Kipling and Swinburne: ‘A Madonna of the Trenches’

Abstract

Strictly speaking, this chapter should be headed ‘Kipling and Morburnetti’, ‘Morburnetti’ being a coinage on the model of ‘MacSpaunday’ and intended to epitomise a Pre-Raphaelite ghost compounded of the brilliant generation of 1850s Oxford poets — Morris, Rossetti and Swinburne, each of whom produced some variant of a re-created medieval world. ‘Morburnetti’ appears in Kipling’s early work as a triune poetic model. Louis Cornell was the first to pay close attention to Kipling’s adoption of their stylistic mannerisms and subject-matter, which is particularly marked in a manuscript notebook dating roughly from the period 1882–3 called Sundry Phansies. As he pointed out, they not only were attuned to Kipling’s mood (he was suffering the miseries of unhappy first love at the time), but constituted a poetic avant-garde which any aspiring young poet might have copied.¹ However, as Swinburne is the most prominent of the three in the tale on which this chapter focuses, provided that the reader appreciates that ‘Swinburne’ stands for a cluster of conflicting emotions connected with an older generation, the apparent exclusion of the others need not worry us here.²

Some are best seen in full sun, others under a lamp and a few are only good to be used in dark places where they were made. The women should know this. (Introduction to the Outward Bound Edition)