The irony of Swinburne's Atalanta in Calydon.

Barr, Alan P.

The reach and power of Swinburne's irony in Atalanta in Calydon remains unexamined and unappreciated. From its initial reception in 1865, the poem has been recognized for its compelling, virtuosic prosody, its theological provocativeness, its exquisite relationship to Greek tragedy, and its pervasive concerns with fate, love, the treacherous-wonderful net of kinship, and with our inescapable mortalities. Together with Poems and Ballads, published the following year, it established Swinburne as a masterful, challenging, deeply learned, often heretical and offending, and clearly untrammeled acolyte of the muses.

Atalanta invited specific discussions of its Greekness. Had Swinburne produced the most successful, trenchant English drama in the Greek mode; was it importantly flawed; was his Erechtheus perhaps more authentic? These issues variously occupied and fascinated a number of classically-trained Swinburne critics. Especially in the burst of commentaries on Atalanta in the 1920s and early 30s, the depth of his knowledge of Greek tragedy and his ability to recreate it were debated. Marion Wier's published doctoral dissertation, The Influence of Aeschylus and Euripides on the Structure and Content of Swinburne's Atalanta in Calydon and Erechtheus (1920), initiated the contending appraisals. Wier simply aligns passages from the three playwrights to suggest parallels. Others, such as William Rutland and Samuel Chew, are more venturesome in their discussions. (1)

Certain assertions emerge as unarguable: Swinburne was an extraordinarily accomplished classicist; the concerns and even the tone of his drama are consonant with those of the ancients; and the exuberance and sensual playfulness of his prosody and very likely the attitude he assigns to his Chorus (of Calydonian maidens) depart from the conventions of G reek tragedy. Swinburne announced his admiration for Aeschylus and his disdain for Euripides. To those who had bristled that Swinburne violated the strict, spare classical form, Kenneth Haynes more recently responded that they were mistakenly accepting Winckelmann's Greece: "light," "definite," "precise." He sees in the poem the wilder, more embellished style of Aeschylus, adding that "Swinburne found in Aeschylus a language that can be used to express disintegration." "Complementing what I see as the central role of irony," Haynes continues, "'division' and its cognates are key words in Atalanta." (2)

The story of Atalanta, Althea, and Meleager, as Rutland and C. M. Bowra point out, was one of antiquity's best known legends, retold from Homer to Ovid. (3) Sophocles and Euripides each wrote a "Meleager" play and Aeschylus an "Atalanta," all of which--perhaps fortuitously for Swinburne--survive only in the meagerest of fragments (Bowra, p. 223).

Sidestepping the question of how exact Swinburne's scholarship actually was, the amalgam fused into Atalanta is astonishing. Within a luxuriantly lyrical dramatic poem (hardly a familiar quality of Attic tragedy), he achieves a cohesive and coherent simulation of a Greek drama. Distorting what would likely be expressed by a traditional chorus, Swinburne manages to berate whatever gods may be--in a manner that reproduces the attitudes associated, for example, with Sophocles. As Rutland observes, "Atalanta in Calydon is a symphony on the favorite theme of Greek tragedy--'Call no man happy while he lives'" (pp. 172-173). He particularly reminds us of Sophocles's comment in Oedipus at Colonus: "The happiest lot is never to have been born" (p. 189). Bowra suggests Swinburne's drama was "his tribute to Aeschylus and Sophocles, his attempt to reproduce the poetical spirit which he found in both of them" (p. 223).

The models, influences, themes, imagery, and prosody of Atalanta have been frequently discussed. There was a modern renascence of interest in Swinburne, probably seeded by John Rosenberg's 1967 article for Victorian Studies (which became the Introduction to the Modern Library volume of the Selected Poetry), followed in 1971 by this journal's double issue dedicated to the poet, and then Jerome McGann's beguiling conversation, Swinburne: An Experiment in Criticism (1972). (4) Ever since, Swinburne has been reasonably, if unevenly, visible, including in a second dedicated issue of Victorian Poetry in 2009, with an article on Atalanta by Katie Paterson. (5)

And yet--for all the gathering attention paid to Swinburne and to Atalanta itself, and for all of the last century's fascination with irony, there has been stunningly little discussion of this pivotal, controlling element in the play. What makes Oedipus or Agamemnon or The Bacchae so poignant are their damning ironies. Contributing crucially to the power of Atalanta is Swinburne's importation of this comparatively un-Victorian mode into his play. Few, however, in all of the debate about its classical qualities--or lackings--have commented on this, and none has paid serious, sustained attention to it. Wier noticed that Swinburne "is quite Aeschylean in his employment of dramatic irony" (p. 6), citing four examples, but doing nothing with them. In the next decade, Rutland devoted an almost hundred-page chapter to reviewing the relationship between Atalanta and the Greek tragedies, mentioning irony once, near the end, where he remarked that "an example of intenser irony would be hard to come by" (pp. 182-183) than Althea's claim, "For there was nevera mother woman-born / Loved her sons better." (6) A handful of modern critics have minimally noted the play's ironies. David Riede, for example, in his discussion of Swinburne's development in the 1860s and 70s, comments: Althea expresses the Swinburnian conviction that nothing is certain but change, and with unconscious irony she refers to the primary metaphor of the play, the burning brand, to remind us how little even the maternal bond can be counted upon.... Every reference to the strength of the attachment between mother and son, in fact, is fraught with ironic implications that it is not strong enough. (7)

The incidental and cursory comments that do exist overlook what seems clearly a deliberate, integral component of Swinburne's art in Atalanta. His recasting of the old legend thoroughly integrates a classical sense of the pervasively, ineluctably ironic human condition. The drama is saturated with this perception.

Though our first image of irony will probably be the comparatively local or limited verbal irony of something like "How sweet of you!," its more substantial and probing manifestations involve presenting contradictions between a person's view and his reality, between a person's aspiration and her prospects (cf. Antigone or Clytemnestra). The two principal sources cited from antiquity are Socrates (an "eiron" who presented as a naif, as he unraveled his disputants) and Sophocles--who, largely thanks to Connop Thirlwall's influential 1833 essay "On the Irony of Sophocles," became the exemplar of classical tragic ironists. (8) Characteristically, this trope of tragic, cosmic, or "Sophoclean" irony assumes its spectators are more aware of the events and what they portend than are the participants on stage. ("Every school boy knows" that, unlike Sophocles' audience, he has to reread Oedipus to appreciate the drama.)

This sense of cosmic irony, threaded into the fabric of Atalanta, has attracted a formidable shelf of commentary--at least since Thirlwall's monograph. Kierkegaard's Concept of Irony was an early cornerstone of his philosophical discourses; G. G. Sedgewick's Of Irony: Especially in Drama (1935) is an elegant exposition of the subject; the New Critics delighted in the form; Wayne Booth found it among the most powerful of rhetorical weapons (1974); and Douglas Muecke refined his study of irony through three revisions (1982). (9) The dazzling cornucopia of examples these writers display returns almost recursively to the ironic (tragic, cosmic) distance between how we would optimistically, even melioristically, like to see our place in the world and the ping pong balls of the fates that we apparently are; the gods evidently do "kill us for their sport."

Etched to varying depths, this deflating incongruity pervades the ancient tragedies. It evolves, accretes from individual verses, images, and events, providing the unity, the power, and the sense of futility we recognize. Much the same, I suggest, is true of Swinburne's refashioning of the Atalanta legend. Three decades before Swinburne's play, Thirlwall, thinking of Sophocles, had noted: The dramatic poet is the creator of a little world, in which he rules with absolute sway.... From his sphere however he himself stands aloof. The eye with which he views his microcosm and the creatures who move in it, will not be one of human friendship, nor of brotherly kindness, nor of parental love. (p. 9) All mortal strength is weakness, all mortal prosperity vain and transient, and consequently all mortal pride is delusion and madness. When man is most elated with the gifts of fortune, most confident of his security, then is his fall most certain: he is safe and strong only while he feels and acknowledges his own nothingness. (p. 30)

Reflecting on what he regards as this seminal monograph, Muecke recounts how Thirlwall "admits that the contrast between man with his hopes, fears, wishes, and undertakings, and a dark, inflexible fate, affords abundant room for the exhibition of tragic irony" (p. 22). Our reality is the reverse of expected good fortune; rather, there is, as Sedgewick asserts, "the sense of mocking fate," which "colours practically the whole of classic Greek literature" (p. 59). Booth speculates that "perhaps no other form of human communication does so much with such speed and economy" (p. 12). These are exactly the features that Swinburne has transplanted into Atalanta in Calydon.

Because Oedipus is the most readily familiar Greek tragedy and because we have become, since the nineteenth century, accustomed to referring to Sophoclean irony, I will tend to invoke it as my exemplum, all the while aware that, as Sedgewick chided, '"Sophoclean irony' is a term that had to wait for the nineteenth century to coin; and it is mere luck that the epithet was not 'Aeschylean' or 'Euripidean'" (p. 59). Atalanta in Calydon--throughout--benefits from the ironic elements identified with Greek tragedies as a group.

The Argument that introduces Swinburne's poeta establishes the ironic dimension that will dominate the world of Calydon as forcefully as the threatening fate that hovered, with long, quiescent periods, over Oedipus. The three Fates "prophesied of [Meleager] three things, namely these; that he should have great strength of his hands, and good fortune in this life, and that he should live no longer when the brand then in the fire were consumed." No matter that Althea quickly "plucked it forth and kept it by her," we know, as she will come to appreciate, that it is only the last of the three prophecies that matters. As determined as she is to deflect the oracle's prophecy, the image of the brand's being consumed by the fire will prevail. Seeming to resolve the threats expressed in Althea's dream, the Argument in fact establishes the ironic substrata of Swinburne's drama. Just as Oedipus deluded himself that he could evade the oracles (or Agamemnon that he could dismiss Cassandra, or Pentheus that he could bind Dionysos), so does Althea imagine she can securely control the brand.

Althea is both the central actor on stage performing the singular dramatic act and the primary vehicle or encapsulation of the poem's ironies. A good deal of the power of her characterization is how her perceptiveness grows as the plot progresses. Although the basic tension in ironic tragedy is usually between the knowing spectator and the limited vision or blindness of the hapless protagonist, occasionally there is a medial structure, where a player gains some insight (exclusive of a privileged seer such as Teiresias or Cassandra). Shortly before retiring to hang herself, Jocasta, at the arrival of the Herdsman, pleads that Oedipus cease his questioning--which she recognizes as dangerous. Althea is a more aware and involved figure. Her response reflects her ironic complexity. She recounts her instant reaction to the burning brand, confident that Meleager's life was thus protected. She believes the Fates have favored and pitied her (1. 255); in her heart she "Laughed likewise, having all [her] will of heaven" (1. 281). Althea with "Love / Trampled the ember and crushed it with swift feet" (ll. 287-288). Her unwarranted confidence jars; her image of "swift feet" disconcertingly alludes to the famously swift feet of Atalanta.

Althea's control of the brand, the metric of Meleager's life, first appears in the nurturing, protective language of motherhood. This dramatically shifts to that of sinister control. Though never exactly carefree or ebullient, she is initially contented with Meleager, beaming encouragement: Few men, but happy; of whom be thou, O son, Happiest, if thou submit thy soul to fate, And set thine eyes and heart on hopes high-born And divine deeds and abstinence divine. (ll. 536-539) She apes the tones of an approving mother: And gloriously hast though lived, and made thy life To me that bare thee and to all men born Thankworthy, a praise for ever. (ll. 546-548)

The ironies here that seem unwitting--intended for the alert spectator--assume a more pointed and ominous tone after the appearance of Atalanta. Oeneus anticipates his wife's fears, admonishing his son: "nor set toward hers thine heart, / Son, lest hate bear no deadlier fruit than love" (ll. 641-642). Althea instantly commends the king on his wisdom and raises both the ante and the irony: "O son, / I pray thee that thou slay me not with thee. / For there was nevera mother woman-born / Loved her sons better" (ll. 656-659). Still the passionate mother, Althea, with sustained irony, elaborates her warnings: Fear thou the gods and me and thine own heart, Lest all these turn against thee; for who knows What wind upon what wave of altering time Shall speak a storm and blow calamity? And there is nothing stabile in the world But the gods break it; yet not less, fair son, If but one thing be stronger, if one endure, Surely the bitter and the rooted love That bums between us, going from me to thee, Shall more endure than all things. What dost thou, Following strange loves? why will thou kill mine heart? The gods have given thee life to lose or keep, Thou shalt not die as men die, but thine end Fallen upon thee shall break me unaware. (ll. 683-704)

The piquancy of her using "burn" to describe the "bitter and rooted love" between them and her assertions that his life is his "to lose or keep," that he "shall not die as men die," and that he will break her unaware prepare us for Meleager's equally ironic exclamation that "there is nothing terribler to men /Than the sweet face of mothers and the might" (ll. 710-711). And this all precedes the slaying of Toxeus and Plexippus, the ostensible cause of Althea's righteous, swelling anger. John Jordan finds in this situation "the central theme of Atalanta: the bitter paradox of maternal love." (10)

If it is horribly ironic that a mother destroys her son, simultaneously destroying herself, the play similarly wonders about love--her motive force--itself. Althea's summoning of love as the determining passion and bond dovetails with another unsettling irony in Atalanta. Not only does the seemingly sweet and protective maternal love turn acrid and devouring, the nature of love is scrutinized and excoriated. The first Chorus almost joyfully anticipates the change of season, "When the hounds of spring are on winter's traces" (l. 65). It celebrates: For winter's rains and ruins are over. And all the season of snows and sins; The days dividing lover and lover. (ll. 89-91)

By contrast, ironically so, Althea enters the stage harshly pessimistic. Rather than looking forward to the spring that will mark the end of winter ruins, she stresses how "Night, a black hound, follows the white fawn day" (l. 125). You cannot, she claims, "pray back" the winter that will "plague all men for sin," nor the storm that will "Eat up like fire the ashen autumn days" (ll. 127, 129, 132). She uses the imagery of fire to express her bitterness: "For all my sleep is turned into a fire, / And all my dreams to stuff that kindles it" (ll. 146-147). If in the past, out of strong love, she had retrieved the brand and Meleager's life from the flames, she now perceives them as part of "some four-foot plague" with which the unpraiseworthy gods harry the land (l. 149). She focuses her ire on "Love, a thwart sea-wind full of rain and foam" (l. 184). Responding to the Chorus's praise of Atalanta as holy, like "The sprinkled water or fume of perfect fire," she is most moved "that for wise men as for fools / Love is one thing, an evil thing, and turns / Choice words and wisdom into fire and air." It leads not to joy but to grief, "Sharp words and soul's division and fresh tears" (ll. 196, 208-210, 212).

Althea's hostility to love is uncompromising. That the image of fire is double-edged contributes to the larger irony of the love that destroys. Still early in the unfolding of the drama, Althea would arm her son, "Lest love or some man's anger work him harm" (l. 313). He should "Love ... the law and cleave to things ordained" (l. 454). She urges him to live a blameless life because "Blind love bums out" (l. 489), eerily anticipating her own destruction of him. Love, which we ordinarily look to for warmth and protection and associate with promise, devolves into the opposite of what it seems, a destructive, consuming flame. A mother's passion indeed proves terrible. (11) The images of warmth, fire, consuming, and even passion, which traditionally convey the attractions of love in poetry, here all turn tail on themselves. A consuming passion (an emotional feast in romantic poetry) becomes a passion that consumes, paralleling the flame that inspires but then devours.

Love is further subverted by Meleager's presumed love object, Atalanta herself. Oeneus hardly mollifies Althea's apprehension by his satisfaction, ironic of course, at Atalanta's arrival. He welcomes the help of "a woman, foreign born, / Virgin," happily, a woman "Unlovable, no light for a husband's house" (ll. 633-634). He urges his son not to set his heart toward hers, "lest hate bear no deadlier fruit than love" (l. 642). Both his and his queen's warnings are soon reinforced by Atalanta's own blunt declaration: "I shall have no man's love / For ever, and no face of children born" (ll. 967-968).

Adam Roberts, for one, has noticed the perversity of Meleager's love choice. Atalanta is sent by the notoriously chaste Artemis, to relieve the curse she herself has visited upon Calydon. Swinburne is, of course, aware of the irony that the apparent reason for this bloody disharmony is the supposedly unifying force of love.... The love that Atalanta represents is divisive precisely because Atalanta (as Artemis's devotee) stands for the forces of nature which are opposed to the order of the city, the Dionysiac rather than the Apollonian. (12)

It is ironic that Meleager's love is a follower of Artemis, a figure so unlike Aphrodite. But the goddess of love herself is vividly associated with a wound, with being cleaved. Jordan sees in this "a fundamental ambivalence toward female sexuality, specifically toward the female genitals. That which is most desirable is also most threatening" (p. 110).

In a manner perhaps alien to traditional Greek choruses, but certainly consonant with Swinburne's play, the Chorus lyrically intones the case against love: We have seen thee, O Love, thou art fair; thou art goodly, O Love; Thy wings make light in the air as the wings of a dove. Thy feet are as winds that divide the stream of the sea; Earth is thy covering to hide thee, the garment of thee. Thou art swift and subtle and blind as a flame of fire; Before thee the laughter, behind thee the tears of desire; And twain go forth beside thee, a man with a maid; Her eyes are the eyes of a bride whom delight makes afraid; As the breath in the buds that stir is her bridal breath: But Fate is the name of her; and his name is Death. For an evil blossom was born Of sea-foam and the frothing of blood. Blood-red and bitter of fruit, And the seed of it laughter and tears, And the leaves of it madness and scorn; A bitter flower from the bud. (ll. 719-734)

The rhymed linking of fire and desire and of breath and death, along with a stunningly graphic evocation of the birth (and implications) of Aphrodite, leave the auditor almost agape at the savaging of love. That which ideally unites in practice violently divides--mother from son, lover from lover, breath from body,--returning us to Haynes's point about division's being a key word in Atalanta.

More striking than the repeated use of "division" in depicting love is the figure Swinburne develops out of "cleave." Cleave and its cognates (clove, cleaving, cleft, cloving) are not only comparatively unusual locutions, they have the particular rhetorical property of being auto-antonymns, terms that have two opposite meanings: to cleave (to) and to cleave (apart). Margot Louis mentions this dual quality of cleave in the poem in the context of her argument about divisions. (13) I would like to assert its rhetorical importance in the ironic dimension of the poem. Swinburne's artistry daringly punctuates Atalanta with variants of a word that can hardly slip by unnoticed. A few of its twenty or more iterations indicate the power and tension they convey: from Apollo's "tresses cleaving lock to lock" (l. 31) to Althea's ominous praising of the "cloven shadow" of Meleager's plume that divides the bright light of his brass helmet (l. 266), from the Chorus' reminding Althea that she should "cleave to him" (l. 1684) to the "cleaving of the sea" (l. 1810), the term is an emphatic, rich poetic lode. Within five lines, Althea can bemoan the son who "clove mine heart through" and recall how she felt "Thy weight cleave to me, a burden of beauty" (ll. 1928, 1932), juxtaposing its contrasting senses. The Messenger's recounting of Meleager's heroics, "as fire cleaves wood / So [he] clove and drove them, smitten in twain" (ll. 1543-44), mordantly anticipates his own demise; fire both cleaves to and cleaves apart, much like love for the "adorable, detestable" Atalanta or a mother's fearsome love. If at the core of irony is a Janus-like double-sidedness, the auto-antonym cleave is a pitch-perfect vehicle for conveying it. The world which, as Matthew Arnold lamented, only seems to "lie before us like a land of dreams," in reality consumes us, rending us from life--two other verbs Swinburne employs to similar effect. In her final speech, Althea joins these images, declaiming she is "severed" from herself; "My name that was a healing" (the literal meaning of Althea, as Peckham notes [p. 279]) has changed: "My name is a consuming" (ll. 1943-45). "Consume" has the opposite potentials for Swinburne of exaltation, of enkindling life and of utterly devouring it--both manifestations of passion.

"Cleave," "consume," and "rend" are individual instances of terms that Swinburne uses to exploit the ambiguities and ironies of words. But Atalanta, itself a poem so finely crafted, is marked by a suspicion of words themselves. Speech, in this drama of words, is periodically impugned as ineffective, unreliable, dangerous. Althea, who will close her performance declaring her silence, early encourages Meleager: "Speech too bears fruit, being worthy" (l. 449). The Chorus apparently adds to her credibility, telling him that the gods have given her "noble wisdom and fair words," words he should respect (l. 569). He, however, responds that he will "cleave" to his sense of "doing justly," though he is not as "subtle of wit" in weaving "sweet words" as his mother is (ll. 574-578). Althea chastises her son and brothers to "refrain" their lips (l. 930), "Lest words turn snakes and bite you uttering them" (l. 931). Her wise words and his just actions lead equally to the inexorable fatality. Words, like the breath that inspires them (and much like Hopkins's "Leaves, like the things of man") may be glittering and compelling, but they tease, expire, and lead to death. The inadequacy and instability of speech subverts any facile, literal understanding of the characters' situations, actions, and fates.

Though he is assuredly writing for his contemporary Victorian audience, Swinburne freely imports Greek allusions to enhance his effect, including his ironic perspective. Most obvious are the fairly specific echoes of Oedipus. Althea complains that: all the fates Shed fire across my eyelids mixed with night, And burn me blind and disilluminate My sense of seeing, and my perspicuous soul Darken with vision; seeing I see not, hear And hearing am not holpen. (ll. 218-223)

The substance and imagery gains force recalling the interchanges between Oedipus and Teiresias--with the blind seer's taunt that though Oedipus has eyes he sees not and the king's subsequent recognition of this shattering, ironic truth. Althea's exchanges with the Herald and then the Messenger parallel exchanges in Oedipus. She exclaims "heaven is good" at the news of the boar's demise, to which the Herald is quick to respond, "fallen is all the trouble of Calydon," and she, "Laud ye the gods; for this they have given is good" (ll. 1229, 1361, 1362). Not only are these comments laceratingly ironic in the unfolding of Atalanta, but they also bring to mind Oedipus's short-lived hopefulness at the return of Creon from Delphi and the successive appearances of the two messengers, the first announcing the reassuring death of Oedipus's father and the other fearfully rescinding any cause for cheer or comfort. Compounding this is Althea's response, when the slain bodies of Toxeus and Plexippus are brought forth. She is confident that they sleep "no shameful sleep, however slain / For my son surely hath avenged you dead" (ll. 1489-90). This is as misguided as is Oedipus's zealous search for the murderer of Laos. It does not even seem like a stretch to see Althea's satisfaction that the gods have favored her "a little in their sight" with the dream warning (l. 253) as a parody of Oedipus's expectation that having heard his cursed fate he can outwit it. If Althea strenuously struggles with her extraordinary, tortuous relationship with her son, Jocasta can serve as her model.

Swinburne also scatters a number of references across the dialog that reinforce for his audience both the classical aura of the play and its ironic bent. Althea fondly thinks of her sister Leda's sons, Castor and Pollux: "O sweetest kin to me in all the world ... / Like kindled lights in untempestuous heaven," leading Meleager to remember "their sisters; one swan-white / The little Helen, and less fair than she / Fair Clytemnestra" (ll. 398-400,412-414). These memories blithely predate the time when the twins will leave Menelaus' palace, enabling Paris to abduct Helen, and the unsavory future of Clytemnestra. Meleager's description of Atalanta as "Most fair and fearful, feminine, a god / Faultless" (ll. 619-610) immediately follows his recollection of the notably less impeccable Medea, "deadlier than the sea" (l. 616). The Chorus' description of Aphrodite as "a mother of strife" (l. 767) is more a controlling metaphor than an illustrative allusion.

Rutland described Atalanta as "a Greek tragedy written by a Hellene of the nineteenth century" (p. 147). Beneath the clear Greek trappings is a scathing depiction of the human condition, one that employs the ancient conventions to address its contemporary world. Beyond simply urging that we are blind, fated creatures, Swinburne's poem debunks love and God as palliatives against the world's buffetings--subjects that have a distinctly nineteenth century resonance (cf. Schopenhauer or Nietzsche or Wagner or T. H. Huxley). If we look to love for a sense of unity and connectedness, the plangent irony is that it more likely divides and destroys; as Althea anguishes, "a fire enkindled of mine hands / And of mine hands extinguished: this is he" (ll. 1895-96). Both love of family and erotic love, which should bind and enrich, lead to dissolution. Mark Siegchrist begins his "Reading" of Atalanta by calling it "one of the bleakest interpretations of human experience in all of Victorian literature. Life in this work is perceived as a hopeless tangle of psychological contradictions," a painful "state of inevitable frustration." The urge to unite the fragments of our existence, he continues, in this play is called love, something "both impossible to resist and impossible to satisfy" (p. 695). (14)

Yet more directly contemporary are the fulminations against a god that consigns us to a world that disappoints, harries, and then kills us. In a marked departure from Greek practice, Swinburne's Chorus indicts the gods, for bequeathing to men a world where love "endures for a breath" and life is "the shadow of death"; fashioning him "with loathing and love," they made a cosmic jest of "The holy spirit of man" (ll. 323-341). There is but "one thing which is ours yet cannot die--/Death" (ll. 1045-46). The best-known and perhaps most startling verse in the poem is the Chorus's denunciation of "The supreme evil, God," who covered us with his hate (l. 1151). (15)

The nineteenth century was acutely conscious of the ambiguous situation of individual lives and egos--from Wordsworth's Prelude to Swinburne's fellow Pre-Raphaelite George Meredith to Hardy's Wessex folk and their purblind Doomsters. We desperately seek a place in the sun--and are all too prone to egoistical self-inflation. Swinburne, with haunting beauty, articulates the discomforting paradox that our puffery notwithstanding, God "made us transitory and hazardous, / Light things and slight" (ll. 1154-55). Rosenberg suggests that Swinburne "perceived in paradoxes" (p. xxxi); and to a Victorian--whether reflective Christian pietist or Freethinker--nothing could have been more paradoxical or ironic than the mismatch between God's imputed benevolence and his cruel (sadistic) creation. The Christian insistence upon such a deity in the face of life's grinding intransigence is anachronistically, defiantly ironic in Swinburne's drama.

Notes

(1) Marion Clyde Wier, The Influence of Aeschylus and Euripides on the Structure and Content of Swinburne's Atalanta in Calydon and Erectheus (Ann Arbor: George Wahr, 1920); William R. Rutland, Swinburne: A Nineteenth Century Hellene (Oxford: Blackwell. 1931); Samuel C. Chew, Swinburne (Boston: Little, Brown, 1929).

(2) Kenneth Haynes, English Literature and Ancient Languages (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2003), p. 162.

(3) C. M. Bowra, The Romantic Imagination (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1961).

(4) John Rosenberg, "Introduction," Swinburne: Selected Poetry and Prose, ed. Rosenberg (New York: Modern Library, 1968), pp. vii-xxxiv; Jerome J. McGann, Swinburne: An Experiment in Criticism (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1972).

(5) Katie Paterson, "'Much Regrafted Pain': Schopenhauerian Love and the Fecundity of Pain in Atalanta in Calydon," VP 47 (2009): 715-731.

(6) Swinburne: Poems and Ballads, Atalanta in Calydon, ed. Morse Peckham (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1970).

(7) David G. Riede, Swinburne: A Study of Romantic Mythmaking (Charlottesville: Univ. Press of Virginia, 1978), p. 90.

(8) Connop Thirlwall, "On the Irony of Sophocles," Remains: Literary and Theological Essays of Connop Thirlwall, vol. 3 (1833; London, 1878), pp. 1-57.

(9) G.G. Sedgewick, Of Irony: Especially in Drama (1935; Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1967); Wayne C. Booth, A Rhetoric of Irony (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1974); Douglas Muecke, Irony and the Ironic (London: Methuen, 1982).

(10) John O. Jordan, "The Sweet Face of Mothers; Psychological Patterns in Atalanta in Calydon," VP 11 (1973): 107.

(11) Elizabeth A. Guzynski, fascinated with the play's masochism, pursues the mother-son relationship in a somewhat different direction. She finds "the figure of a mother who will not play by the rules and a son in love with his own death--a definition of masochism inseparable from a definition of family desire" ("Oedipus is Burning: Fate, Desire and Masochism in Algernon Charles Swinburne's Atalanta in Calydon," Nineteenth-Century Literature 54 [1999]: 203).

(12) Adam Roberts, "Hunting and Sacrifice in Swinburne's Atalanta in Calydon and Erechtheus," SEL 31 (1991): 760-761. Mark Siegchrist has pointed out the oddity of Meleager's attachment to Atalanta, whose patron-goddess would destroy love ("Artemis's Revenge: A Reading of Swinburne's Atalanta in Calydon," SEL 20 [1980]: 695-712). The action is "in the spring, a circumstantial detail which is a rich source of irony, both in the rather obvious Liebestod vein, with a young man dying of love in the flower of his youth" and in the identification of Artemis, the "mother of seasons," with a "sex-denying chastity and mortal destructiveness." This, he finds, is the play's first hint of the "central theme of the polarized self-contradiction of human life" (p. 699). Artemis looms over the action. Meleager's reckless love for Atalanta is in "the bitterly ironical circumstance of his blindly paying futile homage to a devotee" of so antipathetic a goddess (p. 708).

(13) Margot K. Louis, Swinburne and His Gods (Montreal: McGill's-Queen's University Press, 1990), p. 27.

(14) Katie Paterson, arguing that Swinburne's view of love and existence resembles Schopenhauer's, takes the poet's depiction of love in another, philosophically as bleak direction, while incidentally mentioning irony. She begins by stressing the intimate bond they share, then proceeds to urge that love is not the ultimate cause of human misery in Atalanta; existence itself is (p. 715).

(15) H.A. Hargreaves examines, in his essay "Swinburne's Greek Plays and God, the Supreme Evil," Modern Language Notes 76 (1961): 607-616, the poet's attack on Victorian religion and its Christian deity.