The personality who, according to Edgell Rickword, “shattered the virginal reticence of Victoria’s serenest years with a book of poems,” was born in London April 5, 1837. His forebears were distinguished aristocrats. Spoiled and precocious, Swinburne attended Eton and Oxford without being graduated from either. He fell in love with medievalism and its interpretation by the Pre-Raphelites. In his early twenties he attempted to outdo the excesses of the young Bohemians, and was successful, although at great cost to his physique and character.

At twenty-three Swinburne published his first volume, two poetic dramas dedicated to Rossetti. The blank verse was fluent, and the interspersed lyrics were graceful, but the critics were not impressed. Five years later there appeared his ATLANTA IN CALYDON, and the critics squandered there superlatives. In this Swinburne attempted to “reproduce for English readers the likeness of a Greek tragedy with something of its true poetic life and charm.” But the exuberance was anything but Greek, and the mounting syllables carried a sumptuous and orchestral music new to English ears. The spirit was rebellious, a defiance of the creeds by which men live, but it was the melodiousness which made the young men of the period shout the choruses to each other. ‘MAN’ the poem below was part of ATLANTA IN CALYDON :-

Before the beginning of years,
There came to the making of man
Time, with a gift of tears ;
Grief, with a glass that ran ;
Pleasure, with pain for leaven [39] ;
Summer, with flowers that fell ;
Remembrance fallen from heaven ;
And madness rises from hell ;
Strength without hands to smite ;
Love that endures for a breath ;
Night, the shadow of light,
And life, the shadow of death.

And the high Gods took in hand
Fire, and the falling of tears,
And a measure of sliding sand
From under the feet of the years ;
And froth and drift of the sea ;

And dust of the laboring earth ;
And bodies of things to be
In the houses of death and of birth ;
And wrought with weeping and laughter,

And fashioned with loathing and love,
With life before and after
And death beneath and above,
For a day and night and a morrow,
That his strength might endure for a span
With travail and heavy sorrow,
The holy spirit of man.

From the winds of the north and the south
They gathered as unto strife ;
They breathed upon his mouth,
They filled his body with life ;
Eyesight and speech they wrought
For the veils of the soul therein[40],
A time for labor and thought,
A time to serve and to sin ;
They gave him light in his ways,
And love, and a space for delight,
And beauty and length of days,
And night, and sleep in the night.
His speech is a burning fire ;
With his lips he travaileth ;
In his heart is a blind desire,
In his eyes foreknowledge of death ;
He weaves, and is clothed with derision ;
Sows, and he shall not reap ;
His life is a watch or a vision
Between a sleep and a sleep[41].

from ATLANTA IN CALYDON

“ I “ (Ämî)

by Shri Rabindranath Tagore

(Extract from ‘The Concept of an Indian Literature’)

Man happens to be the fulcrum of Tagore’s cosmic vision ; it is the “ the Religion of Man” that concerns him ; there is , indeed, no other religion. Because man is, there is Dharma ; because man is, there is Beauty and Truth – and, indeed God. There is a taped conversation between Einstein and Tagore, in 1934, where Tagore keeps insisting that Beauty and Truth are dependent on man, and argues that if man did not exist the Pallus Athene would no longer be beautiful. Einstein counters that Beauty may be dependent on man but he cannot believe that Truth is. Truth, according to him, exists independent of man ; if all human beings disappeared from the face of the earth, Truth would remain. “I agree with this conception in regard to Beauty,” says Einstein, “ but not in regard to Truth.”