Life.—Swinburne was born in London in 1837. His father was an admiral in the English navy, and his mother, the daughter of an earl. The boy passed his summers in Northumberland and his winters in the Isle of Wight. He thus acquired that fondness for the sea, so noticeable in his poetry. His early experiences are traceable in lines like these:—
"Our bosom-belted billowy-blossoming hills,
Whose hearts break out in laughter like the sea."
He went to Oxford for three years, but left without taking his degree. The story is current that he knew more Greek than his teachers but that he failed in an examination on the Scriptures. He sought to complete his education by wide reading and by travel, especially in France and Italy.
When he was twenty-five, he went to live for a short time at 16 Cheyne
Walk, Chelsea, in the western part of London, in the same house with
Dante Gabriel Rossetti and George Meredith. Swinburne admired
Rossetti's poetry and was much impressed with the Pre-Raphaelite
virtues of simplicity and directness.
Swinburne never married. His deafness caused him to pass much of his long life in comparative retirement. His last thirty years were spent with his friend, the critic and poet, Theodore Watts-Dunton, at Putney on the Thames, a few miles southwest of London. Swinburne died in 1909 and was buried at Bonchurch in the Isle of Wight.
Works.—In 1864 England was enchanted with the melody of the choruses in his Atalanta in Calydon, a dramatic poem in the old Greek form. Lines like the following from the chorus, The Youth of the Year, show the quality for which his verse is most famous:—
"When the hounds of spring are on winter's traces,
The mother of months in meadow or plain
Fills the shadows and windy places
With lisp of leaves and ripple of rain."
The first series of his Poems and Ballads (1866) contains The Garden of Proserpine, one of his best known poems. Proserpine "forgets the earth her mother" and goes to her "bloomless" garden:—
"And spring and seed and swallow
Take wing for her and follow
Where summer song rings hollow
And flowers are put to scorn."
Many volumes came in rapid succession from his pen. In 1904 his poems were collected in six octavo volumes containing 2357 pages. This collection includes the long narrative poems, Tristram of Lyonesse and The Tale of Balen, a faithful retelling of famous medieval stories. He, however, had more ability as a writer of lyrics than of narrative verse.