Creating from nothing: Swinburne and Baudelaire in "Ave Atque Vale".

Brennan, Thomas J.

Algernon Charles Swinburne was among the earliest English critics to praise Charles Baudelaire's Fleurs du Mal (1857). Writing in the Spectator for September 1862, Swinburne stresses the volume's "delight in problems":

 It has the languid lurid beauty of close and threatening weather--a
 heavy, heated temperature, with dangerous hot-house scents in it;
 thick shadow of cloud closed about it, and fire of molten light....
 The writer delights in problems and has a natural leaning to obscure
 and sorrowful things. Failure and sorrow, next to physical beauty
 and perfection of sound or scent, seem to have an infinite
 attraction for him.... Not the luxuries of pleasure, in their first
 simple form, but the sharp and cruel enjoyments of pain, the acrid
 relish of suffering felt or inflicted, the sides on which Nature
 looks unnatural, go to make up the stuff and substance of his
 poetry. (1)

The references to the embracing of suffering and physical disgust evoke the public scandal and legal action occasioned by Les Fleurs du Mal in which Baudelaire caught the tension between the horror and the ecstasy of life. What Swinburne recognizes is that the shock of these ideas derives from the clash of opposites--suffering asks us to consider the question of pleasure just as disgust asks us to consider the question of vivid sensuous awareness. Baudelaire knew that these questions persist as questions, and Swinburne is aware that delighting in them is the mark of the Frenchman's genius--"Ave Atque Vale" is farewell to the mortal Baudelaire and hail to his vibrant verse.

Swinburne's elegy has received recent critical attention--most notably from Harold Bloom, Jerome McGann, and Peter Sacks. (2) They follow the traditional notion of the elegy as a competitive genre, a view that does not account for Swinburne's lingering over Baudelaire--as a corpse but also as a corpus or body of work--throughout his poem. Another perspective of the poem is the Freudian connection between the instincts of pleasure and pain and of life and death. Gilles Deleuze has developed a basis for such a reading in Difference and Repetition. (3) By challenging us to think about death in non-materialist terms, Deleuze emphasizes that the death instinct is not opposed to the life instinct--but embedded in it as part of its potential. This emphasis on death as a potential that inheres in life provides an important but hitherto under-appreciated lens for viewing Swinburne's poem. By focusing on Swinburne's extensive allusions to Baudelaire's text, we appreciate the degree to which Swinburne repeats Baudelaire.

Swinburne, however, makes these allusions not to replace the older poet but to situate him in a procession of images--now inhabiting Swinburne's mind--that will also pass away. Yopie Prins has recently shown that Swinburne's fascination with the Greek poet Sappho enables him to articulate the recurrent structure of poetic vocation: "the body of the poet is sacrificed to the body of her song, and this body is sacrificed to posterity, which recollects the scattered fragments in order to recall Sappho herself as the long-lost origin of lyric poetry." (4)

In a sense, my argument simply extends the circuit of Prins's. The repetition of Baudelaire's corpse in both his and Swinburne's corpus allows both poets to imagine an "afterlife" for their work in terms of future readers (p. 116). Most importantly, regardless of whose body we situate in this process, the process itself, as Prins suggests, raises the problem of subjectivity (p. 132). However, where she sees a non-naturalized rhythm--or poetic text--as the marker for the corpse, I extend this process to the position of the reader. Thought, memory, language, and sense: these faculties all exist for Deleuze only by connection with their opposites. Recognizing these same faculties operative in "Ave Atque Vale," we also perceive the most important aspect of Swinburne's legacy. The most worthwhile kinds of artistic endeavor, as products of these human faculties, resist simple conceptualization as the work of a subject even as they incite praise.

The Critics, Deleuze, and Repetition

Discussions of elegies often call attention to the genre's self-reflexiveness. By raising the question of Baudelaire's poetic legacy, Swinburne is really posing this question about himself. Bloom offers the most important articulation of this idea. Commenting on "the great pastoral elegies," he emphasizes that the elegy's main topic is not "grief" but "their composers' own creative anxieties" vis-a-vis their precursors. Depending on the poem, "consolation" will take the form of either "ambition" or "oblivion" in the later poet. Bloom places "Ave Atque Vale" in the latter group (p. 151). The logic behind the competition, he says, is that fame is finite. Later poets will always seek to extend their "afterlife" by displacing earlier poets (p.151).

According to Jerome McGann, the precursor Swinburne has in mind is Shelley, especially the Shelley of "Adonais" (p. 294). Shelley condemns Keats's critics to "Live" as a "noteless blot on a remembered name" (l. 327), and emphasizes that the living are the ones who are "lost in stormy visions," and "keep with phantoms an unprofitable strife" (ll. 344-345). (5) Similarly, Swinburne celebrates the fact that Baudelaire is now free of such "strange dreams" and of their accompanying "tumultuous sleep" (l. 30). (6) When Swinburne hails "Holy poets," he does so, says McGann, in order to demonstrate that, through their songs, they are the ones who impart life to human beings. This act of storytelling, however, distances the poet from the action his poem memorializes. For this reason, Baudelaire is not mourned by Orestes or Electra (l. 129) but by "The most high muses that fulfill all ages" (l. 131). As McGann argues, Orestes and Electra, by wanting resurrection for their father, are also seeking deadly revenge. By contrast, Baudelaire is not involved in such a redemptive project. Thus, the reciprocity of the dead and living poets that Swinburne imagines has nothing to do with any personal influence of the dead on the living but with the possibility that the living poet may remain "aware of the poetic gods of the past," of great poets of the past, and present this awareness to the reader (pp. 294-299).

Like McGann, Sacks also presents this competition as real but depersonalized. For him, however, Swinburne's precursors are Arnold and Tennyson who "insistently foregrounded their own empirical environment and experience" in their elegies. Swinburne, according to Sacks, becomes a representative mourner who participates in "a community of poets who sing and have sung with the same voice" (pp. 207-208). Sacks points out that the reference in "Ave Atque Vale" to Baudelaire's "The Giantess" invites a comparison of the woman with "landscape"; she is also "the Muse, the womb," and "the primary object for which all mourners are compelled to mourn again" (p. 214). According to this Freudian interpretation, Swinburne recalls this lost object in order to re-attach it to a living one. What he finally grasps as a substitute for the dead poet, however, is the deceased man's poems. Unable to take Baudelaire's hand, Sacks argues, Swinburne instead reaches for the earlier poet's book of poems:

 Not thee, O never thee, in all time's changes,
 Not thee, but this the sound of thy sad soul,
 The shadow of thy swift spirit, this shut scroll
 I lay my hand on. (ll. 100-103; qtd. in Sacks, p. 216)

By clasping the book and not the dead man, Swinburne thus submits himself to the task of living and working in language even though his "pursuit of images" does not hold out the possibility of bearing any fruit (Sacks, p. 223). We can also see that the "'barren' pursuit of images" resembles the oblivion described by Bloom: for both critics Swinburne borrows images of his precursor in order to make a place in the tradition for his own endeavor.

The strength of this kind of criticism is at least twofold. First, it is astute in its account of Swinburne's relation to the elegy genre. Though the poem centers on Baudelaire, Swinburne's depersonalized mode is certainly a reaction to the more personal connections Tennyson, Arnold, and Shelley seek to establish with their precursors. Second, Bloom, McGann, and Sacks make clear that Swinburne appropriates Baudelaire's refusal to believe in immortality beyond its survival in his reputation. Death has led Baudelaire out of "the mystic and the mournful garden" of life (l. 180). "Ave Atque Vale," therefore, can be read as Swinburne's recognition of his own mortality through meditation on Baudelaire's.

Where I disagree with these critics, however, is in their assumption that Swinburne must displace Baudelaire in order to come to this recognition. The logic of "Ave Atque Vale" is not one of Oedipal rivalry with the dead but one in which the dead and the living represent moments in a collective flow of desire that precedes their organization into individual and autonomous subjects. As an example, let us consider again Swinburne's allusion to "The Giantess." Clearly, the "thou" refers to Baudelaire:

 Hast thou found place at the great knees and feet
 Of some pale Titan-woman like a lover,
 Such as thy vision here solicited,
 Under the shadow of her vast head,
 The deep division of prodigious breasts,
 The solemn slope of mighty limbs asleep,
 The weight of awful tresses that still keep
 The savor and shade of old-world pine-forests
 Where the wet hill-winds weep? (ll. 58-66)

In the process of evoking Baudelaire, Swinburne himself gets lost in the flow of images much as Baudelaire is lost in the woman. In a sense, he becomes the "thou" he addresses. Swinburne's interest, therefore, is in the similarity he has to Baudelaire rather than in how he either does or does not surpass him. This concern derives from Swinburne's recognition that the flow of images he has evoked--and which he imagines Baudelaire to have "solicited"--is not only something that poets cause or make but something in which they find themselves immersed. Is Swinburne's recollection of Baudelaire's poem the occasion for the string of images that then telescopes in the smell of a pine forest? Or is the whole list of images triggered by the smell of a pine forest that would then serve as the avenue into the description of the woman? The description allows both accounts of its origin, and thereby stresses that the flow of the images--rather than their direction or even their actuality--is what is most important to Swinburne.

Baudelaire is a particularly powerful moment in this flow of images for Swinburne rather than a poetic father to be surpassed. As a means of understanding how Swinburne sees this force eternally recurring in poets, I suggest Deleuze's notion of repetition. Early in Difference and Repetition, he describes repetition's resistance to conceptualization. For concepts we might also read language, especially as it is understood as directed to the future: "Repetition thus appears as difference without a concept, repetition which escapes indefinitely continued conceptual difference. It expresses a peculiar power to the existent, a stubbornness to the existent in intuition, which resists every specification by concepts no matter how far this is taken" (pp. 13-14). This power derives from repetition's connection to the present in the mind. It is not a replaying of the past in the present but the recognition of how the past and the future are collapsed into the present. Deleuze arrives at this idea by considering Hume's thesis: "Repetition changes nothing in the object repeated, but does change something in the mind which contemplates it" (p. 70). This new thing is the expectation of the repetition. To illustrate the point, he suggests the series AB, AB, AB, A ...--we expect that when A appears, B will follow it. Such an expectation has the force "corresponding to the qualitative impression of all the contracted AB's" because all past events of AB kind are contracted into the present (p. 70). The same contraction characterizes the future because the mind anticipates what is to come.

Past and future thus exist only in terms of the present: "The past and future do not designate instants distinct from a supposed present instant, but rather the dimensions of the present itself in so far as it is a contraction of instants" (p. 71). Most importantly, the process is passive. Synthesizing particular AB events from the past, future AB events appear in the mind but "prior to all memory and reflection" (p. 71). When memory and reflection do enter the process, they are produced at second hand: "on the basis of the qualitative impression in the imagination, memory reconstitutes the particular cases as distinct, conserving them in its own 'temporal space.' The past is then no longer the immediate past of retention but the reflexive past of representation, of reflected and reproduced particularity" (p. 71). This pattern also applies to the future. No longer the "immediate future of anticipation" when first constituted in the mind, it becomes "the reflexive future of prediction" (p. 71).

Deleuze's description of the "stubbornness" of the existent as given "in intuition" is also important. Claire Colebrook points out that he uses "intuition" infrequently, but that it may be as close as one ever gets to a description of his method. This she describes as "going beyond the perception of something in its actual form to the virtual components that make it up." (7) Every specification of a concept--or use of language-will always fall short of that which it describes because in the existent we always a find a potential for some future expression of it that differs from its present "actuality." Indeed, Deleuze speaks of two repetitions taking place simultaneously: "A bare, material repetition (repetition of the Same) appears only in the sense that another repetition is disguised within it, constituting it and constituting itself in disguising itself" (p. 21). The gap between these repetitions, which is the gap between a thing's actual and potential expression, is, for Deleuze, what makes the interweaving of life and death possible: "It is always in this gap, which should not be confused with the negative, that creatures weave their repetition and receive at the same time the gift of living and dying" (p. 21).

For Deleuze, then, death is the reality that enables life's repetitions, because it serves as the source of problems and questions that persist beyond every present and articulated response to them. In this way, it also designates the "(non)-being" or silence that gives rise to every affirmation (p. 112). This silence is the same resistance and repetition Swinburne sees imparted to him through reading Les Fleurs du Mal. If we consider the ramifications of this view of repetition for language, we see that the bare "repetition of the Same" at the level of sounds, words, and even thoughts disguises the more profound repetition that gives rise to death and life. Language's failure to effect anything--as Swinburne says "not all our songs, O friend, / Will make death clear or make life durable" (ll. 171-172)-is itself the difference that makes life and death possible.

Swinburne attends to both of these repetitions in "Ave Atque Vale." Baudelaire repeats himself in Swinburne's work much as the death instinct, for Deleuze, intertwines with and becomes part of the fabric of life. Baudelaire's corpse or body--but also his corpus or body of language--are both symbols of death in "Ave Atque Vale." Swinburne's project, however, is not to reconceive death as the foundation of life but to think of it as a way of speaking about the impossibility of conceiving any foundation for life. Death, in short, always brings back the problem that is life. For this reason, Baudelaire is not ultimately displaced in "Ave Atque Vale" but continually embraced by Swinburne. The older poet inhabits his thought, memory, language, and sense. Instead of representing a future to him, Baudelaire merely impresses on him the continuing flow of images in the present that iterates repetition. Swinburne's accomplishment is to realize that any poet, instead of standing apart from this flow, may be able to refine his perception by becoming one with it.

Corpse and Corpus in "Ave Atque Vale"

Swinburne begins "Ave Atque Vale" by placing himself before the open casket. He wonders what kind of flowers he should place on Baudelaire's corpse: "Shall I strew on thee rose or rue or laurel, / Brother, on this that was the veil of thee?" (ll. 1-2). "Strew" suggests a spreading out of the flowers that is similar to the generating of images that will characterize this poem. By contrast, at the end of the poem, he will stand before the closed casket and will offer a wrought "garland" (l. 188)--his completed poem. By linking these two gestures, Swinburne is collapsing the future into the present so as to show the latter's potency. The "rose or rue or laurel" strewn on the body will become the "garland" at the poem's close just as his images will become this poem. Yet while the whole succeeds the part in the temporality of "Ave Atque Vale," we cannot really think the whole--either poem or garland-apart from the images or blossoms that inhere in each. They contain the whole potentially, and the whole repeats them.

This emphasis on potential applies to the naming of Baudelaire as "Brother." On the one hand, Swinburne alludes to Catullus' elegy: "Traveling through many nations and through many seas / I have come, brother, for these poor funeral rites." (8) By using the term "poor," Catullus stresses the inadequacy of the funeral rites and, implicitly, that of poetry. Neither ritual can fully or adequately memorialize the actual person. Like Catullus, Swinburne recognizes this fact, and thus refers to the corpse as simply a "this." On the other hand, Swinburne alludes to Baudelaire's "To the Reader," the first poem in Les Fleurs du Mal. Imagining the reader's mind as a "squalid zoo of vices," Baudelaire emphasizes one vice as most intriguing because worse than all the rest:

 I speak of Boredom which with ready tears
 dreams of hangings as it puffs its pipe.
 Reader, you know this squeamish monster well,
 --hypocrite reader, --my alias, --my twin! (9)

A more literal translation of Baudelaire's last line would be would be "hypocrite reader,--just like me,--my brother" ("Hypocrite lecteur,--mon semblable,--mon frere"). Where Catullus projects the term "brother" onto the dead person, Baudelaire connects it with his readers so as to jolt them out of a complacent boredom. In contrast to the task of memorializing the dead, this task is one for which for which poetry may be adequate. Swinburne's reference to Baudelaire as a "brother" thus suggests the breadth of his poetic task. From the nothing of the corpse, he will create a work that will repeat the corpus of the dead man.

The non-entity that is the corpse structures the first part of the poem. To illustrate this point, Swinburne dwells on Baudelaire's senses. He begins with what Baudelaire heard, an important choice because it signals a reorganizing of perception away from the visual and toward the auditory. "Thine ears knew all the wandering watery sighs / Where the sea sobs round Lesbian promontories" (ll. 14-15). The reference is to Baudelaire's poem "Lesbos" and especially to its final stanza, where the island is in perpetual mourning as a result of Sappho's suicide:

 And from that time to this, Lesbos laments.
 heedless of the homage of the world,
 she drugs herself with cries of pain
 that rend the skies above her empty shores,
 And from that time to this, Lesbos laments! (p. 126)

The last line of the stanza-and of the poem--repeats the first and emphasizes the circularity of the mourning. The island eternally lingers over the loss of Sappho, a constancy much more evident in the French: "Et c'est depuis ce temps que Lesbos se lamente" (p. 304). Logically, the time moves forward "from that time to this." But the repeated "c'est" and "ce" collapse present and past into each other, an effect Baudelaire underscores with his repeated "l" at the line's close. Additionally, the reflexive "se" emphasizes the lament's self-enclosed quality. Thus, by virtue of the constancy of her grief, the island seems to remain securely bound to the past and to the freshness of Sappho's loss. Swinburne, by stressing the "wandering watery sighs" of Lesbos and the sobbing of the sea, extends this effect into his own poem. What Baudelaire has heard and what Swinburne is hearing is a repetition of the same sad song.

This song is the same for Swinburne and Baudelaire in the sense that the poetic meters they hear do not admit of internalization or conscious synthesis by the memory. Prins touches on this point, although her argument applies to Hardy's way of hearing Swinburne rather than Swinburne's way of hearing Baudelaire: "Meter proves to be a form of automatic writing, a mechanism for remembering something that was never forgotten because it was never 'inside' Hardy to begin with, nor indeed 'in' Swinburne either" (p. 171). What carries over from one poet to the next is not a common message or meaning but a meter or rhythm that simply brings back the past in the present without any explanation of why it registers this effect. In this sense meter concretizes what Deleuze means when he speaks of the past as a way of being in the present such that one sees the present as passing. Really a "former present," the past inhabits the present as a former thing. In this way, the past invests the present with a sense of the present's passing and restlessness (pp. 80-81). Such restlessness is evident in "Lesbos." The poem begins with the image of kisses that Baudelaire celebrates:

 Lesbos, where the kisses, like cascades,
 teeming and turbulent yet secret, deep,
 plunge undaunted into unplumbed gulfs. (p. 123)

By flinging themselves into a "gulf," the present "kisses" may repeat the past moment of Sappho's suicide. But the more salient fact is that this death now works in the present and accounts for the ongoing annihilation of one kiss, like one wave, into the next one.

The same kind of series also fascinates Swinburne--thus he speaks of "the barren kiss of piteous wave to wave" (l. 16). Though Swinburne imagines these kisses as connected with Sappho--"the supreme head of song" (l. 18)--the point is not what we learn about the past but what is concealed from us in the present. Specifically, the waves hide the Greek poet in a ubiquitous grave where they "vex and work her wrong" (l. 21). And though Swinburne knows he is locked in the present, his restlessness makes it impossible for him to resist the pull of such a "salt and sterile" kiss (l. 19). By framing all of these comments in terms of what Baudelaire heard--but now hears no more--we recognize that what Swinburne predicates of his predecessor also applies to him. Sappho's dismemberment in "the wild sea winds" (l. 20) is inevitable, and Baudelaire heard this message in his evocation of Lesbos' restless and self-annihilating kisses. Now impressed by Baudelaire's words, Swinburne anticipates that the same fate awaits him. Because the past restlessly works in the present, Swinburne recognizes that he, like Sappho and Baudelaire, is also subject to the "Blind gods" of necessity (l. 22) who will eventually turn him like them into a corpse.

Having considered what Baudelaire heard, Swinburne then turns to what he saw: "Thou sawest, in thine old singing season, brother, / Secrets and sorrows unbeheld of us" (ll. 23-24). Once again, the focus centers on what is not available in the present; Baudelaire appears to have had access to knowledge not allowed his successors. The "lovely leaf-buds poisonous" (l. 25), for example, are simultaneously alluring and deadly. By framing the noun with these two predicates, Swinburne emphasizes the interplay of both ideas. Instead of discovering a single underlying truth for the "leaf buds," therefore, we encounter two perspectives. Though beautiful, they are also deadly. By positioning his adjectives in this unconventional way, Swinburne makes it appear that he is creating the "leaf buds" as he speaks about them.

In Deleuzian terms Swinburne has presented a simulacra. The "leaf buds" are not copies of an original in nature, and by virtue of their ambiguous effects--alluring yet dangerous--they illustrate the instability of all the objects of perception that the poem describes. Comparing Stephane Mallarme to James Joyce, Deleuze notices the same problematic in reading these authors:

 The identity of the object read really dissolves into divergent
 series defined by esoteric words, just as the identity of the
 reading subject is dissolved into the decentred circles of possible
 multiple readings. Nothing, however, is lost; each series exists
 only by virtue of the return of the others. Everything has become
 simulacrum, for by simulacrum we should not understand a simple
 imitation but rather the act by which the very idea of a model or
 privileged position is challenged and overturned. (p. 69)

This refusal to privilege one image or idea over another helps Swinburne to characterize Baudelaire's taste. A second example of what Baudelaire saw is "The hidden harvest of luxurious time / Sin without shape, and pleasure without speech" (ll. 27-28). Time is described in terms of bountiful potential: it yields the "sin" and the "pleasure" with which Baudelaire is concerned. Additionally, Swinburne links these two ideas with seasonal repetition: both "sin" and "pleasure" are part of a "harvest." Finally, both resist easy conception, either in terms of a readily intelligible "shape" or of "speech." Following Deleuze, we see that for Swinburne Baudelaire possessed an exquisite taste born out of a refusal to reduce life to simple moral ideas. By connecting this "harvest" of time with sin and pleasure, Swinburne suggests that transgression inheres in, but never fully articulates, enjoyment. The pole of "sin" is not to be privileged over the pole of "pleasure."

Most importantly, poets and readers cannot separate themselves from the interplay of these ideas. The simulacrum calls into question not only the text read but also the subject who reads and interprets. How Baudelaire understood this paradox is evident in his poem "Carrion." The speaker recalls walking with a female friend and coming across the corpse of a dead animal. Insects are consuming the body and, in the process, make it look as if the animal were still alive:

 The tide of trembling vermin sank,
 then bubbled up afresh
 as if the carcass, drawing breath,
 by their lives lived again. (p. 35)

With glee the speaker then reminds his companion that she will also come to this fate though she is "the light of my life, the sun / and moon and stars of my love!"

The transgression presented here is Baudelaire's. By drawing near to the corpse both physically and psychically, he can also expose the cliches with which the woman has grown accustomed to hearing herself described. The disgust elicited by the image thus depends on a certain fascination. Baudelaire and the woman pause to look at the corpse (she almost faints "dead away" from the smell), and he uses the incident to remind her of death's inevitability. Most importantly, the intensity of the moment also hints at a pleasure that Baudelaire takes in the woman. Though troubled, the pleasure is very palpable. Once the woman is below the earth and consumed by the "kisses" of "worms," she should remind them that he still has the "sacred essence" and the "form" of his "rotted loves" back on earth. In "Carrion," therefore, Baudelaire manufactures three simulacra: the dead animal that now "breathes" by virtue of the maggots moving through it; the woman's corpse, eventually to be devoured by the maggots underground; and the expectation that the dead woman will continue to live by the poet's feeding on his memory of her and proclaiming this connection in his work. While the encounter with the animal launches the associations that bring us to the other images, Baudelaire does not see the first image as foundational for the other two. Rather, he suggests a convertibility among these images rooted in the observation that death always inscribes itself into life.

Swinburne's move in "Ave Atque Vale" is to turn Baudelaire into a simulacra. "And with each face thou sawest the shadow on each, / Seeing as men sow men reap" (ll. 32-33). At first glance, we might think that he is simply privileging Baudelaire as a model of taste for others. People suffer punishment in proportion to the pleasure they have enjoyed. For most, however, this suffering remains a "hidden harvest" (l. 28) because the register of both pleasure and pain is so small. Not so Baudelaire. As someone who felt pleasure and pain keenly, he was in a position to recognize the extent to which this kind of enjoyment did--or, more often, did not--apply to others. For this reason, Swinburne speaks of him as able to see the "face" of another: Baudelaire recognized the extent to which others were alive because he was so alive himself. At the same time, his predecessor also saw the "shadow" on the face. Living at a level of pain and pleasure unknown to most humans, Baudelaire could intuit how dead most people are to either sensation.

But while this analysis of pleasure and pain may illustrate Baudelaire's insights into the human condition, Swinburne never tires of reminding us that there is nothing to be gained from this understanding. Like Sappho and his figures in "Carrion," Baudelaire is himself a corpse who can only be remembered through his words. Swinburne makes this point most emphatically when, having described what Baudelaire heard and saw, he dwells on what Baudelaire's "heart" (l. 34) thirsted for--"sleep" (l. 35) and "peace" (l. 36). In death he may have attained this desired decomposing, but with a shock, we also realize that this state is indistinguishable from that of the rotting corpse:

 Is it well now where love can do no wrong,
 Where stingless pleasure has no foam nor fang
 Behind the unopening closure of her lips?
 Is it not well where soul from body slips
 And flesh from bone divides without a pang
 As dew from flower-bell drips? (ll. 39-44)

As in the description of the Giant woman, Swinburne offers a series of images that obscure Baudelaire's corpse. Then, with a shock, he brings the fact of the decaying corpse back--Baudelaire is not merely in the place where "soul from body slips" but also where "flesh" and "bone" divide from each other "without a pang." Any hope that the soul can escape the body in this division collapses.

By failing to obscure the corpse, Swinburne underscores that pain and pleasure form the coordinates of human experience. On the one hand, he appears to have negated both, by predicating them of a dead man. On the other hand, the fact that Swinburne still remembers the "sting" and the "fang" suggests that their residue remains in him as one of Baudelaire's readers. This mixed quality of pleasure is also evident in the seeming ease with which body and soul separate. The simile suggests that the process is as natural as the fall of dew from a flower. This flower, however, does not represent the natural pattern for the dead body. Rather, Swinburne emphasizes that the repetition of the corpse--with its inclusion of decay--is a simulacra of the flower. The flower has a potential for decay; only with that recognition can its life be appreciated.

With the utterance "It is enough" (l. 45), Swinburne ostensibly brings to a close these reflections on Baudelaire's body. But because he is really problematizing his own pleasure and taste, this direct statement serves to accentuate the force of his questions. Deleuze makes the same point. Questions derive their rhetorical and ontological power not from being resolvable but from being repeated:

 The power of the questions always comes from somewhere else than the
 answers, and benefits from a free depth which cannot be resolved.
 The insistence, the transcendence and the ontological bearing of
 questions and problems is expressed not in the form of a finality
 of a sufficient reason (to what end? why?) but in the discrete form
 of difference and repetition: what difference is there? and "repeat
 a little." (p. 107)

What looks like a negation of Baudelaire, therefore, is really Swinburne's way of continuing to raise his work as a problem. Death is unremitting: "For thee no fruits to pluck, no palms for winning, / No triumph and no labor and no lust" (ll. 48-49). Now all of Baudelaire's striving and all the fruits of his striving cannot accrue to him in any way. These negations also echo Keats's "Ode to Psyche" where the speaker recognizes that Psyche has no outward signs of a cult:

 No voice, no lute, no pipe, no incense sweet
 From chain swung censer teeming;
 No shrine, no grove, no oracle, no heat
 Of pale-mouthed prophet dreaming. (ll. 32-35) (10)

Confronted with this emptiness, which is really a projection of the living poet's own vacancy, Keats discovers in his own subjectivity the power to worship Psyche: "I see, and sing, by my own eyes inspired" (l. 43). Swinburne, however, keeps the focus on Baudelaire's "quiet eyes wherein the light saith nought" (l. 51). The opacity of the corpse to light, as well as to "day" and "night" (ll. 52-53), highlights that a knowing subject or mind is to him simply a fiction. Nothing--even Swinburne's own vacancy--is transformed by the reality of Baudelaire's corpse.

In such a framework, what remains are the questions raised by Baudelaire's poetry. As we have seen, the allusion to Baudelaire's "Giantess" presents the impossibility of a determinate origin for the series of images used to evoke this poem. Swinburne frames these meditations as a question about artistic vision in the next stanza when he asks Baudelaire: "Hast thou found any likeness for thy vision?" (l. 67). Since Swinburne does not believe in an afterlife, the obvious answer to the question is "No." Nevertheless, he asks another question: "Does the dim ground grow any fruit of ours, / The faint fields quicken any terrene root?" (ll. 73-74). As Deleuze would say, the questions have an "insistence" to them that resides in their recurring without an answer. Later in the poem, Swinburne will return to these images of fruit when he speaks of making an offering to the "gods of gloom" (l. 117). Whatever quantity of "honey and spice" may come from his "seedlands" (l. 118), he now places at Baudelaire's tomb. Yet this gesture, like the questions about "fruit" from the "dim ground" and the "faint fields," acquires force from its very futility. Most importantly, if we equate these "seedlands" with the field of poetic endeavor, then we see that Swinburne situates himself not as Baudelaire's successor but as his co-worker in the same project--to create poetry of a power that resides not in the answers it provides but in the questions it raises.

As the first part of "Ave Atque Vale" draws to a close, we can say that Baudelaire's body becomes a symbol for this type of pursuit. Baudelaire lives in the "lowlands where the sun and moon are mute / And all the stars keep silence" (ll. 75-76). This image is really Swinburne's way of referring to Baudelaire's work as the only location where the Frenchman can now be imagined as still alive. Emphatically, though, this poetry will not yield any sort of result for its readers. By highlighting his own access to the obscure and puny--typified by the "gainless glimpse of Proserpine's veiled head" (l. 83) and the "little sound of unregarded tears" (l. 84)--Swinburne undercuts the hope of his "hearkening spirit" (l. 87). At the same time, he implies that only such an ironic perspective can do justice to his predecessor's sadness, a sadness Swinburne now appropriates as his own: "Thou art far too far for wings of words to follow / Far too far off for thought or any prayer" (ll. 89-90). Any attempt to locate Baudelaire is useless, even though the desire remains:

 Yet with some fancy, yet with some desire,
 Dreams pursue death as winds a flying fire,
 Our dreams pursue our dead and do not find. (ll. 93-95)

Desire, as Swinburne presents it, is closely connected with the work of thinking. How is it possible to pursue the dead in thought if one does not believe in a life or reality beyond the present? This problem brings Swinburne to the potential, and perhaps to the limit, of thought itself--what Deleuze calls a thought without an image. How Baudelaire symbolizes this limit says much about how Swinburne conceives the poet's immanent connection with the present.

Thought and its Limit: What Baudelaire Engenders in Swinburne

Discussing the violence and struggle in the work of the poet and dramatist Antonin Artaud, Deleuze praises his effort to think a thought that goes beyond the image:

 Artaud pursues in all this the terrible revelation of a thought
 without image, and the conquest of a new principle which does not
 allow itself to be represented. He knows that difficulty as such,
 along with its cortege of problems and questions, is not a de
 facto state of affairs but a de jure structure of thought; that
 there is an acephalism in thought, just as there is an amnesia in
 memory, an aphasia in language and an agnosia in sensibility. He
 knows that thinking is not innate but must be engendered in
 thought. (p. 147)

The link Deleuze sees between the human faculties of thought, memory, language, and sensibility is their connection to the annihilation of these same powers. A thought that comes from something that is headless ("acephalic") is a thought that engages thinking--something that not all thoughts do. Those that do not engage thinking Deleuze places in the category of ordinary "recognition"; we can think, for example, of fingers, tables, and persons. In this way, thought is "filled ... with an image of itself" and may be kept quite busy (p. 138). By contrast, the "encounter" works to annihilate such thought by pointing out the existence of contraries in what we perceive:

 Whereas a finger always calls for recognition and is never more
 than a finger, that which is hard is never hard without also being
 soft, since it is inseparable from a becoming which includes the
 relation within it (the same is true of the large and the small,
 the one and the many). The sign or point of departure for that
 which forces thought is thus the coexistence of contraries, the
 coexistence of more and less in an unlimited qualitative
 becoming. (p. 141).

The same is true of memory that emerges from amnesia, speech that emerges from muteness ("aphasia"), and sensibility that emerges from the loss of perception ("agnosia"). In each case the encounter with the faculty's creating or producing itself highlights the faculty's existence as the problematic element. In the course of memorializing Baudelaire, Swinburne has a similar Deleuzian encounter. From the discussion of the first part of the poem, we see that the image by which he recognizes Baudelaire is that of the corpse--"this that was the veil of thee" (l. 2). Yet Baudelaire is not reducible to the corpse because the corpse veils the spirit. In the second part of the poem, therefore, Baudelaire becomes Swinburne's way of describing the production not of one image but of many that the Frenchman's poetry elicits. In this way, the impossibility of imaging the older poet brings Swinburne to the threshold of thought itself. Thinking about Baudelaire is activated because the image of him is missing.

This activation of thinking is most evident in terms of the faculty of speech. In stanza X, Swinburne places his hand on the "shut scroll" (l. 102) of Baudelaire's work, and finds that "not death estranges / My spirit from communion of thy song" (ll. 103-104). Equated with "the sound of [Baudelaire's] sad soul" and "The shadow of thy swift spirit" (l. 102), the "shut scroll" signifies not only Baudelaire's silence but also Swinburne's aphasia when confronted with this silence. Swinburne's estrangement from "communion" with Baudelaire is real, but characterizing the source of the estrangement--which he can only describe as "not death"--brings him to the limit of language itself.

Swinburne's placing himself among Baudelaire's mourners underscores this limitation: "I stand, and to the gods and to the dead/Do reverence without prayer or praise" (ll. 115-116). Baudelaire is "Far too far off for thought or any prayer" (l. 90) and words, even of prayer or praise, only highlight the distance between the dead and the living. The placing of his hair on the tomb confirms this idea. More than any other gesture in the poem, this tribute has a purely formal and even perfunctory quality to it. Needing a word that rhymes with "bear" and "air" at the close of the stanza, as well as one that would fit in the context of a funeral, Swinburne turns to Greek tragedy. At the same time, he recognizes that without further explanation, the allusion remains open to misunderstanding. If we consider its outward appearance, the laying of the lock of hair is "Orestes-like" (l. 120), and it corresponds to what Deleuze speaks of as "a bare material repetition" (p. 21). Swinburne uses the allusion, however, in order to differ from Aeschylus and thus to underscore that thinking is engendered here through this connection. Where Orestes' laying of the hair expressed his grief and revenge, Swinburne's laying of the hair simply recalls his muteness. Baudelaire's death, unlike Agamemnon's, remains at a remove from "time's changes" (l. 100) because no tears will "quicken" him (l. 125). Finding Orestes' expression of grief too common-his tears are those "that all men hear" (l.126)--Swinburne's repetition of the image stresses its inadequacy. He is making no such offering himself.

Underlying the inefficacy of Swinburne's tears is the inefficacy of language signaled by his aphasia. "Fall tear by sweet imperishable tear/Down the opening leaves of holy poets' pages" (ll. 126-127). By referencing the "opening leaves" rather than the "opening lines" of the poem, Swinburne keeps the focus on how his work, like leaves opening in spring, has been nourished by the "imperishable mars" of his predecessor. In this way, the practice of poetry becomes a means of repeating loss. Language repeats the tears, and--just like tears--also fails to yield an image of the dead.

This same failure also occurs within the faculty of memory. Deleuze speaks of a "transcendental memory" that does not consist of a beyond to human experience but is contained within it and is unavoidably recalled:

 Transcendental memory ... grasps that which from the outset can
 only be recalled, even the first time: not a contingent past but
 the being of the past as such and the past of every time. In this
 manner, the forgotten thing appears in person to the memory which
 essentially apprehends it. It does not address the memory without
 addressing the forgetting within memory. (p. 140)

That which compels recollection--or forces thought-is inseparable from what is forgotten. Forgetting, therefore, is not an accident that happens to memory but rather is something existing in "essential memory" and operating "as though it were the 'nth' power of memory" (p. 140).

In "Ave Atque Vale" we see memory raised to such a power when Swinburne invokes the supposed source of his inspiration--the "muse funereal":

 These memories and these melodies that throng
 Veiled porches of a Muse funereal--
 These I salute, these touch, these clasp and fold,
 As though a hand were in my hand to hold,
 Or through mine ears a mourning musical
 Of many mourners rolled. (ll. 105-110).

The "thronging" of "memories" and "melodies" suggests a proliferation of images for Swinburne in connection with Baudelaire. Opposed to this proliferation, however, is the veiled porch of the muse. We never get beyond this locale, that is to say we never get from Swinburne a definitive image for the origin of his inspiration. In addition, Swinburne never mentions her name--Melpomene-suggesting that when she appears to him in memory, it is as a thing forgotten. She thus resembles Deleuze's transcendental memory and forces Swinburne to meditate on the act of thinking and writing. Yet she also underscores that what is forgotten or hidden from memory--in this case its alleged origin--remains vital to this process.

The two gods present at this imaginary funeral-Apollo and Venus-illustrate the work and pain connected with remembering and with inspiration as well as Swinburne's amnesia about its source. In George M. Ridenour's view, Swinburne's identification of Apollo as the "God of all suns and songs" (l. 145) alludes to Baudelaire's poem "The Sun" that equates this god with the "physical sun." (11) In addition, Apollo inspires his poem (Ridenour, p. 113). Yet, it is the cruel aspect of the sun god's inspiration that Baudelaire stresses. The poem opens with the sun's "scourg[ing] alike the city and fields / parching the stubble and sinking into slums." This pain he links to the poet's struggle to compose:

 I venture out alone to drill myself
 in what must seem an eerie fencing-match
 dueling in dark corners for a rhyme
 and stumbling over words like cobblestones. (p. 88)

The second stanza presents the sun in more positive terms. It "dissolves / anxieties into air like morning mist" and enables both the "verse" and the "rose" to ripen (p. 88). In the same way, inspiration and its frustration must coalesce in the making of a poem. Above all, the sun seems irresistible. The poet in his sickness cannot "stand up" to it because the latter is a "towering foster father." Inspiration forces itself, as Deleuze would say, on the poet as a thought that cannot be escaped. Thus, at the poem's close, when Baudelaire describes this visitation of the sun as the result of "a poet's will," we see that this drive to glorify "all things vile" expresses itself at the price of his own suffering (p. 88).

Swinburne understands the sun's role in this context of suffering. As Margot K. Louis points out, although Apollo is the god of music and light, neither of these has any effect on "the unmelodious mouth and sunless eyes" (l. 152) of the dead man who is not going to come back to life. (12) This is consistent, as Louis stresses, with Apollo's feeding Baudelaire the "bitter wine" (l. 138) and "bitter bread" (l. 139): unlike Christ's suffering the poet's suffering at the hands of the "art-god" has no redemptive value (Louis, p. 153). What Swinburne recognizes about inspiration is that he is privileged to express the yearning of "our God's heart" (l. 132). There is, in other words, a potential-Deleuze's "unlimited qualitative becoming"--operative in the poet that raises his work to the level of a god.

Yet Apollo remains "sparing of his sacred strength" (l. 133), a circumstance that calls attention to the contrary painful element in inspiration. Crucially, this limitation does not rule out the possibility of desire becoming so refined even among "us darkling" (l. 134); rather, the pain and suffering makes this refinement possible. The allusion to Book 3 of Paradise Lost raises this possibility very potently. Just as Milton's "wakeful bird / Sings darkling" (3.38-39), (13) so Swinburne can sing because Baudelaire's "unmelodious mouth and sunless eyes" (l. 152) open a space in which the living poet may emerge from silence.

Swinburne describes this hope by reflecting on the act of speaking. Apollo's "sacred strength" makes itself felt "In hearts that open and in lips that soften / With the soft flame and heat of songs that shine" (ll. 133-137). Lips that soften are lips that are preparing to open, either to take in food or to speak. Baudelaire's receives the "bitter bread" and the "bitter wine" that Apollo offers--the god's inspiration. These lips recall Sappho's closed lips from stanza IV, where "the barren kiss of wave to wave" (l. 16) has forgotten where Sappho's body lies. By contrast, Swinburne says that Apollo, having fed Baudelaire with inspiration, now will "save thy dust from blame and from forgetting" (l. 147). We should notice, however, that what underlies Swinburne's assurance is that Apollo's mode of mourning "with strange tears and alien sighs" (l. 151) really repeats his own. Apollo, in other words, imitates Swinburne's "gleanings of a northern shore" (l. 10). In the same way, the light that now shines from "the under skies" (l. 154) repeats the "low light" (l. 97) that had failed Swinburne earlier. Now the light shines over Baudelaire's "irrevocable head" (l. 153) because Swinburne, in the guise of Apollo, is the mourner.

As Baudelaire's mourner, Swinburne forgets as much as he remembers in the act of mourning. This amnesia becomes clearest with the introduction of Venus as one who weeps with Apollo "in the ways Lethean" (l. 155). In other words, Swinburne's imagining her in the present results from an erasure or forgetting of her past images. She is "That thing transformed which was the Cytherean" (l. 158) and "the face no more called Erycine" (l. 160). By speaking of Venus as a "thing" and a "face," Swinburne emphasizes that she is an artifact thought and made by human beings. In this process, past images of her--the Cytherean and the Erycine--are necessarily remembered and forgotten.

To illustrate the extent to which memory and amnesia have become intertwined, Swinburne alludes to Baudelaire's "A Voyage to Cythera" and to his own "Laus Veneris." In the former, Baudelaire sails by the island where Venus was born in the sea foam, recalls the myth, and is excited about the prospect of being near the place: "My heart flew up like a bird before the mast, / circled the shrouds and mounted free and clear" (p. 134). As the ship passes the island, however, he notices a corpse hanging on a gallows and being pecked apart by birds of prey. No disgusting detail is spared in the description of this body: the birds have pecked out the eyes and "from the ruined groin / a coil of heavy guts had tumbled out" (p. 135). Addressing the corpse, Baudelaire believes that this man must have suffered ignominious death as punishment for participation in "shameful rites" (p. 136) and for committing sins that prevent his burial. But in judging the man on the gallows, he also recognizes his double as the concluding lines to Venus illustrate: "On Aphrodite's island all I found / was a token gallows where my image hung" (p. 136). As in "Carrion," Baudelaire here introduces images that are disgusting in order to emphasize his implication in what he has described--like the man on the gibbet he, too, will be Venus' victim.

Yet, while "A Voyage to Cythera" presents the fate of devotees of Venus, what enables Baudelaire to undertake it? Crucially, he forgets the brutality of the devotion there until the corpse brings it back to him. Forgetting works in much the same way in "Ave Atque Vale." With "A Voyage to Cythera" in mind, Swinburne speaks of Baudelaire as Venus' "sad and second prey" (l. 163). He is the "second prey" because he follows the pattern set by the Tannhauser knight in "Laus Veneris." According to the original legend, the pope curses the knight who has come seeking forgiveness for his sin with Venus; she now lives as an enchantress in the Horsel, a German mountain. As part of the curse, the knight is told not to seek God's mercy until the pope's staff breaks into bloom. The knight then returns to the Horsel to stay with Venus until the end of time, and the pope's staff miraculously blooms. But in "Laus Veneris" Swinburne omits the final detail. For the knight this miracle is now irrelevant: "Yea, what if sapless bark wax green and white, / Shall any good fruit grow upon my sin?" (ll. 375-376).

What is important, Swinburne suggests, is the extent to which the knight is obsessed by his transgression with Venus and his pursuit of a fruitless relationship with her. This power of this obsession derives from the goddess' seductiveness that is closely related to the knight's ability to forget as much as he remembers. Seeing her when he returns, the knight forgets all of his prayers and promises:

 And I forgot fear and all weary things
 All ended prayers and perished thanksgivings,
 Feeling her face with all her eager hair

 Cleave to me, clinging as a fire that clings
 To the body and to the raiment, burning them
 As after death I know that such-like flame
 Shall cleave to me forever; yea, what care,
 Albeit I burn then, having felt the same? (ll. 401-408)

In "Ave Atque Vale," we see Baudelaire in much the same position. Once again, miracles are dismissed: "And now no sacred staff shall break in blossom" (l. 166). With this dismissal, moreover, comes a refusal of the future. The knight in "Laus Veneris" believes that he will eventually burn in hell as punishment for his sin, but this burning is indistinguishable from the burning for Venus he already feels in the present. Similarly, while he was alive, Venus lured Baudelaire into "footless places" and "shadows hot from hell" (ll. 164-165). In this place he "wove the sick flowers of secrecy and shade / Green buds of sorrow and sin, and remnants gray" (l. 181). This evocation of Baudelaire's life work, however, is not really distinct from the imaginary "faint fields" (l. 74) and "low lands where the sun and moon are mute" (l. 75) that Swinburne has invented for the dead man.

In terms of the faculty of sense, this blurring of the distinction between death and life represents what Deleuze describes as its agnosia. "Faint fields" suggests ones we cannot see while the meeting of the sun and moon anticipate the end of the poem where "all winds are quiet as the sun / All waters as the shore" (ll. 197-198). In both references, the sun's becoming quiet suggests Baudelaire's inspiration has been stilled by death. Swinburne then links this idea to a limiting of other kinds of sensuous awareness, illustrated by the "garland" he offers:

 For thee, O now a silent soul, my brother,
 Take at my hands this garland, and farewell.
 Thin is the leaf, and chill the wintry smell,
 And chill the solemn earth, a fatal mother,
 With sadder than the Niobean womb,
 And in her hollow breasts a tomb. (ll. 188-193)

Through the synaesthesia of the winter climate, Swinburne restrains his powers. He has apprehended his own fate in Baudelaire's. Death will one day lead him from the "mystic and mournful garden" (l. 180) of poetry and of life.

Yet even as the poem ends with this agnosia in sensation, Swinburne suggests that there is potentiality in this state-it illustrates thought's operation. The restraint at the end of "Ave Atque Vale" echoes the start of Milton's "Lycidas" where the speaker comes to pluck leaves to make a garland for his departed friend:

 Yet once more, O ye laurels and once more
 Ye myrtles brown, with Ivy never sere,
 I come to pluck your Berries harsh and crude,
 And with forc'd fingers rude,
 Shatter your leaves before the mellowing year. (ll. 1-5)

Milton's autumnal sadness eventually yields to the soaring conclusion of "Lycidas sunk low but mounted high" (l. 172). Swinburne introduces the redemptive perspective into his poem but then dismisses it. Yet Swinburne is also suggesting that the belief in overcoming death--as Milton describes it--and the belief in death's finality--as he describes it--are intertwined.

By ending "Ave Atque Vale" with this agnosia in sense, Swinburne recalls the first half of the poem where he had depicted Baudelaire's senses--hearing, seeing, and thirsting--as expressions of their own absence. The corpse, as we have seen, is his generalized way of speaking of this absence. From this non-entity Swinburne then evokes Baudelaire's corpus and expands his own so as to problematize thought--and with it life--along the lines presented by Deleuze. Acephalism, aphasia, amnesia, agnosia--Swinburne dwells on each. They illustrate the difficulty, but also the inevitability, of recalling Baudelaire. Embodying both the expression of the faculty and its occlusion, Baudelaire becomes a symbol for Swinburne of the poet's power to repeat rather than to surpass his predecessors. Baudelaire lives in his poetry and Swinburne apprehends his own eventual death. "Ave Atque Vale" reminds us that these events are not distinct.

Notes

(1) Philip Henderson, Swinburne: The Portrait of a Poet (London: Routledge, 1974), pp. 87-88.

(2) Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1973); Jerome McGann, Swinburne: An Experiment in Criticism (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1972); Peter Sacks, The English Elegy: Studies in the Genre (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1985).

(3) Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1994).

(4) Yopie Prins, Victorian Sappho (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1999).

(5) Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Complete Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972).

(6) Algernon Charles Swinburne, The Poems of Algernon Charles Swinburne, 6 vols. (London: Chatto and Windus, 1904).

(7) Claire Colebrook, Gilles Deleuze (London: Routledge, 2002), p. 46.

(8) The Poems of Catullus, ed. Guy Lee (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990).

(9) Charles Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du Mal, trans. Richard Howard (Boston: David R. Godine, 1982).

(10) The Poetry of John Keats, ed. Jack Stillinger (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1982).

(11) George M. Ridenour, "Time and Eternity in Swinburne: Minute Particulars in Five Poems," ELH 45 (1978): 107-130.

(12) Margot K. Louis, Swinburne and His Gods: The Roots and Growth of an Agnostic Poetry (Montreal: McGill-Queen's Univ. Press, 1990).

(13) John Milton, The Complete Poetry and Major Dose of Milton, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1957).