Passions that sprang from sleep and thoughts that started,
Shall death not bring us all as thee one day
Among the days departed?
In a passage such as this, not considering the nature of the content matter, and setting aside qualities in the style peculiar to Swinburne, there is clearly sounded in the actual writing the note that distinguished Victorian poetry from the poetry of earlier ages. The quality in this which is distinctively Swinburne’s own, as it is in the great body of his work, is one in which the effect of metrical movement, or more precisely the play of metrical movement upon diction, is more important than it commonly was in the verse of his contemporaries. As I have suggested earlier in this essay, the technical originality of poetry by the time that Tennyson began to write, if not, indeed, before that, was to be sought rather in diction, the elements of which we have discussed, and in rhythmic currents moving along more or less established metrical channels, than in actual metrical invention. But Swinburne more than any other poet of his time calls for modification of this statement. To distinguish rhythmic beat from metrical pattern is difficult, perhaps impossible to do by any rule-of-thumb. But a careful examination of Swinburne’s verse as a whole reveals that, in comparison with poets of his own stature, he had little rhythmic subtlety, a diction that was superbly copious but seldom touched with the rarer magic of discovery, and a metrical genius that, in its power, its variety and its essential artistic significance, may be said without over-statement to remain beyond the approach of any other English poet. While most people would, I think, accept the generalisation without question, in so far as it concerns Swinburne’s diction, they might question it in respect of rhythm and metre. The average reader of poetry, whose business rightly is to enjoy what he is reading before coming to a close analysis of its nature, should he come to that at all, if asked what most struck him in Swinburne’s poetry would probably say that it was its rich and intoxicating rhythm. The trained critical mind, on the other hand, might assert that, masterly as Swinburne’s metrical performance was, it was hardly ever metrical invention. Both would be difficult to answer, and yet I think both might be persuaded. We have only to take any characteristic passage from one of the supreme creators of rhythmical life, such as Shakespeare and Milton and Wordsworth and Keats and Tennyson and Arnold, and to see how nervously the phrasing line runs through it, to realise how little of this line there is in Swinburne, and that the beat which rings so seductively or impressively in our ears from The Garden of Proserpine and The Forsaken Garden and the Atalanta choruses and a hundred other splendid poems, is really a metrical beat and not a rhythmical beat at all. And on the other hand, while it would be dangerous to say that any single metrical form used by Swinburne could not be shown to have its model in an older use, his metrical abundance and ingenuity are so great, the new combinations he makes so many and fortunate, the effect he produces so incisive and unforgettable, that his use of metre may reasonably enough be allowed as an original achievement of genius. It is not difficult to support the whole position by a single poem or, indeed, by two stanzas of a single poem.
Let us go hence, my songs; she will not hear.
Let us go hence together without fear;
Keep silence now, for singing-time is over,
And over all old things and all things dear.
She loves not you nor me as all we love her.
Yea, though we sang as angels in her ear,