The Poetics of Difference: AC Swinburne’s “the Leper”
The first stanza of A.C. Swinburne’s “The Leper” begins with a triple articulation of the word “well:”
Nothing is better, I well think,
Than love, the hidden well-water
Is not so delicate to drink:
This was well seen of me and her.
What is significant about this repetition? How does it provide a frame for the rest of the poem?
Swinburne’s “well, well, well” indicates to us that the poem is going to be built on the drawing-together of opposites: a poem about illness begins with a firm hammering of its opposite, “well-”ness into the reader’s ear. Beyond opposition, though, the triple meaning of “well” suggests a multiplicity — the sense that the same word can mean in infinite different ways. The repetition of “well” in the first stanza carves out space within the line for difference and contingency, two principles that become crucial to figuring out what the poem wants, and what it wants, specifically, with leprosy. Difference — specifically, the differences of gender and class that attract Swinburne — may also be a problem that leprosy, a disease that fundamentally alters the body and renders the lovers both unrecognizable and similar to one another, is uniquely positioned to solve.
In its first use, “well” serves to soften a statement of opinion: if I “well think,” then I do not simply think something — I feel fairly convinced or pretty sure, which is less than being sure; I express hesitation or contingency, couched in the appearance of taking a confident stance. The next appearance of “well” is the “hidden well-water,” echoing William Wordsworth’s “comfortless and hidden well” of “A Complaint.” In Wordsworth’s poem, the well represents his lover’s love for him, which has recently become, disappointingly, “hidden” under the earth’s surface— not dried up, but also, no longer freely and visibly flowing.
Swinburne’s well, on the other hand, is no less thrilling for being hidden— in fact, its water is more “delicate,” presumably because of its rarity, the difficulty of access. Swinburne, revisiting the language of the Romantic poets, communicates his difference from their model of love: rather than sentiment that flows freely, his speaker instead what is difficult to access, that which that lies under the surface and has to be exhumed. This desire for that which is underground is perhaps a light foreshadowing of the poem’s necrophilic tendencies, but is, more broadly, an indication of aestheticism’s investment in questions of historical desire — what kinds of love are particular to the historical archive, can only be expressed through the poet’s (often scholarly, or faux-scholarly) engagement with the buried poetic and therefore erotic forms that only properly belong to an earlier moment in history?
The “well water” at the end of Swinburne’s line is an example of a wrenched accent, an instance in which verse meter and the natural rhythm of prose come into conflict. The wrenched accent was popular for a time with the Pre-Raphaelites, and was likely an homage to earlier poets like Thomas Wyatt (Alden 8).While one might, in ordinary speech, pronounce both syllables “the hidden well-water,” the line scans as “the hidden well-water;” in other words, as Raymond McDonald Alden wrote (contingently enough) in his 1904 definition of the wrenched accent, “the verse accent may be regarded as triumphing wholly or in part” (8). The wrenched accent creates an aestheticist situation in which artifice triumphs over the natural; yet this triumph is, as Alden put it, “partial.” The contingency lingers, leaving the process of sublation partly unfinished and leaving prose/verse difference on display.
In the third appearance of “well” in this stanza, “this was well-seen of me and her,” the speaker offer his own experience of love as an example through which someone — passive voice keeps the question open precisely as to whom — could see evidence of love’s supremacy over all else. The question of seeing is important to the poem, and being “well-seen” is not simply an expression of good evidence: it is also an expression of watching, being seen, of the panoptic, judging eye (eventually revealed as the eye both of the community and of God) that is constantly trained on the speaker and his beloved.
In this introductory stanza, “The Leper” stages itself as an argument about love’s value — an argument that is proven through the speaker’s experience. The triteness of this principle, that is, that “Nothing is better… than love,” builds in a series of singsong repetitions — this line serves as the poem’s balladic refrain — making more profound the uneasy juxtaposition of the generalizable sort of bland sweetness (“nothing is better than love”) with the specific kind of violent desire intermingled within the lover’s lexicon.
The triple repetition of “well” within this argument offers three philosophic moods that become important to the poem‘s wider erotic landscape: we witness the hesitancy couched in feeling pretty sure; the desire for that which is buried and therefore rare; the burden of being watched by an unknown Other in order to serve as proof of an abstract principle. In expressing sureness (or the proximity to it — “well-think”ingness), the scribe always also expresses unsureness.
