Une fleur du mal? Swinburne's "The Sundew" and Darwin's Insectivorous Plants

Victorian Poetry

Volumn 41, Issue 1, 2003, Pages 131-150

  Smith, Jonathan ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 33846559803     PISSN: 00425206     EISSN: 15307190     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/vp.2003.0015     Document Type: Article

References (51)

1. [Grant Allen], "Queer Flowers," Cornhill 3 n.s. (1884): 404-
2. Literary scholars writing on Swinburne's poem, even while acknowledging his own familiarity with the sundew, often describe the plant as rare. While the sundew is not ubiquitous in the way many other wild species are, it ranges throughout Britain. As the comments of Allen and other reviewers and popularizers of Darwin's work make clear, the sundew was well known and easily accessible
3. Swinburne to Henry Bright, January 6, 1880, The Swinbume Letters, ed. Cecil Y. Lang, 6 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959-62), 4:121
4. Thanking Bright for A Year in a Lancashire Garden (1879), Swinburne refers to "The Sundew" as "a poor thing, but mine own." A search in the Chadwyck-Healey English Poetry Database confirms the sundew's absence from English poetry prior to the nineteenth century. Very few references appear during the century, and all are very much passing ones, usually in descriptions of moorscapes. Like Swinburne, other poets speak of the sundew's delicate beauty, but none hints at its darker side
5. June 4, 1884, Swinburne Letters, 5:70. Swinburne's description of the sundew as "a rarity" seems in this context to be an acknowledgment of the plant's unusual nature rather than a comment on its range and numbers
6. Harold Nicolson included "The Sundew" in a vaguely defined group of miscellaneous poems, "Incidental and Decorative, but mainly under the Pre-Raphaelite influence," that he regarded as barely worthy of comment. Ian Fletcher and Anne Walder have subsequently pursued this Pre-Raphaelite connection, although Walder's primary aim is to show that the language and meaning of the poem are influenced by Baudelaire. Both Jean Overton Fuller and Philip Henderson argue that "The Sundew" belongs with Swinburne's other early poems of lost love, Fuller connecting it with "The Triumph of Time" and "A Leave-Taking," Henderson with "Before Parting" and "Felise," the two poems bracketing it in Poems and Ballads. The original version of the poem is about love rather than lost love, but the revisions for Poems and Ballads clearly make such a grouping plausible. Rikky Rooksby puts "The Sundew" in a category that specifically includes two of the lost-love poems, but his organizing principle for this grouping is that the poems in it all have a contemporary setting. Kerry McSweeney and Douglas Fricke see "The Sundew" as linked to Swinburne's concern with humanity's relation to the natural world. See Harold Nicolson, Swinburne (New York: Macmillan, 1926), p. 108
7. Ian Fletcher, Swinbume (London: Longman, 1973), pp. 16-17
8. Anne Walder, Swinburne's Flowers of Evil: Baudelaire's Influence on Poems and Ballads, First Series, Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis 25 (Stockholm: Almquist and Wiksell, 1976), pp. 40-43
9. Jean Overton Fuller, Swinburne: A Biography (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), p. 109
10. Philip Henderson, Swinburne: The Portrait of a Poet (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974), pp. 263-265
11. Rikky Rooksby, A.C. Swinburne: A Poet's Life (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1997), p. 133
12. Kerry McSweeney, "Swinburne's Poems and Ballads (1866)," SEL 11 (1971): 675
13. McSweeney, Tennyson and Swinburne as Romantic Naturalists (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1981), pp. 136-138
14. Douglas C. Fricke, "The Idea of Love in Swinburne's 'The Sundew,"' ELN 13 (1975-76): 194-201
15. Catherine Maxwell, ed., Swinburne, Selected Poems (London: Dent, 1997), p.106. Even those critics like Maxwell, Fricke, and Kenneth Haynes (Poems and Ballads and Atalanta in Calydon [New York: Penguin, 2001]) who note the sundew's insectivorous character seem unaware of its contested status in the 1860s
16. Allison Pease, "Questionable Figures: Swinburne's Poems and Ballads," VP 35 (1997): 43
17. Kathy Psomiades, Beauty's Body: Femininity and Representation in British Aestheticism (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1997), p. 59
18. On Swinburne's parodic use of sacramental imagery, particularly of the eucharist, to attack and offer alternatives to Anglo-Catholicism, see Margot K. Louis, Swinburne and His Gods: The Roots and Growth of an Agnostic Poetry (Kingston: McGill-Queen's Univ. Press, 1990)
19. Antony H. Harrison, Victorian Poets and Romantic Poems : Intertextuality and Ideology (Charlottesville: Univ. Press of Virginia, 1990), p. 181
20. [John Morley], Saturday Review 22 (1866): 145-147
21. repr. in Swinburne: The Critical Heritage, ed. Clyde K. Hyder (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970), pp. 22-29
22. McSweeney, "Swinburne's Poems and Ballads," p. 675
23. and Tennyson and Swinburne, p. 137
24. Algernon Charles Swinburne, "Charles Baudelaire: Les Fleurs du Mal," Spectator 35 (1862): 999
25. Both Fletcher and McSweeney criticize the ending, although McSweeney drops his comment that the poem is "badly marred by its banal conclusion" ("Swinburne's Poem and Ballads," p. 675) from Tennyson and Swinburne as Romantic Naturalists
26. Both Fuller and Henderson regard the "secret" of "The Sundew" as Swinburne's love for his cousin, Mary Gordon, now generally identified as Swinburne's "lost love," even though there is no obvious linguistic connection. That the sundew knows the face as well as the name of the speaker's beloved strengthens the connection to Mary, for she and Swinburne walked and rode together frequently as children and young adults, both on the Isle of Wight and in Northumberland. The have/halve pun may thus be rooted in the fact that the sundew would have only heard Swinburne address Mary by her first name, her surname remaining a secret. The two were very close, and her 1864 engagement and subsequent marriage were devastating for Swinburne. For their relationship, see Rooksby, A.C. Swinburne, pp. 21-24, 101-110
27. Swinburne's later depreciations of "The Sundew" as "boyish" (Swinburne Letters, 5:40, 70; 6:153) may reflect embarrassment at the poem's personal turn. Nicholas Shrimpton's comment that "The Sundew" "hover[s]" between the expressive and dramatic lyric is another expression of the critical uncertainty of how closely to identify the speaker of the poem with Swinburne ("Swinburne and the Dramatic Monologue," The Whole Music of Passion: New Essays on Sivinburne, ed. Rikky Rooksby and Nicholas Shrimpton [Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1993], p. 61)
28. Richard Sieburth, "Poetry and Obscenity: Baudelaire and Swinburne," CL 36 (1984): 353
29. For a readable account of Darwin's botanical work, see Mea Allen, Darwin and His Flowers (New York: Taplinger, 1977)
30. Both Sanderson's lecture and Hooker's address were widely reported. The full text of the former was published in Nature 10 (1874): 105-107, 127-128
31. while the latter was, for example, extensively summarized in The Gardeners' Chronicle 2 n.s. (1874): 260-261
32. "The Flowers of the Future," Punch 67 (1874): 255
33. "Carnivorous Plants," Scribner's 9 (1875): 774
34. Charles Darwin, Insectivorous Plants, vol. 24 of The Works of Charles Darwin, ed. Paul H. Barrett and R.B. Freeman, 29 vols. (New York: New York Univ. Press, 19864989), pp. 1, 2, 3
35. Gowan Dawson, "Walter Pater, Aestheticism, and Victorian Science," Ph.D. dissertation, University of Sheffield, 1998
36. [W. H. Mallock], "The Late Professor Clifford's Essays," Edinburgh Review 151 (1880): 483. The most extensive twentieth-century investigation of Swinburne's poetry in relation to Darwinian evolution supports this view
37. See Joseph Warren Beach, The Concept of Nature in Nineteenth-Century English Poetry (1936; New York: Russell and Russell, 1966), pp. 455-469
38. Lionel Stevenson gives Swinburne limited attention in Darwin Among the Poets (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1932), but his conclusions anticipate Beach's
39. Darwin's Orchids was reviewed with works on "consanguineous" marriage as early as 1863 in [G.W Child], "Marriages of Consanguinity," Westminster Review 24 n.s. (1863): 88-109
40. Darwin's son, George, took up the questions extensively in "On Beneficial Restrictions to Liberty of Marriage," Contemporary Review 22 (1873): 412-426
41. and "Marriages Between First Cousins in England and Their Effects," Fortnightly Review 18 n.s. (1875): 22-41
42. A. H. Huth, who incorporated the Darwins' work in his Marriage of Near Kin (1875; 2nd ed. 1887), reviewed father and son together in "Cross-Fertilisation of Plants, and Consanguineous Marriage," Westminster Review 52 n.s. (1877): 466-485. Charles even encouraged an unsuccessful attempt by John Lubbock, his neighbor, scientific ally, and local M. P., to convince Parliament to include a question on cousin marriage in the 1870 census
43. Review of Insectivorous Plants, by Charles Darwin, The Athenaeum, July 17, 1875, p. 88
44. [Alfred Austin], "The Poetry of the Period: Mr. Swinburne," Temple Bar 26 (1869): 467-468
45. T. H. Huxley, "On the Border Territory between the Animal and Vegetable Kingdoms," Macmillan's Magazine 33 (1876): 378
46. John Ruskin, The Works of John Ruskin, Library Edition, ed. E.T Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, 39 vols. (London: George Allen, 1903-1912), 25:507-508, 390-391. The parts in which these comments appear were originally published in 1886 and 1882, respectively. Ruskin's chapter on the butterwort, also issued in 1882, acknowledges the "fly-trap character, in which these curiously degraded plants are associated with Drosera" (25:433), only in the final paragraph
47. Ellice Hopkins, "Carnivorous Plants," Contemporary Review 35 (1879): 50
48. M. C. Cooke, Freaks and Marvels of Plant Life (London, 1882), p. 49
49. J. E. Taylor, The Sagacity and Morality of Plants (London, 1884), pp. 262, 303
50. Rosa M. Barrett, Ellice Hopkins: A Memoir (London: Wells, Gardner, Darton, [1907]), p. 88
51. Grant Allen, Colim Clout's Calendar (New York, 1883), pp. 130-131