THE POET Algernon Swinburne (1837–1909) can be best described as a colorful eccentric who lived and wrote without shame in late Victorian England, where moral behavior was so strictly regulated that artists with bohemian ideas were performing incredible stealthy feats in order to launch their careers. The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood paid for and hosted their own exhibitions of original paintings when the established salons refused to entertain their too-realistic biblical scenes and brazen red-headed women in striking poses. Swinburne, perhaps inspired by his friends at the Brotherhood, defied his age entirely when he decided to write a poem about a romance between women.
In the 19th century, lesbianism was a taboo topic on a par with bodily functions. Even the landowner and traveler Anne Lister (1791–1840), a notorious seducer of women, recorded her private diary in a complicated secret code. It’s not an accident that her diaries ended up stashed in a wall for years, read by no one. But the educated elite of Victorian England also had a convenient historical smokescreen behind which they could veil their ventures into lesbian themes: Sappho of Lesbos, the great poet of Archaic Greece and an admirer of women.
In the time of Swinburne, Sappho’s existence was something of an inside joke among the cognoscenti, which included historians, theater people, and literary types, especially those who had similar predilections to those of Sappho.Through Sappho, authors could disguise their queer-coded love poems as innocent appreciations of Greek culture. Katherine Bradley (1846–1914) and Edith Cooper (1862–1913) did exactly that when they published their lesbian-themed collection of poems Long Ago under the male penname Michael Field (who was assumed to be a single man writing about his love of women). Swinburne pulled off a similar feat when he published “Sapphics” in his 1866 collection Poems and Ballads. Unlike “Michael Field,” he enjoyed the privilege of publishing under his own name.
In this poem, Swinburne is anything but subtle. His masculine name may have gotten the work past censorship, but those familiar with his terminology would have understood that he was writing the closest thing to girl-on-girl soft erotica that he could get away with. He actually uses the words “lesbians” and “sapphics” to describe women who love other women. And in his portrayal in “Sapphics,” another creative decision that is surprisingly modern, he presents lesbianism not as something dirty, scandalous, or doomed to tragedy, but as a sacred act on a par with an artist’s worship of their muse. In “Sapphics,” he writes about the Muses—of which Sappho herself appears as the Tenth—who are infatuated with the goddess Aphrodite, a sexual icon who had always been reserved for the male gaze. In the words of literature scholar Joyce Zonana, who conducted an in-depth analysis of the poem: “Sappho as Muse challenges tradition not simply in her humanity; she also directly confronts the Western (male) poetic imagination through her full sexual femaleness.”
The attraction of the fangirl-esque Muses to Aphrodite in “Sapphics” is expressed with feverish, desperate longing, demonstrated with the traditional seduction tactic of performing music for their object of desire. Aphrodite’s female admirers are essentially sirens, trying to gain her attention and lure her in through song, and they pursue her as obsessively as any male suitor with amorous intentions from Greek literature and mythology: “So the goddess fled from her place, with awful/ Sound of feet and thunder of wings around her;/ While behind a clamor of singing women/ Severed the twilight.”
The women in the poem also explore their sexuality with each other. Here is where Swinburne is at his boldest, and perhaps his most sympathetic to queer women. The kissing and touching between his female characters is strictly for their own pleasure and no one else’s, a striking subversion from the pornography of the previous Romantic Era, where physical acts of
female-to-female contact were conducted primarily for the entertainment of men (think the controversial Gamiani, or Two Nights of Excess, published anonymously in 1833, or the works of the Marquis de Sade, where lesbianism is both grotesquely fetishized and weaponized against the Catholic Church). Here are Swinburne’s words, which are romantic in nature, and not too innocent to the point where lesbianism can be interpreted as an adolescent “phase” which these Muses—all fully grown, consenting women—are expected to ease out of someday: “Saw the Lesbians kissing across their smitten/ Lutes with lips more sweet than the sound of lute-strings,/ Mouth to mouth and hand upon hand, her chosen,/ Fairer than all men;”
In this writer’s opinion, there are few male authors who can be trusted to handle the topic of lesbianism with dignity (Michael Cunningham’s The Hours comes to mind, and not may others). Yet Swinburne’s poem is, for the late nineteenth-century, an impressive attempt for its age. Not entirely perfect representation—he wasn’t writing directly from a lesbian’s perspective, after all—but passably Sapphic.
Emily R. Zarevich is an English teacher and writer from Burlington, Ontario.
