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24
SYNTAX
Name above all names that are light above,
We have loved, praised, pitied, crowned and done thee
wrong,
O thou past praise and pity; thou the sole
Utterly deathless, perfect only and whole
Immortal, body and soul.
This clause is a very curious one as it contains all
the different parts reiterated and multiplied. Nevertheless,
it is comparatively seldom that such is the case: usually
we find the attributes only treated in this way.
I choose an example from the famous North Sea
poems, the description of the churchyards sapped by the sea.
V, 107, Now displaced, devoured and desecrated,
Now by Time’s hand darkly disinterred,
These poor dead that sleeping here awaited
Long the archangel’s recreating word,
Closed about with roofs and walls high-gated
Till the blast of judgment should be heard,
Naked, shamed, cast out of consecration,
Corpse and coffin, yea the very graves,
Scoffed at, scattered, shaken from their station,
Spurned and scourged of sea and wind like slaves.
Desolate beyond man’s desolation,
Shrink and sink into the waste of waves.
Now two parts of the sentence especially, and of
course two kinds of attributes, seem to prevail over
everything else in Swinburne’s style. Genitives and adjectives
may be said to be his favourites, accumulations of both of
them being found on almost every page.
Genitives, that is ^/-genitives — for the ’Anglo-Saxon’
type is rare — are often accumulated and not infrequently
seem to take the part of compound substantives. Compare
with this the tendency to dissolve possessives into ofa
personal pronoun, and specially § 1 b. Sematology.
VI, 274, Till sons of the sons of the Norsemen . . .
396, . . . her portals ajar
Let pass as a shadow the light of the sound of a dream ...
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