"Hymn to Proserpine"

  1. The Romantic poets of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries often wrote poems in which a depressed speaker longs for death or release from pain, using lamenting the inadequacy of his poetry, or even his inability to write at all (e.g. Coleridge's "Dejection: An Ode," Wordsworth's "Intimations of Immortality," Percy Shelley's "Dejection" and "Ode to the West Wind," Keats's "Ode to a Nightingale" and "Ode on a Grecian Urn"). The speaker of Swinburne's "Hymn to Proserpine" is also a depressed poet longing for death. What's different, though, about this speaker and the cause of his longing? What, in short, is Victorian about Swinburne's use of this common Romantic motif?
  2. What is the speaker's view of Christianity, especially in lines 23-46, based both on what he sees it as having replaced about Paganism, and on what he sees it as replacing Paganism with?
  3. What does the speaker predict will be Christianity's fate?
  4. The poem (like many of Swinburne's poems) is full of references to the sea, especially in 47-88. What does the sea seem to represent for Swinburne? What is its role in relation to the speaker's view of Christianity's fate?
  5. At the end of the fourth verse paragraph, the speaker contrasts Venus with Christ (71-74); the fifth verse paragraph (75-88) contrasts Venus with the Virgin Mary. With what characteristics does the speaker associate Venus and Mary, and how do these fit into his view of paganism and Christianity?
  6. The poem closes with the speaker asserting that "there is no god found stronger than death; and death is a sleep" (110). What is the speaker's view of the afterlife, and how does it compare to Christianity's?
  7. Swinburne's poem appeared in a decade that saw the Catholic Church's declarations of the doctrines of the Immaculate Conception (i.e. that Mary, unlike all other humans since the Fall of Adam and Eve, had been conceived free from taint of original sin) and Papal Infallibility. How does this context add to our understanding of the poem's likely aims and likely impact?