‘Poetry in Motion’: Movement as the Internal Logic of A.C. Swinburne’s “The Nightingale”

Abstract

Algernon Charles Swinburne was a nineteenth century English poet and critic who until the first decade of the twentieth century was the most well-known and critically appreciated of the decadent period poets of English Literature. This paper tries to reevaluate and re-view one of his early fragments collected in his poetic juvenilia:“The Nightingale.” It tries to explore the fragment’s relationship with some of his other lyric poems specifically the Sapphic poems of Swinburne and analyses this multifaceted poem as an exemplar of such diffuse themes as transformation, unbridled and insatiable desire, creative energy, fusion of binaries, order out of chaos and ultimately death. Moreover, it contends that the central logic that follows from this multitude of themes, both in terms of form and content, is ‘Movement.’ Keeping in mind the observations of Jerome J. McGann regarding the same the paper tries to arrive at a comprehensive working definition of Movement and searches for numerous manifestations of movement within the poem. Keywords: