The Harem of Words’: Attenuation and Excess in Decadent Poetry

Abstract

In 1912, Edward Thomas criticized Swinburne for keeping ‘a harem of words, to which he was constant and absolutely faithful. Some he favoured more than others, but he neglected none.’¹ Although this comment targets a particular aspect of Swinburne’s work and ignores poetry that does not fit with it—his Villon translations, for instance, or imitations of Border ballads—even his admirers find it difficult to dispute where much of his oeuvre is concerned. Throughout his career, the poet returned repeat- edly to gods and rods, the sea, the wind, pain, pleasure, sleep, and the rhyme of ‘bright’ with ‘light’: he never lost a fondness for beginning lines ‘And all’. In Thomas’s view, Swinburne achieved his effects through ‘dependence] on sound and an atmosphere of words which is now and then concentrated into an intensity of effect which is almost magical’ without quite being so.² ‘Love of sound and especially of rhyme per- suaded him to a somewhat lighter use of words than is common among great poets’, he continued, noting Swinburne’s tendency to accumulate cairns of recurrent adjectives, his foregrounding of incantatory rather than communicative alliteration and an addiction to rhyme which ‘acted. .. as a pill to purge ordinary responsibilities’. The consequence of such strategies in Thomas’s view, were words that ‘altogether suggest rather than infallibly express his meaning’.³