With lips that lost their Grecian laugh divine
160 Long since, and face no more called Erycine;9
A ghost, a bitter and luxurious god.
Thee also with fair flesh and singing spell
Did she, a sad and second prey,1 compel
Into the footless places once more trod,
165 And shadows hot from hell.
16 And now no sacred staff shall break in blossom,2 No choral salutation lure to light
5. Apollo, god of light and poetry. (Odes 1.2.33-34). 6. Associated with mourning. 'Laurel': the crown 1. The first 'prey' of Venus had been Tannhauser, of Apollo, a wreath honoring poets. whom she had lured into the 'footless places' of 7. I.e., flickering light of the underworld. her cave. Raudelaire is her 'second prey.' Swin8. Of Lethe, the river of forgetfulness in Hades. burne, after reading Baudelaire's 1861 pamphlet 9. The Venus of medieval legends held her court on Wagner's Tannhauser (1845), described this inside a mountain in Germany (the Horselberg). Venus as 'the queen of evil, the lady of lust.' This later Venus is a transformed version of the 2. Such a miraculous event occurred when Tannjoyous foam-born goddess associated with the hauser made a pilgrimage to Rome to seek absoisland of Cythera and also worshipped in Sicily at lution for having lived in sin with Venus. Previously a shrine on Mount Eryx (hence 'Erycine'). The the pope had denied absolution until the day his Roman poet Horace described her as 'blithe god-staff should bloom. dess of Eryx, about whom hover mirth and desire'
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WALTE R PATER / 150 5 170A spirit sick with perfume and sweet night And love's tired eyes and hands and barren bosom. There is no help for these things; none to mend And none to mar; not all our songs, O friend, Will make death clear or make life durable. Howbeit with rose and ivy and wild vine And with wild notes about this dust of thine 175 At least I fill the place where white dreams dwell3 And wreathe an unseen shrine. 17 Sleep; and if life was bitter to thee, pardon, If sweet, give thanks; thou hast no more to live; And to give thanks is good, and to forgive. 180 Out of the mystic and the mournful garden Where all day through thine hands in barren braid Wove the sick flowers of secrecy and shade, Green buds of sorrow and sin, and remnants grey, Sweet-smelling, pale with poison, sanguine-hearted, 185 Passions that sprang from sleep and thoughts that started, Shall death not bring us all as thee one day Among the days departed? 18 190For thee, O now a silent soul, my brother, Take at my hands this garland, and farewell. Thin is the leaf, and chill the wintry smell, And chill the solemn earth, a fatal mother, With sadder than the Niobean womb,4 And in the hollow of her breasts a tomb. 195Content thee, howsoe'er, whose days are done; There lies not any troublous thing before, Nor sight nor sound to war against thee more, For whom all winds are quiet as the sun, All waters as the shore. 1866-67 1868
3. Presumably the abode of the ghosts of the dead. than the goddess Leto, the goddess's children? 4. After Niobe boasted of having more children Apollo and Diana (Artemis)?killed them all. WALTER PATER
1839-1894
Studies in the History of the Renaissance, a collection of essays published in 1873, was the first of several volumes that established Walter Pater as one of the most influential writers of the late Victorian period. His flair for critical writing may have first been sparked when he was an undergraduate at Oxford (1858?62), where he heard and enjoyed the lectures of Matthew Arnold, who was then professor of poetry. After graduation Pater remained at Oxford, a shy bachelor who spent his life teaching classics (for the story of his earlier years see 'The Child in the House' [1895], an
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1506 / WALTER PATER
autobiographical sketch that provides a helpful introduction to all of his writings). In
view of his quiet disposition Pater was surprised and even alarmed by the impact
made by his books on young readers of the 1870s and 1880s. Some of his younger
followers such as Oscar Wilde and George Moore may have misread him. As T. S.
Eliot wrote somewhat primly, '[Pater's] view of art, as expressed in The Renaissance,
impressed itself upon a number of writers in the nineties, and propagated some con
fusion between life and art which is not wholly irresponsible for some untidy lives.'
It can be demonstrated that Pater's writings (especially his historical novel Marius
the Epicurean, 1885) have much in common with the works of his earnest-minded
mid-Victorian predecessors, but his disciples overlooked these similarities. To them
his work seemed strikingly different and, in its quiet way, more subversive than the
head-on attacks against traditional Victorianism made by Algernon Charles Swin
burne or Samuel Butler. Instead of recommending a continuation of the painful quest
for Truth that had dominated Oxford in the days of John Henry Newman, Pater
assured his readers that the quest was pointless. Truth, he said, is relative. And instead
of echoing Thomas Carlyle's call to duty and social responsibilities, Pater reminded
his readers that life passes quickly and that our only responsibility is to enjoy fully
'this short day of frost and sun'?to relish its sensations, especially those sensations
provoked by works of art. This epicurean gospel was conveyed in a highly wrought prose style that baffles
