Songs before Sunrise was published by F.S. Ellis in 1871. The collection represents Swinburne’s political phase: inspired by his friendship with the Italian revolutionary Giuseppe Mazzini and his passionate commitment to Italian unification and republican government, Swinburne turned his poetic powers from erotic rebellion to political rebellion.
The poems celebrate liberty, republicanism, and revolution with the same intensity that Poems and Ballads had brought to desire and pleasure. Liberty is personified as a goddess — more compelling than the Christian God, more worthy of worship, more demanding of sacrifice. The anti-clericalism is fierce: the Catholic Church is attacked not merely as a political obstacle to Italian freedom but as a spiritual fraud, a system that enslaves the minds it claims to liberate.
“Hertha” — a dramatic monologue spoken by the Germanic earth-goddess — is the collection’s philosophical centerpiece: a poem that proposes a pantheistic alternative to Christianity, arguing that divinity is immanent in nature rather than transcendent above it. “Before a Crucifix” is one of the most sustained attacks on Christianity in English verse, contrasting the suffering Christ with the suffering poor and asking what the Church has done to alleviate either.
The verse is technically as brilliant as anything in Poems and Ballads: the anapestic rhythms that Swinburne favored create a headlong, incantatory quality that turns political argument into something approaching religious ecstasy. The irony — that Swinburne attacks religion in a register that is itself religious — was not lost on contemporary readers.
Collecting Songs before Sunrise
First edition (F.S. Ellis, London, 1871): Green cloth binding.
Market values:
- First edition, fine: $150–$400
- Very good: $60–$150