.C. Swinburne's "By The North Sea" of 1880 describes a barren, empty landscape like that of Sir Edward Coley Burne Jones' Souls on the Banks of the River Styx, yet Swinburne chooses to depict a landscape without any humans present, instead focusing on the personification of natural elements such as the sea, earth, wind and sun.
Swinburne evokes images of animal noises, yet an absence of life within the immediate vicinity of this landscape, writing that:
That the roar of the banks they breasted
Is hurtless as bellowing of herds,
And the strength of his wings that invested
The wind, as the strength of a bird's;
As the sea-mew's might or the swallow's
That cry to him back if he cries,
As over the graves and their hollows
Days darken and rise.
By referring to the days passing over graves, Swinburne evokes a sense of eternity and changelessness that resembles the gray, empty afterlife of Burne-Jones' study; yet, due to its lack of human figures, it appears even more savage and violent: Swinburne compares the interplay between the sea, wind and earth to a fire (section II, stanza 1) and warfare (II, 4). Swinburne creates images of passion and sensuality as well as warfare between natural forces as he assigns female pronouns to the sea and earth and masculine pronouns to the wind and sun. His poem's landscape maintains tension and drama despite the absence of human characters by reassigning the roles of man and woman to nature.
According to George P. Landow, in "Swinburne's 'By The North Sea', . . . time destroyed the Christian faith just as the worship of Venus and Proserpine fell to Christianity's rise;" and "Swinburne presents a vision of horror, for turning from the desecrated, destroyed buildings that once were built to the everlasting glory of an everlasting Christian God, he draws our attention to the graves that have been uncovered and swallowed by the sea's encroachment upon the land" (source).
Questions
1. How does Swinburne's focus on elements of nature embody a sense of the sublime? Can this be seen as something that replaces the force of God and religion in poems such as Christina Rossetti's?
2. By personifying natural forces that serve as reminders of the persistence of time, even without a human to observe its passage, does Swinburne implicate humans at all as destroyers of the faith? Does he implicate them by calling attention to their absence?
3. By recalling The Odyssey, does Swinburne attempt to make a point about the powers of poetry in preserving religion despite the passage of time?
4. What are some possible reasons for Pre-Raphaelites', such as Swinburne and Burne Jones, preoccupation with nothingness and eternity? Landow compares the barrenness of "By The North Sea" to the "spiritual bleakness" (source) of Wallace Stevens' poetry. Could these bleak images function as precursors to later, post-modern views of isolation, Godlessness and colorless landscapes such as the ones featured in the poems of T.S. Eliot and Wallace Stevens?
Related Materials
- Gendered Nature in Swinburne's "By the North Sea"
- "By the North Sea"
- Extreme Contradictions in Swinburne's "By the North Sea"
- "Waste endless and boundless:" A.C. Swinburne's "By The North Sea"
Last modified 5 November 2004