I.

This soaring passage comes from Max Müller's celebrated 1855 essay on linguistic anthropology. I start with it because no brief text better captures the import of Swinburne's poetic manifesto “Hertha.” And “Hertha” is important because, like “Anactoria,” it is pivotal in Swinburne's ambitious poetic program.

In our long neglect of Swinburne's work we have learned to forget what was once well known and established: that as a literary critic and theoretician, his Victorian peers are Arnold, Pater, and Wilde – period. As Swinburne might have said, “Beside or above them/ Nought is there to go” (“Hertha” 16–17). More significantly, some of his most important theoretical arguments come not in his prose – important as it is – but in his verse. “Anactoria” shows that his aesthetic position virtually necessitates this result. Its argument aspires to a condition of music so that the first-person poet can become “Now no more a singer, but a song” (“Thalassius” 474).Footnote ¹ In “Hertha” this program of non-subjective romanticism frames its argument – that is to say, its forms of expression – along broad philological lines. The move is understandable given the social and political purposes of Songs before Sunrise, the book in which “Hertha” is the key theoretical text.

Swinburne began to write “Hertha” in October 1869. Sending a sample of passages to William Michael Rossetti, he called it “another mystic atheistic democratic anthropologic poem” being written “for my ‘Songs of the Republic’” (Letters 2: 45). “Hertha” was to be the central philosophical poem in a book that would construct a polemical argument for human freedom.

Famously devoted to the Mazzinian cause of democracy and republican ideals, Songs before Sunrise is easily and often misread. Though prophesying the end of the historical pre-eminence of Christianity, the book is far from making common cause with contemporary progressivist ideas about historical development. We want to recall what he wrote to his aunt in 1865 about his favorite English poet: “Shelley's Prometheus is. . . spoilt. . . by the infusion of philanthropic doctrinaire views and ‘progress of species’” (Letters 1: 115). Because Swinburne committed himself to Italian Risorgimento, the Songs before Sunrise can be read as a repudiation of the darker insights of Atalanta and the pagan aestheticism of the 1866 Poems and Ballads. While the moral commitments of the Songs before Sunrise modified his ideas about art for art's sake and the “didactic heresy,” Swinburne did not in 1869 – or at any time after – see history in a progressivist, least of all a benevolent, way.

Swinburne's comments on “Hertha” ought to have settled this matter. But his commentary, though detailed and explicit, is subtle. As he explained to William Michael Rossetti, the poem had to address a difficult “problem to solve in expression” (Letters 2: 80). Specifically, the poem had to make it

The problem was poetical and linguistic: how to “reconcile in words” the presence and operation of the “divine contraries” grounding Swinburne's republican ideal of freedom.

To demonstrate what he had in mind, Swinburne quoted for Rossetti one of his latest additions to the poem. These lines, he said, had “broken the back (not only of God but) of the poem in question” (Letters 2: 79):

As we shall see, the published text of this passage carries one crucial change that would clarify even further what Swinburne wanted to say. Nonetheless, the passage pleased him: “This much may be reasonably supposed and said, without incurring the (to me) most hateful charge of optimism, a creed which I despise as much as ever did Voltaire” (Letters 2: 80).

So “Hertha” – and, by extension, all of the Songs before Sunrise – stands against the “creed” of “optimism” as much as did Atalanta in Calydon and the 1866 Poems and Ballads. As Hertha tells us, “A creed is a rod” (71) – any creed, even a humanitarian one.

Why then should “the principle of growth, whence and by which all evil not less than all good proceeds and acts. . . prefer liberty to bondage”? The answer to the question lies in Swinburne's view of “the principle of growth.” This principle functions by what are called (in “Genesis,” the companion poem to “Hertha”) “The divine contraries of life” (32), “whence and by which all evil no less than all good proceeds and acts.” Like Krishna instructing Arjuna in The Bhagavadgita, “Hertha” instructs its audience – initially, Swinburne's contemporaries – in an idea of freedom that is not “philanthropic” and an idea of growth that is not progressivist.

Consider closely Swinburne's list of alternative types of the liberty v. bondage contraries: Hertha prefers “Mazzini to Buonaparte, Peabody to Troppman, Christ to de Sade – ‘ce mauvais babeleur’ to ‘ce bon marquis’.” The first pair is easily understood because, like Rossetti, we know that Swinburne admired Mazzini and hated Buonaparte. The second pair – which sets the American philanthropist against the French murderer – rhymes with the first. But the third pair complicates the list of liberty v. bondage types. Swinburne clearly (and comically) highlights this fact when he glosses the pale Galilean (here designated a figure of liberty) as a nasty babbler, and the wicked Sade – Swinburne's “divine Marquis,” here designated a figure of bondage – as “good.”Footnote ²

Swinburne's argument is summarized in “I have need of you free/ As your mouths of mine air.” This reciprocal need represents a secular process, at once antitheistic and located in real history. In arguing that view, “Hertha” unfolds an intellectual structure that draws heavily upon contemporary science and scholarship, and in particular upon ancient texts and ideas being translated, studied, and, explained in that body of work.

For all the attention that “Hertha” has received, particularly in recent years, one crucial feature is never noticed: that the poem is put in the mouth of a dead god long delivered into the regions of comparative mythology. Furthermore, this dead god is speaking to a sharply divided intellectual world: to an Oxford torn on one hand between traditional Christian scholars who in 1860 refused to elect Max Müller to the professorship in Sanskrit, and on the other, the circle of liberal thinkers, like Benjamin Jowett and John Nichol, who were Swinburne's friends and mentors; to a Europe divided between Darwin and Agassiz, Archbishop Wilberforce and John Tyndall, Pio Nono and Mazzini. These divisions are very mundane instances of what Swinburne called, after Blake, the “divine contraries of life.”

Death is what gives Hertha's voice its prophetic authority. For Swinburne, it is the condition – ultimately a philosophical condition – from which one observes the operation of the divine contraries. Here is how the dead pagan speaker of “Hymn to Proserpine” reveals the dialectic of time and its historical illusions.

This pagan voice gains its foresight precisely because of its historical belatedness, because – as “Hertha” puts it – “his twilight is come on him” (“Hertha” 181). Fate has overtaken the kingdom of Aphrodite and her queenship has passed to another. Reflecting on the pale Galilean's new queen, the speaker observes: “Of the maiden thy mother men sing as a goddess with grace clad around;/ Thou art throned where another was king; where another was queen she is crowned” (75–76). In this process Aphrodite, like the great god Pan, has “fallen and hidden her head.”

In that overthrow she mutates into the queen of the underworld, Proserpine. In the nineteenth-century that kind of transformation is described and explained by any number of contemporary studies in comparative myth and linguistic anthropology (Max Müller's being the most famous and influential).Footnote ³ Swinburne's fourth century Roman has no such enlightened understanding. But his pagan awareness of historical cyclicity makes him a prophet for the nineteenth-century with its “philanthropic doctrinaire views and ‘progress of species’.”

In the nineteenth-century context of Swinburne's poem, this death references far more than the coming death of this speaker or the related demise of the cultural world he represents. As “Hertha” will show, this death is a philosophical condition gained when historical change and biological death are overcome by an enlightened mind. Swinburne believed his historical epoch was populated by many such minds, whose intellectual work represented what he called “the morning of manhood” (“Hertha” 95). He constructed Songs before Sunrise to join that body of work.

Perhaps even more significantly, he wrote “Hertha” only partly to explain these ideas and identify their historical momentousness. These were the same obligations undertaken by the prose minds of Darwin and Huxley and Tyndall, Colebrook and Burnouf and Müller. Swinburne's was to be a poet's contribution, however: that is to say, a discourse in which the living reality of these ideas would be imitated.

II.

The destruction of Swinburne's entire correspondence with Jowett and nearly all of his correspondence with Nichol has left us with a drastically attenuated view of his intellectual life at Oxford and immediately thereafter. The general shape of his thinking is unmistakable, but what precisely he was reading is not always as clear as we would like. Our view of “Hertha” suffers particularly because he said the poem “has in it the most of my deliberate thought and personal feeling” (Letters 2: 85). “I rate Hertha highest as a single piece,” he told E. C. Stedman five years after the poem was published, “finding in it the most of lyric force and music combined with the most of condensed and clarified thought” (Letters 3: 15).

We get important hints about the poem's “thought” from a few letters. Most interesting are the terms already quoted from his letter to William Michael Rossetti: “another mystic atheistic democratic anthropologic poem” (Letters 2: 45). “Another” references his recently composed “Hymn of Man,” while “atheistic” and “democratic” seem clear from the poem itself and its Songs before Sunrise context. But the terms “mystic” and “anthropologic” give an additional valence to the term “atheistic.” In the letter where he discusses “Hertha”‘s “problem to solve in expression” he praises “Hindoo” literature's “Mystic bawdy poetry” (Letters 2: 79). The comment signals the Oriental reference in the word “mystic.” A major focus of contemporary philology, ancient Sanskrit literature underwrote the remarkable advances taking place in comparative religion and linguistic anthropology. Whether one read the Vedic inheritance as theistic or atheistic was a matter of controversy as much for the original Oriental authors and commentators as for the Europeans who were recovering those materials in the nineteenth century. Swinburne clearly read the texts as atheistic. Thus all three of these words he uses – mystic, anthropologic, and atheistic – gloss the philosophical tradition that found its way into “Hertha” via Swinburne's acquaintance with contemporary Oriental studies and translations.

We know he was reading enthusiastically in the Fauche translation of the Mahabharata in January 1869 with the Etonian and outspoken atheist Thomas Bendyshe, fellow of Kings and Vice-President of the Anthropological Society of London,Footnote ⁴ But except for the famous passage on the World Tree – chapter XV of the “Bhagavadgita” – “Hertha” does not seem much in debt to this famous section of the Mahabharata, which is primarily a narrative, not a philosophical work. Besides, the World Tree in “Hertha” is not Oriental, it is the Norse Yggdrasil, drawn from the mythic world of the goddess Hertha – that is, from northern Europe, not from India.

The philosophical poems from the Vedic tradition that look like “Hertha” are the Vedas and their culminant forms of expression, the Upanishads. French and English translations from the Vedas and the Upanishads were available to anyone with an interest. Swinburne's circles, both in Oxford and London, included scholars of comparative religion and mythology who would have subscribed to the publications of the East India Company and the Asiatic Society, both of which sponsored the remarkable Bibliotheca Indica. The series included the Sanskrit texts as well as English translations, with introductions and commentaries by various learned Orientalists ancient and modern.

While no contemporary source tells us that Swinburne knew these materials, their likenesses to the thought and stylistic expression of his work are clear, as we shall see. Nor should this surprise us. Swinburne moved in the same circles at Oxford where Max Müller was a celebrated figure. He attended Müller's lectures and they are known to have dined together with Jowett.Footnote ⁵ In a lost 1872 letter Swinburne recommended an Oriental work to John Addington Symonds. Symonds's reply, which survives, is interesting: “I am so ignorant as not even to have read the name of the Indian book you speak of” (Letters 2: 79 n.2). Swinburne could not have been talking about the Mahabharata or the “Bhagavadgita” or even the Vedas. These were well known if not necessarily widely read. If Swinburne had mentioned the Katha, the Mandukya, or the Khandogya (Chhandogya) Upanishad, however, Symonds might well have been nonplussed. In fact, the ideas laid out in the Upanishads seem absolutely fundamental to Swinburne's “mystic atheistic democratic anthropologic poem.”

Scholars have long recognized an influence of Eastern philosophy on “Hertha.” Swinburne read the “Bhagavadgita” and he “admired Emerson's ‘Brahma’ as early as July 1867” (Letters 1: 252 and Louis 112). But the depth and importance of the Hindu intertexts has not been recognized. Margot Louis's excellent commentary on “Hertha” – the best that we haveFootnote ⁶ – misses the central structure of its thought by mistaking how Swinburne adapted what he borrowed from the Vedic tradition. Comparing “Hertha” with Emerson's “Brahma” and certain passages in the “Bhagavadgita,” Louis writes that

A “linear and progressive” reading of “Hertha” is precisely the reverse of Swinburne's purpose, as we have already noted. Because the poem also heralds what it calls “the morning of manhood” (95), however, and means to explain man's “principle of growth,” it seems caught in apparent contradictions.

In fact, it is caught in – or rather, it has caught at – a whole network of apparent contradictions: “I am that which unloves me and loves,/ I am stricken, and I am the blow” (20). That line and many like passages in the poem illustrate some of “Hertha”‘s Hindu source texts: “I am thou, whom thou seekest to find him; find thou but thyself, thou art I” (35) These passages all point to a basic move in Swinburne's poem: to recast the Brahmanic conception “tat twam asi” (“Thou art that,” “That thou art,” or “You are that”). This is one of the four Mahāvākyas (Grand Pronouncements) in Hinduism (see for example the Khandogya Upanishad VI.8.7, which is thought to be its earliest occurrence). The pronouncement expresses the key philosophical idea of codependency. Ultimate wisdom involves the investigation of Being's network of apparent contradictions until the apparitions dissolve and become “equal and whole” (4) with themselves and with the process of investigation that makes them appear to us.

So Swinburne's poem solicits as many paradoxes and apparent contradictions as it can imagine. The prophesied death of God is coming, for example, in “the last [hour] of his infinite year” (185). This striking paradox is fundamental to Swinburne's thinking, as we can see by recalling its earlier incarnation in Atalanta in Calydon: “Before the beginning of years/ There came to the making of man/Time, with a gift of tears” (314–16). Clearly Swinburne imagines an infinity, or infinities, that have beginnings and endings as well as a history, or histories, that are in the grip of more encompassing ideas of temporality.

These kinds of recurrent local paradoxes are assembled within a governing and even more arresting contradiction. Swinburne pointed to it in a letter he wrote to Dante Gabriel Rossetti while he was still finishing the poem (19 February 1870): “in Hertha I have tried not to get the mystic elemental side of the poem, its pure and free imaginative part, swamped by the promulgation of the double doctrine, democratic and atheistic, equality of men and abolition of gods” (Letters 2: 98). On one side we have the ancient Vedic materials, on the other the attack upon theism and contemporary authoritarian political institutions. Swinburne manages these rival claims and purposes by using recent Oriental scholarship – what Max Müller in his celebrated essay of 1856 labeled “Comparative Mythology” – to establish linguistic action as “Hertha”‘s “polestar and pole” (194).Footnote ⁷ This scholarship was particularly useful for Swinburne because it put at his disposal a library of ancient texts where philosophic ideas were cast in poetic forms. “Hertha” is a kind of Upanishad for his epoch – and as such, yet another of his remarkable pastiche works.

Let us tease our way into the system, if it can be so called, of the poem's contradictions. “Hertha” opens with a series of stanzas that rehearse ideas and expressions drawn from Vedanta texts. But the pivotal image in the poem, the “tree many rooted,” is not Oriental, it is – like the poem's title – Norse, the name of the being Swinburne called (in his letter to William Michael Rossetti, (Letters 2: 80), the “All-Mother” – translated in the poem as “Mother, not maker,/ Born, and not made” (66–67). Had Swinburne wanted to make his poem more transparently “equal and whole” (4) to its Sanskrit sources, he could have chosen the World Tree (Ilya) that figures so prominently throughout the literature of ancient India.Footnote ⁸

More provocative still, how can it be true – this opening stanza?

The problem is elementary if we think about what Hertha says here. She is a Teutonic goddess, belated and derivative. How could we credit any of these assertions? Or the assertions that follow through the first forty lines of the poem where Brahmanic ideas are forcefully declared?

What are we missing? Is there more to this Hertha, this I, this speaker? In one form, her initial and titular form, she is a goddess from the Scandanavian Eddas, remarked by Tacitus. When we make an anthropological exploration of her history – explorations quite available to Swinburne – we find that she has other names, Njord and Nerthus. As Njord Hertha is male, god of the sea and winds, as Nerthus she may or may not be Njord's wife. Then there is the linguistic evidence of her name, so closely related to “earth” and thence to the primitive Aryan root “ar.” This root word has numerous significations in different branches of Aryan-related languages and is, besides, the root syllable of the word Aryan itself. Hertha is a transformational creature: of the earth, of the sea, female, male. Seen in terms of syncretic myth and comparative linguistics, she is equal and whole with a multitude of changing forms – perhaps even, as she says, “All forms of all faces,/ All works of all hands” (131–32).

Müller's 1863 review of a book on Teutonic mythology by Walter Keating Kelly is extremely interesting in this context. In a stern commentary on what he sees as Kelly's loose handling of comparative linguistics, Müller focuses on Kelly's analysis of the relation between the Teutonic Yggdrasil and the “Vedic fig-tree” Ilya. While not denying the kinship of these forms of a “tree at the navel of the earth,” Müller stresses their differences in order to make the following key point:

For Müller and so many others of his age, to understand the diversities of human culture entailed the investigation of the folklore and mythologies of different peoples. Comparative philology was the indispensable tool for these studies. “It has placed in our hands a telescope of such power that, where formerly we could see but nebulous clouds, we now discover distinct forms and outlines” (“Comparative Mythology” 16). More, those distinct forms give us clues for studying “Universal History” and hence “mankind” itself: “a word,” Müller slyly observes, “which never passed the lips of Sokrates, or Plato, or Aristotle” (“Comparative Mythology” 4-5). For “all these dialects point to some more ancient language which was to them what Latin was to the Romance dialects. . . that mother-tongue that died in giving birth to the modern Aryan dialects, such as Sanskrit, Zend, Greek, Latin, Gothic, Slavonic, and Celtic” (“Comparative Mythology” 19). Swinburne's “All-Mother” is precisely this “mother-tongue” – herself, like all her offspring, “born and not made,” as Grimm and all the new philologists had shown.

III.

The “tree many-rooted,” the “life-tree” (96, 99) of the poem, is language itself, “whose growth has no guerdon/ But only to grow” (138-39). In “Hertha,” however, Müller's hypothesized Ur-Language is turned into the idea of language-as-such – the conception, at once “mystic” and “poetic,” on which the poem is grounded. Blake's Marriage of Heaven and Hell – Swinburne's favorite Blake poem – helped Swinburne's thinking on these matters, but Müller remained a useful source, not least when he focused on his favorite subject, “Hindu mythology.” Exactly because there is “no system of religion or mythology in the Vedas,” Müller observes, “the whole nature of these so-called gods is still transparent; their first conception. . .clearly perceptible.” He goes on:

So Müller will declare this: “If we want to know whither the human mind. . . is driven. . . by the irresistible force of language as applied to supernatural and abstract ideas, we must read the Vedas.” “It was a mistake of the early Fathers,” he adds,

For Swinburne, of course, the gods of monotheism “have no more substantive existence than Eos or Hemera” either. They are equally poetical creatures, nomina not numina. So parodying Jeremiah 2.28 he writes:

Swinburne is here clearly refashioning a key text in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Plate 11 sketches the way “priesthood” enslaves the mind by erecting “forms of worship from poetic tales.” As Blake adds, “Thus men forgot that All deities reside in the human breast.”

But Swinburne extends this Blakean thought by drawing upon the work of scholars like Müller. One hundred years of advanced work in comparative philology lets Swinburne identify this “tree many rooted,” with its rich fruit and extensive boughs, with the language he is himself now using. More, though both English and historically localized in 1870, this writing is deeply, even mystically, connected with the language of mankind at large, mankind living and dead, mankind past and passing and to be.

Müller argues that “if there be any truth in inductive reasoning, that [Ur-language] was once a living language, spoken in Asia by a small tribe” (“Comparative Mythology” 19). This is how the historian, an empiricist, views foundational language. Swinburne, a poet, sees the matter differently – in fact, sees it as he sees the “mystic” and “poetic” texts on which Müller's inductive method depends. The difference is marked in the way Swinburne deploys the most important word in “Hertha”: the pronoun “I.” This word is a recurrent philosophic subject in the Brahmanic scriptures, and especially in the poetic Upanishads. Read in “inductive” terms – what Vedic philosophy sees as lower or material terms – this “I” has innumerable names and innumerable forms, so that one may say – and it is only one of an infinite number of possible ways of putting the matter – “the heaven is the head, the sun is the eye, the wind is the breath, the sky is the trunk, the moon is the fundament, and the earth is the feet” (Khandogya Upanishad V. 18. 2). Implicit in all those articulations, however, is the “I” of “the Universal Soul. . . the principal object indicated by [the pronoun] I” (Khandogya Upanishad V. 18. 1). These pronouns both permit and instantiate the demonstration since they are, as words, completely particular universals.

The philosophical and poetic status of these pronouns appears in the way they are used. The Vedic texts regularly initiate a self-presentation by opening with a pronoun whose referent is not previously given, as if the word were self-identical (which in fact, as the argument proceeds, we come to realize it is). So the Fourth Brahmana of the (Brihad Aranyaka Upanishad) begins thus: “This was before the soul, bearing the shape of a man. Looking round, he beheld nothing but himself. He said first: ‘This is I.’ Hence the name I was produced. Therefore even now a man, when called, says first: ‘It is I,’ and tells afterwards any other name that belongs to him.” The words “This” and “I” thus come to identify, in the unfolding of the text itself, the Universal Soul as it “strives to obtain the state of Prajápati, namely, [he] who thus knows” (Brihad Aranyaka Upanishad I. 4).Footnote ⁹

The central function of the Vedic texts is practical instruction in self-awareness. They set up a teacher/pupil dialectic within which tales of such exchanges are imbedded, like Chinese boxes. The typical dynamic is for the teacher to lead the pupil through a series of exchanges so that the identity of the individual Soul with the “Universal Soul,” or Brahma, gets repeatedly exposed. The characteristic formula “This is that” (e.g., Katha Upanishad II.4) devises an instructional procedure for establishing the idea of the fundamental identity of all Being. More importantly, because the Universal Soul, in the Vedic view, is a deathless dynamic agent, ultimate knowledge for any individual person emerges in the recognition of one's identity with that deathless agent. And that emergence takes place in the Vedic instructional scene, in and as its linguistic and catechetical exercises.

So in the Khandogya Upanishad when Swetakeku seeks wisdom from his father in a series of questions about the character of the many forms of Being, he is led through a series of demonstrations that always conclude like the first: “All this universe has the (Supreme) Deity for its life. That Deity is Truth. He is the Universal Soul. Thou art He, O Swetakeku” (VI. 8. 7). This identity is made possible through the insight that the Universal Soul is the ongoing, ceaseless process of thought by which Being itself is sustained. The insight is not an abstract idea but a practical event experienced by those who are repeatedly rethinking the Vedic texts and their signs and symbols. Consequently, the catechetical method of the Upanishads, as in this characteristic passage from the Khandogya Upanishad, becomes the living embodiment of this deathless agency. In this view, the Vedic texts are inseparable from the continual investigation of those texts, and that continual investigation – the process of knowing that they maintain – is the foundation of all Being, phenomenal and noumenal.

The great stress that the Upanishads lay upon the recitation of hymns, upon meditating the letters of the Vedic texts, and most famously upon the word Om, illustrate the primacy of the discursive fields. They are primary because they reveal by practical engagement the human exchange that, in this view, is thinking.

IV.

The first person rhetoric of “Hertha” is plainly constructed in imitation of these Sanskrit models. The opening textual move, “I am that which began,” establishes the textual situation to be negotiated. The pronoun appears to reference the title, as it does, but in that event the problem, the poem's paradoxes, begin to unfold, as we have seen. These paradoxes reach their initial climax in the pair of stanzas (lines 31–40) that conclude the first section of the poem, where the poem's “I” gets dispersed into an indefinite set of referents.

At that point the “I” turns the poem's central focus to the second person, “thou,” whose primary referent appears as the reader. In a text that recalls and parodies the Book of Job (chapters 38–39), this second person is directly questioned about the character of what and whence it knows what it thinks it knows. As in Job, the questions are rhetorical, intending to expose the difference between knowledge, which is illusion, and knowing, which is vital Truth. The difference initially appears in the line, “What I show to thee now” (59) where Hertha's discourse and Swinburne's poem are first clearly identified. The text then begins to elaborate this new, explicit theme: “What is here, dost thou know it?” (61). Identifying with this second person reader, we are led to ask, here and now: what is here?

The answer we receive is interesting: “prophet nor poet/ Nor tripod nor throne/ Nor spirit nor flesh may make answer, but only thy mother alone.//Mother, not maker,/ Born, and not made” (43-47). Here various distinctions are being drawn. First and most obvious, answers do not come from authoritative sources, not even – as one might imagine in this text – from “Prophet” or “poet.” Answers can be made “only [by] thy mother alone.” The first person – Hertha, this poem – then draws a distinction between herself and this “Mother,” and immediately draws a further distinction between this “Mother” and the monotheist God (the “Maker”). These distinctions establish originary Being as mortal rather than transcendental. “Born, and not made” reinforces and extends these distinctions by looping the text back upon itself and exposing language – the mother tongue – as the initial face of this “Mother.”

The move does far more than repeat the theme of the mortality of “thy Mother.” It begins to reveal the codependent relations of Hertha, “I,” “Thou,” and “Mother.” The next stanza elaborates:

Though mortal creatures, “Born and not made,” creeds and kings are now distinguished from “this thing called God.” Divinity turns now to the third person, a “thing” once named God but actually “born,” we now learn, “to be man”: an agent rather than a name, and an agent of enlightenment.

This new grammatical transformation completes the transformation of the discursive field.

This remarkable passage has always been under-read as a clever reference to the colors of the flag of Italy, which of course it is. In purely formal terms, the passage anticipates the central figura of the next section of the poem, Yggdrasil, the “life tree” that brings “Hertha”‘s philological focus into sharpest relief. This forecast is most important, however, for its relation to the stanza's pivotal idea: that the first person lives in and through the second person and vice-versa. As the first person later says, “I have need of you free/ As your mouths of mine air;/ That my heart may be greater within me, beholding the fruits of me fair” (158-60). As we have seen, the poem identifies this dynamic relation in linguistic and ultimately philological terms. Feeding upon its mother tongue, the poem gives back the life it received in a ceaselessly reciprocal process of gift- and life-giving. This process is itself the Truth specified at the climax of the poem:

The double reference in the pronoun “his” underscores the theme of codependency. But at this point the poem's initial generic structure – a dramatic monologue by the dead goddess Hertha – has dissolved into a text that has become an exponent of its own philosophical demonstrations. All of the words, all of the names, the entire linguistic field has been purified of its attachments to things. The result, however, is anything but an attenuation or mere meaningless language, as T. S. Eliot once misleadingly argued. The course of the particulars in “Hertha” – the apparitional signifiers – gather into a single living whole, the unfolding of the poem's unified textual field – that Being (the third person) emergent through the exchanges of first and second persons. Exposed as a texture of signifiers, the autopoietic process that weaves and maintains this texture – the Truth – gets told.

V.

Swinburne said that a crucial issue for his poem was to make it apparent “why the principle of growth, whence and by which all evil not less than all good proceeds and acts, should prefer liberty to bondage.” He said that this stanza broke the back of the problem:

I remarked earlier that when he finally published this stanza, one word was changed: the word “grow” in the last line became “be.” The change is small but important, as one begins to realize in the new rhyming structure that emerges. “Be” in the first line rhymes with “free” in the third, but now that pivotal word “be” gets repeated in the final line. The move points to a thought everywhere emphasized in the poem: “Be the ways of thy giving/ As mine were to thee;/ The free gift of thy living/ Be the gift of it free” (81–84). Swinburne is arguing that a human demand underlies what is often represented as a random, Lucretian concourse of atoms. In his view, a reciprocal process of gift-giving alone ensures human life. For Swinburne, this process necessarily operates without the constraint of categorical imperatives (what he calls, in his (a)theistic vocabulary, “creeds”).

The revision therefore underscores how Swinburne understands the word “grow” (as in Hertha's important remark that “my growth ha[s] no guerdon/ But only to grow” (138–39). This is not a growth as understood in myths of progress and perfectibility, it is growth as observed in the cycles of nature: “All death and all life, all rains and all ruin, drop through me as sands” (135). Here we see once again the proximity of Swinburne's ideas to those he found in the Vedic tradition.

But the differences between the two are also important. The Oriental works involve a theory of transmigration. Drawing upon the central ideas of contemporary comparative philology, Swinburne translated this idea into cultural and linguistic categories. In addition, he read it in terms of the atheistic tradition of his Vedic authorities, where the idea of Nirvana signified passage out of the cycles of nature and history by extinction rather than by translation to an alternative (heavenly) existence. In the atheist tradition, extinction is revealed as an intellectual rather than a natural event. Death is its image only when death is stripped by the free mind of its fearful or lamentable features. So when Swinburne writes that “Death is a sleep” (“Hymn to Proserpine” 110) – an idea that assumes many formulations in his work – the metaphor exemplifies a mind that has freed itself from the illusions of nature and history. This ancient atheistic tradition, dominantly Buddhist rather than Brahmanic, fitted nicely into the secular line of historicist and scientific ideas about culture, history, and myth that pervaded the anthropological discourse of Swiburne's day.

One last but fundamental point. “Hertha”‘s machinery is designed to expose the synonymy of various words and ideas. The process executes the Vedic principle “This is That.” The synonymy of the pronouns keys off the central pronoun, “I,” as we have observed. The poem has a second key word, however, the word “Be,” around which a whole set of other key words constellate, the most dramatic of which are free, grow, give, live (and their cognates). Ultimately we see that the words “I” and “Be” are themselves rhyme words, that their constellations rhyme, and – most important – that the ordering principle or idea powering the work is the process of synonymy itself. In this sense, the meaning of “Hertha” is not found in the concepts it brings into play. Indeed, “Hertha” is arguing that meaning can't be located at all, in that sense, because the meaning it cares about is dynamic, not conceptual, and human, not abstract. The poem means through an unfolding textual play. It executes meaning, in the full paradoxical sense of the word. It lives in the death of the manifold meanings it generates in its passages through time and ourselves.