MEMORIES OF SWINBURNE

New Zealand Listener, Volume 36, Issue 927, 17 May 1957, Page 11

MEMORIES OF SWINBURNE

Sir,-It is pleasant to follow in s/he Listener Walter Brookes’s trail of Swinburne’s footsteps. This recalls times of surging joy on youthful discovery of Swinburne’s magic, joy which can still be felt, tempered though it may be by cooler judgment, after the passing of many years. I had "The Pines," Putney, pointed out to me when I first drove into Londén. Years before, about onefifteen on a morning in 1909, I received in a New Zealand newspaper office the "late cable," the last news that came to us. This time it consisted of two words: "Obituary Swinburne." Hurtiedly I wrote a short footnote, and

quoted from memory a verse from "The Garden of Proserpine-"From too much love of living," and so on, Was it "no life lives for ever,’ or "no man lives for ever’? I got it wrong. Mr Brookes’s article may move some to inquire into that queer ménage at "The Pines." Edmund Gosse dealt with it in his biography of the poet, and Quiller-Couch has a first-class chapter on this book and the poet generally in Studies in Literature, first series. Quiller-Couch had no doubt that Swinburne was a great poet, and he says so with true Victorian enthusiasm, but he is emphatic about his artistic weaknesses, and candid on the debit side of Watts-Dunton’s praiseworthy rescue, with its 30 years of guardianship. I am glad Mr. Brookes quotes from "A Forsaken Garden," a haunting poem, applicable to many an old home in New Zealand. Over the meadows that blossom and wither, Rings but the note of a sea-bird’s song; Only the sun and the rain come hither All year long. In How to Write, Stephen Leacock ‘misquotes the last line as "all the year long," and thereby weakens it. This is an excellent example of what small de- tail can convey in poetry. Yes, Swinburne is quotable, The Oxford Dictionary of Quotatians, 1941, gives him four

pages.

A.

M.

(Wellington).