"Quivering Web of Living Thought": Mapping the Conceptual Networks of Swinburne's Songs of the Springtides

Our paper will discuss conceptual networks
present in Victorian poet Algernon Charles
Swinburne's mid-career collection
Songs of the
Springtides
(1880) and how those networks may
be represented in TEI P5 XML markup and
graphic visualizations driven by the encoded
text.
Swinburne’s work is full of familiar signposts
and nodes, such as his trademark binary
oppositions and pairings: pain/pleasure, life/
death, love/hate, hope/fear, sleep/death. An
incredibly learned poet with an extensive
range of form and allusion, Swinburne’s poems
are packed with often obscure references to
the Bible, classical mythology, and Arthurian
legend. He wrote a number of political
poems addressing contemporary events. He
wrote parodies of other contemporary poets,
including Tennyson, Browning, and Rossetti.
And as Jerome McGann has noted, “No
English poet has composed more elegies
than Swinburne” (McGann 293). These binary
oppositions; the many biblical, mythical
and legendary references; the historical and
contemporary figures who are eulogized in the
elegies and praised in the many tributes and
dedications; the pervasive symbols of song and
the sea: these elements of Swinburne’s verse
all serve as familiar, easily identifiable nodes
of information, laden with meaning acquired
through strategic repetition and structural
integration into the intellectual networks of
Swinburne’s work. We will examine these nodes,
structures and architectonic forms in one of
Swinburne’s most artfully crafted and carefully
designed collections,
Songs of the Springtides
.
The mid-career
Songs of the Springtides
is a
particularly interesting volume in the context of
inter- and intra-textual networks. For
Songs of
the Springtides
, Swinburne originally planned
“a little volume containing three poems upwards
of 500 lines each in length, all of them in a sense
sea-studies” (Swinburne
Uncollected Letters
2:181). The three poems are: “Thalassius,” “On
the Cliffs,” and “The Garden of Cymodoce.” To
this “triad of sea-studies” Swinburne added the
“Birthday Ode” to Victor Hugo. Unannounced
but also present in the volume are three short
poems: the fifteen-line “Dedication” to Edward
John Trelawny, Swinburne’s “old sea king” and
a friend of Shelley’s (Swinburne
Uncollected
Letters
2:181); an untitled sonnet, with the
first line “Between two seas the sea-bird’s
wing makes halt;” and another sonnet, buried
in the notes to the ode for Hugo, “On the
proposed desecration of Westminster Abbey
by the creation of a monument to the son of
Napoleon III.”
This small volume is an artful example of a
deliberately fashioned and architected whole
connected by complex discourse networks of
key concepts that operate within, across, and
beyond the individual poems. Familiarity with
the poems of
Songs of the Springtides
reveals a
few key concepts, figures, or images of particular
import and penetration: Swinburne's pantheon
of literary heroes; song and music; the natural
world, especially the sea; the poet; the text.
In many cases occurrences of these concepts
may be identified algorithmically. However, one
cannot rely on string pattern matching to find
all words and phrases related to a particular
concept. In the case of
song
, for instance,
automated processes may be used to identify
the many clear and obvious occurrences of
this concept, phrases including words such as
song
,
songs
,
sing
,
singer
,
music
, etc. However,
the poems also contain phrases such as the
following: “lutes and lyres of milder and
mightier strings,” which is obviously related
to music, but less susceptible to automated
identification. A combination of automated and
manual markup then has been used to identify