"Regret": A Swinburne Revision Author(s): Rikky Rooksby Source: Victorian Poetry, Vol. 34, No. 1 (Spring, 1996), pp.

117-120 Published by: West Virginia University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40002547 . Accessed: 14/09/2011 00:35
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R1KKYROOKSBY /117
3 See Erdman, pp. 816-818, for a concise description of the text. As Bentley puts it, "thereis no known referenceto Vala [or The FourZoas] and the first printed mention of it is in the by Blake's contemporaries, cataloguein Gilchrist'sLife (1863)" (p. 459). Bracelet(1829). L.E.L.'s"The Lost Pleiad"was publishedin The Venetian are The lines E.B.B. may be remembering the following: "Whetherfair dream, or actual sight, / It was a vision of delight; / For free to his charm'deyes were given / The spiritsof the starryheaven"(11.186-189). Mitford'spoem reads,in part:"Mylittle book, as o'er thy page so white, / With half-closed eyes in idlest mood I lean, / Whose is the form that rises still between / Thy page and me, - a vision of delight?"(11.1-4). and E.B.B.and Mitfordwere correspondents friendsby 1839. Wordsworth's poem, publishedin 1801, contains the lines, "On me the chance-discovered spot / Gleamedlike a vision of delight"(11.3-4). 6 and Architects, vols. (London, 1829-33), 2:147-179. Repr. in JosephA. Wittreich, ed., Nineteenth-Century Accounts of William Blake (Gainesville: Scholars'Facsimilesand Reprints, 1970), pp. 147-194.
Allan Cunningham, Lives of the Most Eminent British Painters, Sculptors

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A "Regret": SwinburneRevision
RikkyRooksby

Swinburnedid not revise his poems after they had been published, in contrast to the habit of a poet such as Matthew Arnold. Once a poem had appearedin print, whether in periodical or book form, Swinburnedid not feel the need to tinker with it, except occasionally to change a title. For example, between 1867 and 1878 "A Lost Vigil" became "A Wasted Vigil," "Child'sSong in Winter" became "Winter in Northumberland," and "The End of a Month" (1871) was changed to "At a Month's End" (with stanza 28 being added). It is striking thereforeto come acrossa more substantialrevision. The poem in question is "Pastiche,"published in Poems and Ballads, SecondSeries (1878). This lyric first appeared in the FortnightlyReviewfor September 1867 (p. 271) under the title "Regret" and to my knowledgethis version has never been reprinted:
Regret Now the days are all gone over Of our singing, love by lover, Days of summer-coloured seas; Days of many melodies.

118/ VICTORIAN POETRY

Now the nights are all past over Of our dreaming, where dreams hover In a mist of fair false things, Nights with quiet folded wings. Now the kiss of child and mother, Now the speech of sister and brother, Are but with us as strange words, Or old songs of last year's birds. Now all good that comes or goes is As the smell of last year's roses, As the shining in our eyes Of dead summer in past skies. Pastiche Now the days are all gone over Of our singing, love by lover, Days of summer-coloured seas Blown adrift through beam and breeze. Now the nights are all past over Of our dreaming, dreams that hover In a mist of fair false things, Nights afloat on wide wan wings. Now the loves with faith for mother, Now the fears with hope for brother, Scarce are with us as strange words, Notes from songs of last year's birds. Now all good that comes or goes is As the smell of last year's roses, As the radiance in our eyes Shot from summer's ere he dies. Now the morning faintlier risen Seems no God come forth of prison, But a bird of plume-plucked wing, Pale with thoughts of evening. Now hath hope, outraced in running, Given the torch up of his cunning And the palm he thought to wear Even to his own strong child - despair.1

Swinburne'srevisions repay careful examination. The change of title is symptomaticof his whole approach."Regret" a more emo' is

RIKKYROCKSBY lug which immediately tionally naked and specific title than "Pastiche," distances the authorfrom the poem by implyingthat the primaryimpoem as pulse in its creation is imitation. The OED cites Swinburne's makesplain the central the earliest recordeduse of the term. "Regret" emotion of the lyric; "Pastiche" gives no such clue. The first change comes in line three where "Days of many melodies" is changed to "Blown adrift through beam and breeze."The earlier version reinforces the happyimage of the past; the revision emphasizesthe loss of seas" with "blownadrift."The revision of "daysof summer-coloured line eight has a similareffect. "Nightswith quiet folded wings"seems and the impressionof a peaceful, sheltering;"afloat"echoes "adrift," lack of groundingis magnifiedby "widewan." So far Swinburneseems to be intensifyingthe feeling of loss. But he is also concerned to depersonalizeit, as the change in stanzathree makes clear. This is the most personal moment in "Regret." Swinburneseems to be articulatinga sense of estrangementfrom his family which must have been acute during the winter of 1866-67 when this poem was probablywritten. Writing to George Powell on December26, 1866, he complainsthat his art "is at a discount here,"2 and it is obvious that neither his parents nor sisters or brother apin proved of Poemsand Ballads(1866), which had reappeared the auwithdrawnby Moxon and Co. in August. Admiral tumn after being Swinburnetold Ruskinon September17 that his son's writings"contain passagesthat give us great pain and sorrow,and check the longing desire to be pleased"(Letters,1:184-185). It is also possible that "Now the speech of sister and brother"alludes to the loss of his closest sister Edith in 1863 throughconsumption.In the later version the human relationship is replacedby a purelyfigurativeone- "Now the loves with faith for mother, / Now the fearswith hope for brother" as though he were uncomfortable with the explicit nature of the original statements. The last stanza of "Regret"ends the poem with an image of memories of shared experience- "dead summer in past skies" and leaves that to speak for itself. In the later version, Swinburneuses a more extreme verb- "shot" and personifies (and therefore poeticizes, just as in stanza three) the summer.He then adds two stanzas. Stanza five is a description of a winter's day, no sooner risen than of driftingto night, "pale"echoing the "wan" stanzatwo. Stanzasix is built on a personificationof hope defeatedby its own "child,"despair. The notion of hope running a race and being "cunning"is not especially effective, but the relation between it and despairhas psychological meaning, since the disappointmentof hope (and herein lies,

POETRY i2o/ VICTORIAN for Swinburne, its danger) can lead to the opposite position of despair. Swinburne'sstoicism would preferto avoid both. Hope and despair (along with other abstractnouns, like fear) become very noticeable in the later poetry, as Swinburne'stendency to think in antitheses hardensinto a vice of style. This unusual act of revision reveals something important about Swinburne's attitude toward poetry. He liked "Regret"enough to want to reprint it but not without makingthese changes, even though is it was not his usual practice to do so. "Pastiche" a far less personal which readsmore like one of Symons'or Hardy's poem than "Regret," shorter lyrics. As ever, Swinburne is reluctant to be too revealing. "Regret"also reminds us that the elegiac mood which bore fruit in
Poems and Ballads, Second Series was not solely the product of the

poet's lonely thirties, but has its roots in the personal turmoil of the 1860s.

Notes
1 2 A. C. Swinburne,Poems,6 vols. (London: Chatto and Windus, 1904), 3:90-91. Cecil Y. Lang, The Swinburne Letters,6 vols. (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1959-62), 1:215. Hereaftercited as Letters.