

time in which we see a contrast between two lines in the poem. this sudden technical switch

in the line break pattern place an extra thematic emphasis upon these lines most importantly,

Swinburne's stress on cyclical patterns within this poem. If the poem is a cycle in itself, and

the metaphor of Persephone is meant to invoke this cycle, then is the speaker is on some

level suggesting that not only will the Christian gods die in their own time but that the ancient

gods of Greece and Rome will likewise return.?

Swinburne's "Hymn to Proserpine" presents a view of religion interestingly different from

the other Victorian poets whom we have already covered. The speaker gives voice to a man

unconvinced of the saving power of this "pale Galilean," from whose breath "the world has

grown grey." Here Swinburne treats Christianity, just like the speaker's Paganism, as a

fleeting thing. The Gods who were once sacred are now "dethroned and deceased."

In the face of his essentially post Pagan world, the speaker creates a very strong and

overwhelming image that overpowers all of life's forces, including humanity`s measly

creations: that of time. St Pauls view that the world was coming to an end contrast sharply to

a more classical idea of cycles of time without end. This view can be seen within the work of

Aristotle. (Coope p 38)

Near the mid-point of the poem, Swinburne creates a very vivid rendering of temporal

forces, by resorting to spatial elements Here again is the imagery of the sea "the foam of the

present that sweeps to the surf of the past", and "tall ships founder" in a storm created by the

"whitening winds of the future, the wave of the world."

The image becomes especially strong in the lengthy sentence that follows, in which

Swinburne layers and layers the desolation and strength of vision of Time — destructive and

all consuming:

.....“The depths stand naked in sunder behind it, the storms flee away;

In the hollow before it the thunder is taken and snared as a prey;

In its sides is the north-wind bound; and its salt is of all men’s tears;

With light of ruin, and sound of changes, and pulse of years:

With travail of day after day, and with trouble of hour upon hour;

And bitter as blood is the spray; and the crests are as fangs that devour And its vapour and storm of its steam as the sighing of spirits to be;

And its noise as the noise in a dream; and its depth as the roots of the sea: And the height of its heads as the height of the utmost stars of the air: And the ends of the earth at the might thereof tremble, and time is made bare.

Will ye bridle the deep sea with reins; will ye chasten the high sea with rods?

Will ye take her to chain her with chains, who is older than all ye Gods?”..... (58 -68)

Swinburne alludes to the early Christians who were predominately urban and separated from

the natural world. Indeed the very term pagan originates in Latin from the word “pagani” or

country dweller. (http://www.religioustolerance.org/paganism1.htm)

After this attempt at describing the strength of the insurmountable and all consuming nature

of time, the Speaker turns to rhetorically ask the constructed Gods of man "will ye bridle the

deeps sea with reins, will ye chasten the high sea with rods?" His answer is firmly negative.

"Ye are Gods, and behold, ye shall die and the waves be upon you at last." (69)

It seems that in the face of this overwhelming and pessimistic vision of eternity, the speaker

holds out not religion, but death as the only source of earthly peace. ( 104-110) It is only

Prosperine, who gives death, who "art more than the Gods who number the days of our

temporal breath." Is death a way in which to escape life, “the glass of the years . . . wherein

we gaze for a span"? Swinburne`s view on death is that "there is no God stronger than death,"

and ends the poem confirming that "death is sleep." Is death than the cessation of time and

the storm of its power? Is it the ending of the soul? This is implied in line 97 where the

Poppies are sacred to Proserpine and are flowers of sleep.

The poems form of constantly circular imagery, which becomes stronger and stronger,

climaxing with the Speaker's rendering of death, and then returning to his feelings at the

beginning he asks Prosperina "to be near me now and befriend."? she is removed from a

divine figure to being one of a more all powerful earth mother, Swinburne indicates that the

“Galilean” is alleinated from nature. The last Pagan Emperor of Rome Julian the Apostate

described the Christian Churches as “charnel houses” and this image is implied throughout

the poem. ( Smith 1995 p35) “ O ghastly glories of saints, dead limbs of gibbeted Gods! (45)

“Time and the gods are at strife” is the key motif of the poem and illustrates how the Fourth

Century and the latter half of the Nineteenth is similar.

Bibliography

Coope , Ursula Time for Aristotle Physics IV. 10-14

Clarendon Press Oxford Aristotle Studies Series October 2005

Goldhill, Simon Love, Sex and Tragedy : why classics matter Hodder Headline 2004Levin, Ysrael “O sun that we see to be God”: Swinburne’s Apollonian Mythopoeia

A Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfilment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of philosophy 2003 in the Department of English University of Tel Aviv

Peters, Robert A. C. Swinburne's "Hymn to Proserpine": The Work Sheets

MLA, Vol. 83, No. 5 (Oct., 1968), pp. 1400-1406

Shackford Martha Hale Swinburne and Delavigne PMLA, Vol. 33, No. 1 (191 8), pp. 85-95 1918

Smith Rowland B. E Julian's Gods: Religion and Philosophy in the Thought and Action of Julian the Apostate Routledge 1995

Swinburne AC The Poems of Algernon Charles Swinburne Kessinger Publishing Co ( 2004)

Wharton Margot K. Louis Proserpine and Pessimism: Goddesses of Death, Life, and Language from Swinburne Modern Philology, Vol. 96, No. 3 (Feb., 1999), pp. 312-346

Web resources

Hymn to Proserpine you tube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YCMQL1O4Tkw

Moore , John S Introduction to Nietzche http://www.mith.demon.co.uk/nietintr.htm

Victorian Poetry: A Research Guide http://www.libraries.iub.edu/index.php?pageId=5482