著者

上村 盛人

出版者

奈良教育大学

雑誌

奈良教育大学紀要. 人文・社会科学 (ISSN:05472393)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.26, no.1, pp.69-80, 1977-11-15 (Released:2017-02-24)

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In Swinburne's poetry we find many remarkable femme fatale characters : Dolores, Faustine, Venus, Mary Stuart, and Atalanta are all typical femmes fatales, to give a few examples. He was almost possessed with the femme fatale image, and in fact, he became the first to introduce to the Victorian England the "fatal woman" imagery, which was indeed the representative iconography in the fin de siecle European art. Mary Gordon was Swinburne's closely related cousin and was also his bosom friend who had shared the romantic make-believe world of their own since their childhood. Mary's sudden announcement to marry a soldier was a shock to the poet, to whom perhaps it meant destruction of their cherished private world. Swinburne had been interested in the femme fatale theme since his boyhood, and in his imagination the "fatal woman" image had already taken shape, waiting only for a chance to be actually written down as a poem. Mary's engagement announcement gave him such a chance, and now he could set out to become a chief actor in his‘monodrama', in which he was to be tormented by cruel femmes fatales. Swinburne was a poet who was extremely conscious of his poetic art as a‘maker' of poetry. Almost all his poetry can possibly be said‘meta-poetry', that is, poetry about poetry. To achieve his aim to embody‘l'art pour l'art' in his poems, he made use of surprisingly many poetic forms and themes. And his femme fatale myth was one of such themes and his‘lost love' to Mary Gordon gave a good chance to start him writing femme fatale poems.

著者

上村 盛人

出版者

奈良教育大学

雑誌

奈良教育大学紀要 人文・社会科学 (ISSN:05472393)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.27, no.1, pp.p41-58, 1978-11

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With the publication of Atalanta in Calydon in 1865, Swinburne became famous and was welcomed "to an honourable place among younger poets of England". Aside from his juvenilia, The Queen Mother and Rosamond, issued in 1860, Atalanta was virtually his first important work, because we can find in it almost all Swinburnian traits that he was to develop further in his later works. From the legendary story of Meleager and the boar hunting which Homer, Euripides and Ovid had told, Swinburne created his own tragic version of the myth. Though Swinburne thought that Atalanta was "pure Greek", it was not necessarily so because of its Swinburnian antitheism and aestheticism. Throughout this drama, Heraclitean idea that "Παντα ρει" is repeatedly expressed. Althaea urges her son to serve the gods' law and social customs, while Meleager respects "great things done" that "endure". Chief Huntsman, Chorus and Althaea worship and implore Artemis, the goddess of moon, chastity, hunting and death, while Meleager wishes to be praised by Apollo, the god of sun and art. Artemis, Aphrodite and Atalanta are all represented as femmes fatales. Though Meleager dies a tragic death, he acquires an eternal fame for "what he did in his good time". Like Balen and Tristram, Meleager lives an everlasting life in the world of art, because his "great deeds" have been told by the artists who have immortal soul. Atalanta is a meta-poem and embodies "art for art's sake" like Swinburne's other excellent works.

著者

上村 盛人

出版者

奈良教育大学

雑誌

奈良教育大学紀要. 人文・社会科学 (ISSN:05472393)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.28, no.1, pp.35-53, 1979-11-15

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Tennyson had been greatly interested in the legends of King Arthur since his boyhood, because he had always felt the "passion of the past" even from a boy. However, when he wrote "Sir Launcelot and Queen Guinevere," the first treating of Arthurian theme, he had probably no intention of enlarging it into a longer poem. The germ of Idylls of the King was "Morte d'Arthur" started in 1833. and the final complete edition of the Idylls was published in 1888. Thus for more than fifty years Tennyson had been engaged in completing the work. Yet, his version of the Arthurian legends is quite uniquely his own since he seems to have inserted his own ambiguous and rather pessimistic vision towards the Victorian society into the framework of the Arthurian story. In 1872 Swinburne harshly attacked Tennyson's Idylls in his critical pamphlet, "Under the Microscope." According to Swinburne, "the moral tone of the Arthurian story has been lowered and degraded by Mr.Tennyson's mode of treatment." Swinburne had found in the legends of King Arthur "something almost of Hellenic dignity and significance" just like Aeschylus' Oresteian tragedy. Tennyson degraded the original noble story, Swinburne said, by making Arthur into a "wittol", Guenevere into a "woman of intrigue", Launcelot into a "co-espondent", and Vivien into "the most base and repulsive person". Swinburne regarded Tennyson's representation of Tristram and Iseult as an outrageous fiction which was "perilously akin to lying." Tennyson and Swinburne are seemingly contrastive and antagonistic. In the skilful management of poetical technique, however, both poets were equally excellent as "word-musician." And the two poets had almost the same view of the "changing world of changeless law." Living in such a world of changeless change, both poets sought for something changeless and everlasting. Tennyson found it in the "principle of immortal Love" as is embodied by King Arthur himself in the Idylls. However, as the last book of the Idylls implies, Tennyson's faith in "immortal Love" was rather precarious, living as he was in the transitional Victorian era. On the other hand, Swinburne who was one of the leading advocates of "art for art's sake" thought that only the great work done by the great artist was immortal. Strongly opposed to Tennyson's degradation of the legendary story, Swinburne, true to "the dear old story," produced his own version and published it as Tristram of Lyonesse in 1882, though in Swinburne's poem Wagnerian 'Liebestod'and the existence of Fate were idiosyncratically emphasized. It was somewhat ironical that Tennyson, a conservative poet as a spokesman of the Victorian society, was rather radical in his interpretation of the Arthurian story and that Swinburne, a radical aesthete, was rather conservative in his treatment of the story of King Arthur. Tennyson stressed the Christian element of the legends, implying his own ambiguous sentiment towards his own society at the same time, while Swinburne emphasized the tragic element with characteristically Swinburnian touch.

著者

上村 盛人

出版者

奈良教育大学

雑誌

奈良教育大学紀要 人文・社会科学 (ISSN:05472393)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.35, no.1, pp.p29-42, 1986-11

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When Swinburne published his Poems and Ballads, Second Series in 1878, this new book of poems was received warmly with high estimation. Critics have for long regarded this book as 'the finest of his volumes of poems.' Most of the poems it contains had been composed and published previously, but Swinburne spent time on 'arranging them in proper order' and tried to give consistency to his new book of collected poems. "The Last Oracle," the first poem in the volume, is important because in this poem the poet states the idea of immortality of art. And Swinburne tries to express this idea throughout the whole volume. In the second poem, "In the Bay," the poet sings mainly about Marlowe and Shelley who `first clove the thought-unsounded sea' and joined and became the shining star that gives immortal light of art for the people to come. The whole theme, however, of the next poem, "A Forsaken Garden," is the mutability of human affections, the erosion of time and the destructive force of death. At this point, we know the two main themes of this volume, that is, immortality of Art (Poetry) and all-conquering Death (Time). Swinburne writes about Art (Poetry) and Death (Time) in the poems that follow, that is, "Relics," "At a Month's End," "Sestina," "The Year of the Rose," "A Wasted Vigil," "The Complaint of Lisa" and "For the Feast of Giordano Bruno." In "Ave atque Vale," an elegy for Charles Baudelaire, Swinburne contemplates the relation between Art and Death and recognizes that immortal Art survives Death and he reaches the understanding that though 'death cancels his (i. e., Baudelaire's) life for ever,... he is glorified in those that follow, and Apollo, the lord of all light and source of all lights (i.e., poets), lives only if men live.' A specific feature of the second series of Poems and Ballads is Swinburne's interest in Francois Villon. Swinburne found in this 'Poet, Pickpurse and Pimp' as well as 'Master Thief' 'the greatest singer' who sang a new immortal song emitting Apollo's shining light in the dark. To Swinburne, Villon was as great a tragic singer as Sappho. Poems and Ballads, Second Series contains many excellent poems in which Swinburne states dexterously his theory of l'art pour i'art.