The eternal conflict between land and sea plays out in the palace's third room. The “iron coast and angry waves” battle to break each other directly next door to the previous stanza's coastal scene of a lone figure pacing along the sea's sandy edge. Menacing undertones of the night sea's dangers rise to the surface in this stanza as an allegory for the struggle between human society and the chaotic forces of nature. Referring to it as the “iron coast” provides the key to understanding the hint of a deeper meaning in the stanza.
Endless expanses of water beat at the shores of civilization, as indicated by the reference to iron—a natural element extracted and reformed by humans to build the structures and machines that drove the Industrial Revolution. Though the description of the iron coast can refer simply to the cliffs' colors, the critical ambiguity paints a poetic image of a coastal boundary wrought by humans to fend off the vast, inhospitable sea.
The waves of chaos batter the shores of civilization, but in the end the waves are “rock-thwarted” and leave the land's defenses intact. The sea's destructive energy is fended off for the moment, but the “bellowing caves,/ Beneath the windy wall” belie the ultimate vulnerability of the cliffs to erosion by the ceaseless battering by the wind and waves. This twist complicates the underlying conflict between human industry's constructive efforts and nature's destructive forces.
A.C. Swinburne approaches the same allegorical conflict from the opposite vantage point in his poem “By the North Sea.” The crashing waves are thwarted under the cliffs in “The Palace of Art,” but in “By the North Sea, “Like ashes the low cliffs crumble,/ The banks drop down into dust” (259-60). Swinburne frames the conflict using almost exactly the same language and tone, with the same indications of an allegorical proxy fight between the civilized land and the wild sea. Iron again supplies the reference to industrialism, “But the grasp of the sea is as iron,/ Laid hard on the land” in a reverse of the expected sides in the battle of the elements (265-6).
A closer examination of “The Palace of Art” suggests that the speaker—or at least the author—recognizes that land, and therefore humans' constructed civilization, always ultimately succumbs to the wild forces of wind and water. The battle between sea and cliffs in “The Palace of Art” occurs directly after the scene on the beach, with waves lapping up against the sand. Swinburne includes the “Wide sands where the wave draws breath” as a reminder of the beaten and broken rocks that lie under the ocean and along the already-conquered stretches of sandy shores (270). The site of conflict in “The Palace of Art” still represents an on-going struggle, but the beach referenced before it acknowledges the fate of land in its struggle with water and man's constructed order in its struggle with natures perpetual chaos.
Swinburne's identification with water, “My mother, my sea,” in “By the North Sea” calls into question the rigidity of man's association with land rather than water (274). Human cities and civilization seem to be firmly rooted to the quickly eroding land, but the human spirit more easily floats outside of the constraints of civilization and can instead offer “My dreams to the wind everliving,/ My song to the sea” (523-4). William Bell Scott's portrait of Swinburne in profile by the sea illustrates the tension between the author's wild eyes and red hair and his neatly ordered three-piece suit. A reading of this painting in the context of the battle between land and sea in “The Palace of Art” and “By the North Sea” reveals the apparent conflict between Swinburne's wild spirit and the structured human society in which he lived.
The conflicts between land and sea, civilization and nature, become immediately evident in the brief glimpse depicted in “The Palace of Art,” and the allegory persists through the writing of “By the North Sea.” Swinburne does not contradict Tennyson on the existence of a conflict; in fact, Swinburne employs much of the same language to build the association between the superficial physical erosion and the deeper struggle of civilization to overcome nature's forces. Rather, Swinburne advances the idea that man need not side with civilization in that battle—a philosophy he seems to have lived by throughout his turbulent and tragic life.
