(3) Dante:  a Dramatic Poem.  By Heloise Durant. (Kegan Paul.)

(4) Father O’Flynn and Other Irish Lyrics.  By A. P. Graves. (Swan Sonnenschein and Co.)

(5) The Judgment of the City and Other Poems. (Swan Sonnenschein and Co.)

MR. SWINBURNE’S LAST VOLUME

(Pall Mall Gazette, June 27, 1889.)

Mr. Swinburne once set his age on fire by a volume of very perfect and very poisonous poetry.  Then he became revolutionary and pantheistic, and cried out against those that sit in high places both in heaven and on earth.  Then he invented Marie Stuart and laid upon us the heavy burden of Bothwell.  Then he retired to the nursery and wrote poems about children of a somewhat over-subtle character.  He is now extremely patriotic, and manages to combine with his patriotism a strong affection for the Tory party.  He has always been a great poet.  But he has his limitations, the chief of which is, curiously enough, the entire lack of any sense of limit.  His song is nearly always too loud for his subject.  His magnificent rhetoric, nowhere more magnificent than in the volume that now lies before us, conceals rather than reveals.  It has been said of him, and with truth, that he is a master of language, but with still greater truth it may be said that Language is his master.  Words seem to dominate him.  Alliteration tyrannises over him.  Mere sound often becomes his lord.  He is so eloquent that whatever he touches becomes unreal.

Let us turn to the poem on the Armada: 

The wings of the south-west wind are widened; the breath of his fervent lips, More keen than a sword’s edge, fiercer than fire, falls full on the plunging ships.  The pilot is he of the northward flight, their stay and their steersman he; A helmsman clothed with the tempest, and girdled with strength to constrain the sea.  And the host of them trembles and quails, caught fast in his hand as a bird in the toils; For the wrath and the joy that fulfil him are mightier than man’s, whom he slays and spoils.  And vainly, with heart divided in sunder, and labour of wavering will, The lord of their host takes counsel with hope if haply their star shine still.

Somehow we seem to have heard all this before.  Does it come from the fact that of all the poets who ever lived Mr. Swinburne is the one who is the most limited in imagery?  It must be admitted that he is so.  He has wearied us with his monotony.  ‘Fire’ and the ‘Sea’ are the two words ever on his lips.  We must confess also that this shrill singing—­marvellous as it is—­leaves us out of breath.  Here is a passage from a poem called A Word with the Wind: