“Sweet for a little even to fear and
sweet,
O Love! to lay down fear as Love's fair feet;
Shall not some fiery memory of his breath
Lie sweet on lips that touch the lips of death?
Yet leave me not; yet if thou wilt, be free;
Love me no more, but love my love of thee,
Love where thou wilt, and live thy life; and I,
One thing I can, and one Love cannot die.”
Algernon
Charles Swinburne
Taken from http://www.victorianweb.org/painting/ssolomon/paintings/1.html
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A COMMENTARY ABOUT SIMEON SOLOMON’S DAMON AND AGLAE AND THE LINES BELOW THE PAINTING, BY ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE Algernon Charles Swinburne (London,
1837-1909) was a famous English writer in the Victorian Era. “Se estableció en Londres y comenzó una
larga relación con el poeta y pintor Dante Gabriel Rossetti y los escritores
William Morris y George Meredith(...)Atalanta en Calydon (1865) le lanzó a la fama. Este poema
constituyó un ambicioso intento por reproducir la forma y espíritu de la
tragedia griega y pone de manifiesto el talento extraordinario del poeta para
mantener la melodía verbal.(...) Escritor de
brillantes recursos técnicos, dominó la música del verso y sus experimentos
en el uso del metro y la rima crearon una gran variedad de efectos poéticos
originales.”( www.epdlp.com/escritor.php?id=3022
)He was very
interested in classical mythology, as we can see, for instance, in the same
title of the painting in this paper commented (Damon and Aglae) specially in Greek tragedies, and, although he
was an outstanding poet like the majority of his contemporaries like the
great Alfred Tennyson, his most influential work was an essay on Elizabethan
drama and Shakespeare’s works that was published the year Swinburne died. Damon and Aglae by Simeon Solomon was exhibited for the first time in The Royal Academy (RA) in 1866, but the poem was written, according to some sources consulted, between 1863 and 1864, presumably from the RA catalogue and is described by Adrienne Johnson in her English and History of Art as “a passionate encounter, rich in color and emotion(...)The viewer sees the lovers at a charged moment. The two stand staring into each other's eyes while he reaches for her in plea or in passion, and she raises her hands between them, either to embrace him or to create a barrier. Solomon frames the picture so that their figures take up most of the space of the painting, drawing attention to their postures and allowing their realistic, warmly colored robes to fill the painting. The warm, rosy hue of their skin serves as a paler extension of the vibrant reds of their robes. The rich color, from their hair to the fold of their robes creates an urgent sense of passion, the pinks and reds giving the figures a vibrant presence, full of warmth, life and love”. ( www.victorianweb.org/painting/ssolomon/paintings/johnson11.html). I completely agree with the writer of the article. The first thing we think when we see the picture is that there are two lovers showing their feelings of love, passion and endearment to each other. And we see the influence of classical (Ancient Greek) mythology of Swinburne and maybe the painter in almost every respect in the painting: the hairstyle of the characters, the features of their bodies, the dressing of them (both dressed in red, the color of passion, the most appropriate term to describe the picture as Adrienne Johnson has already said). She continues with her depiction of the painting: “The names point to characters in classical mythology, but they do not illustrate a particular narrative. The absence of a defining place -- the blue and gray landscape serves more to contrast and accentuate the warm glow of the figures rather than to provide a setting -- and the suggestion of emotion through color make Solomon's work a represenation of passion and love, rather than a myth”( www.victorianweb.org/painting/ssolomon/paintings/johnson11.html). She’s right when she tells us the lovers are not in a specific place where they are wonderfully in love, the colors of the sky may mean that they are just in a cloudy afternoon or it can symbolize the feelings of them (I think that they can be the feelings of the man, Damon, but I will explain this later, in the analysis of the poem). With respect to the work, I have to say that
it is a simple, short, easy-reading and excellent poetic composition. The
vocabulary used by the author is very easy to understand for anyone with a
relative knowledge of the English language and of the literary vocabulary. Although Swinburne is one of the most
representative poets in the Victorian Age, some of the aspects in the poem
are more typical of Romanticism. Charles Swinburne repeats several times the
word love, and the expression of
love was one of the main topics in that movement started at the end of the 18th
Century. Referring to the structure of the poem, it
has an only stanza with eight lines where the rhyme is AABB/AACC. As I have already said, and I think this is the
main analyzable topic both in the poem and in the picture, the cloudy sky in
different tones of blue and grey can mean the sadness and fear of Damon
because he can lose his beloved Aglae. Comparing lines 3, 4, 5 and 6 with the
painting we can see this more clearly. In the picture we see Damon throwing
Aglae with his two arms (he really loves her, he does not want to lose her,
he wants to avoid Aglae leaves him), and Aglae tries to scape from him (she
is really in love to him because she does not want to hurt him and for that
reason she prefers to leave him). Swinburne perfectly explains this fact: “Shall not some fiery memory of his breath/
Lie sweet on lips that touch the lips of death?/(here Swinburne wonders
if Aglae does not want to kiss Damon because Aglae’s lips are condemned so
Aglae is going to die if she kisses him)Yet
leave me not; yet if thou wilt be free;/ Love me no more, but love my love of
thee. With this Swingburne show as a master how Damon asks his beloved to
love the life they lived together, not to keep on loving him, but at least
she must keep on loving the time they spent together. The good times must
remain over the bad ones, Damon asks Aglae to stay remembering the time when
they were an only human being, an only person, when they were in love and
that forget the disgraces that have happened to them while they were
together. |
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