Maggie's Farm

The poem would seem to describe, in typically florid decadent wise, a bout of erotically charged nocturnal paralysis, or an encounter with what was known in the Middle Ages as a succubus (nowadays, the imagery would be of small grey beings with large heads, rather than an anaemic but impassioned femme fatale). In literary terms, this particular poem by Swinburne, like much of his oeuvre, can be traced back to what the more manly Byron famously described as "Johnny Keat's piss-a-bed poetry". Swinburne was not one of the greats (although he towers over his 1890s epigones - Ernest Dowson, Lionel Johnson, Theodore Wratislaw et al., who represent a decadence of the decadence), but his work certainly is very interesting stuff.

Randolph - It's decadent when the lover in question may well be a demonic visitation that preys on you while you are in a state of confused arousal during a bout of half-waking nocturnal paralysis. La belle dame sans merci and other such decadent fairies that steal men's wits are a far cry from the Song of Songs. The lover of the Song of Songs was not a phthisical psychic vampire who delighted in perverse torments, and would therefore be far too wholesome an object of desire for enervated decadent poets like Swinburne.

BD - Although I unreservedly approve of the delightful lady in the photograph accompanying this post, she doesn't seem quite consumptive enough to suit truly decadent tastes.

Decadence is literally a falling off, (moral, cultural, spiritual etc.) decline or decay. Thus, to say someone is "decadent" is another way of saying corrupted, dissolute, degenerate, immoral. In much decadent poetry, the poet or his personae find themselves irresistibly corrupted by the degenerate object of their erotic fascination. This is certainly the case with Swinburne.

"The Decadent Movement in Literature" (this was the original title of Arthur Symons's "The Symbolist Movement in Literature", published in 1899) was never a label used by poets or artists themselves to describe their own work or to situate themselves within a group, but rather a term of opprobrium employed by those who saw decadence as precisely that - as a moral falling off. In the late nineteenth century, Punch magazine used to publish a series of cartoons about "Our Decadents", the butts of whose satire did not, of course, describe themselves as "Decadents". To call something "decadent" always implies a moral judgment, a judgment rejected by the "Decadents" themselves: for example archetypal "Decadent" Oscar Wilde (in court precisely on charges of indecency) contended that there was no such thing as a moral or an immoral book, only books that are either well or badly written. In other words, according to the Decadents, Decadence does not exist, because they reject the moral value judgments upon which the idea of decadence rests. The other point of view is best summed up in the National Observer's reaction to the trial of Oscar Wilde:

"There is not a man or woman in the English-speaking world possessed of the treasure of a wholesome mind who is not under a deep debt of gratitude to the Marquess of Queensberry for destroying the High Priest of the Decadents. The obscene impostor, whose prominence has been a social outrage ever since he transferred from Trinity Dublin to Oxford his vices, his follies, his vanities, has been exposed, and that thoroughly at last. But to the exposure there must be legal and social sequels. There must be another trial at the Old Bailey, or a coroner's inquest - the latter for choice; and of the Decadents, of their hideous conceptions of the meaning of Art, of their worse than Eleusinian mysteries, there must be an absolute end."

In conclusion, both the poets and their poetry were decadent, according to a certain set of moral values, values to which they themselves did not, of course, adhere.

I might add that the "decadent" values espoused by Oscar Wilde (extreme moral relativism, in other words) are precisely the values that are seen today as most "progressive".

If the Marquess of Queensberry were around today to see rap music videos of hip-hop ho's getting jiggy with it, he would probably be laid low by an apoplectic fit of horrified outrage before he could even reach the Old Bailey. In terms of obscenity and social outrage, Oscar Wilde was positively innocuous compared to, say, Robert Maplethorpe only a century later. Which goes to show that decadence is continuous, even exponential.

Alexander Pope, at the end of The Dunciad, could not have been more prophetic:

Religion blushing veils her sacred fires,
And unawares morality expires.
For public flame, nor private, dares to shine,
Nor human spark is left, nor glimpse divine!
Lo! thy dread empire, Chaos! is restored;
Light dies before thy uncreating word;
Thy hand, great Anarch! lets the curtain fall,
And universal darkness buries all.