Poem of the week: Anima Anceps by Algernon Charles Swinburne | Poetry

Anima Anceps

Till death have broken
Sweet life’s love-token,
Till all be spoken
That shall be said,
What dost thou praying,
O soul, and playing
With song and saying,
Things flown and fled?
For this we know not –
That fresh springs flow not
And fresh griefs grow not
When men are dead;
When strange years cover
Lover and lover,
And joys are over
And tears are shed.

If one day’s sorrow
Mar the day’s morrow –
If man’s life borrow
And man’s death pay –
If souls once taken,
If lives once shaken,
Arise, awaken,
By night, by day –
Why with strong crying
And years of sighing,
Living and dying,
Fast ye and pray?
For all your weeping,
Waking and sleeping,
Death comes to reaping
And takes away.

Though time rend after
Roof-tree from rafter,
A little laughter
Is much more worth
Than thus to measure
The hour, the treasure,
The pain, the pleasure,
The death, the birth;
Grief, when days alter,
Like joy shall falter;
Song-book and psalter,
Mourning and mirth.
Live like the swallow;
Seek not to follow
Where earth is hollow
Under the earth.

The title of Swinburne’s poem (from Poems and Ballads, First Series, 1866) can be translated as “double-headed soul”. Less literally, “anceps” (double-headed) also applies to the kind of syllable in Greek and Latin verse that may be either long or short. Swinburne’s subject is not his own mind, complex and non-binary though it was. Under the light veil of its logical questioning, the poem is didactic: it’s designed to expose the contradictions implicit in Christian belief and set out a more realistic and honest alternative.

Of course there’s much more to it than argument. The poem is compelling in the depiction of existence itself as contradictory. Death/birth, grief/joy, praying/playing, pain/pleasure and many other opposing elements are densely packed into the whole structure. Spelled out, the antitheses sound crude, but they are very gracefully handled. Distinctions blend and harmonise, aided by the verse form. In each stanza, three sets of rhymed dimeter lines with feminine endings are followed by a fourth dimeter with a masculine ending. This pattern occurs four times in each of the three stanzas. Here are the end-words of the first to illustrate the rhyme-scheme: broken, token, spoken, said/ praying, playing, saying, fled/ know not, flow not, grow not/ dead/ cover, lover, over, shed.

Under the melody, there’s a sharper, wittier tongue, reasoning out the case against pious hypocrisy and, perhaps specifically, against poets whose work reconciles secular and spiritual aspirations. What is the soul doing, if it asserts its belief in eternity in one gesture (praying) and then mourns the evanescence of life in another gesture, that of “playing / With song and saying”? Fasting and weeping in any case won’t make a difference to the unfolding of events in time, and the losses entailed. The diction and rhythm of the poem which conduct the case against Christian piety, perhaps also contain in their song a hint of epicureanism.

The last stanza is the mellowest. It recommends “a little laughter” – an engagingly modest ingredient suited to a place among the concrete objects that now accumulate: roof-tree and rafter, song-book and psalter. (At this point, it seems that religious piety itself might be woven into the poem’s tapestry of opposites.) The poet-philosopher directs his listeners away from a focus on time and change. Swallows are exemplary, perhaps because of their migratory habits. Swinburne has run out of time and space to explore the analogy, but clinches things very neatly in the final admonition: “Seek not to follow / Where earth is hollow / Under the earth.” That repeated, stressed monosyllable “earth” pulls us up abruptly. That the grave is now hollow, empty, is clearly not intended to suggest the resurrection of the body but its ultimate reduction.

Readers interested in exploring the origins of the poem further, and Swinburne’s work in general, may be interested in this thesis by Sara Lyons.