'SONG NEW-BORN': RENAISSANCE FORMS IN SWINBURNE'S LYRICS (ODE).

摘要

Swinburne's adaptations of Renaissance forms of the ode exemplify his ability to transform past poetic tradition into his own idiom. Essentially a late Romantic, he continues the Romantic "revival" of Renaissance spirit and poetic practice. In his poetry, as in much Renaissance verse, the literary influences are cosmopolitan. English Renaissance prosodic experiments provide important models. Swinburne also looks to the continent and to classical poets for inspiration and prosodic models. The result is often a versification that stretches the boundaries of and invigorates English prosody.;The subtlest adaptations are Romantic nature poems created from Renaissance forms. In these, the Romantic sense of sublime nature is given new perspective. The continuity of the Renaissance and Romantic traditions is upheld. At the same time, Swinburne, like Milton, uses forms of a past tradition to revivify and transform the aging tradition of which he is a late representative--in Swinburne's case, nineteenth-century Romanticism.;His adaptations of Renaissance forms range from early "pastiches"--imitations of French fixed forms and classical meters--to stanzas modeled on that of Milton's "Nativity Ode" and on Keats's "Ode to a Nightingale" stanza, which is itself adapted from the sonnet. Some of these forms have prosodic traits that Swinburne uses throughout his poetry: three-part structures, refrains, repetends, and other kinds of repetition that create antiphonal effects. The adaptations are more than imitations of external forms, however. They also bring into play genres and conventions with which the forms are associated. Especially significant is the historical and conventional association of the ode with music, and thus with song forms. Swinburne's transformation of a Renaissance form in "To a Seamew" weds lyric song form to the basically antithetical Romantic practice of infusing the prosody with musicality.