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"Dolores", subtitled "Notre-Dame des Sept Douleurs", is a poem by A. C. Swinburne first published in his 1866 Poems and Ballads . The poem, in 440 lines, regards the figure of the titular "Dolores, Our Lady of Pain", thus named at the close of many of its stanzas.
The speaker of the poem is the voice of a besotted lover, faced with, and lamenting, Swinburne's particular ruthless and grim representation of the sacred feminine, embodied here as the Lady of Pain. In these respects, the poem shares its central themes with "Satia te Sanguine" from the same 1866 collection, as does it similarly share its sadomasochistic imagery with that poem and many others within Swinburne's corpus.
The poem's meter is a fairly regular anapestic trimeter with some use of iambs and the final line of each stanza containing only two feet. It uses an eight line stanza with the rhyme scheme ABABCDCD and regularly uses feminine rhyme for the A and C rhymes, often rhyming the name "Dolores". A considerable quantity of catalexis is present, but this is fairly regular in its application. The poem, like a number of others by Swinburne, is notable for its use of anapestic verse to create a serious and somber mood rather than the comic effect for which anapests are more commonly encountered in English, as in the limerick.
The poem demonstrates most of the controversial themes for which Swinburne became notorious. It conflates the cruel yet libidinous pagan goddess figure of Dolores, the Lady of Pain with Mary, Mother of Jesus and associates the poem itself, through its parenthetical titular text (Notre-Dame des Sept Douleurs, i.e., "Our Lady of Seven Sorrows") with the Seven Dolours of the Virgin. It laments the passing of the worship of classical deities in favour of Christian morality (277What ailed us, O gods, to desert you | For creeds that refuse and restrain?), a theme more fully elaborated in Swinburne's "Hymn to Proserpine". Finally, sadomasochistic themes and characteristics are attributed to the Lady of Pain throughout (397I could hurt thee — but pain would delight thee, etc.)
The poem was parodied in 1872 by Arthur Clement Hilton, then a student at Cambridge, in his poem "Octopus", which substitutes the character of the Lady of Pain for that of the titular mollusc. Where Swinburne begins his poem, in describing the Lady of Pain, "Cold eyelids that hide like a jewel | Hard eyes that grow soft for an hour", Hilton begins "Strange beauty, eight-limbed and eight-handed, | Whence camest to dazzle our eyes?".
The Planescape campaign setting of Dungeons & Dragons features a character called the Lady of Pain, which was inspired by the poem's central character, as explored by author Troy Denning in his 1997 novel Pages of Pain which directly quotes Dolores and reimagines many elements of the poem into the narrative.
The short comics story "How They Met Themselves", by Neil Gaiman (originally published in Vertigo: Winter's Edge #3, reprinted in Absolute Sandman Volume III, pp. 510-519), tells how Swinburne wrote the poem after meeting Desire, who only told him that its name begins with a "D".
In his book Dylan's Visions of Sin, literary critic Christopher Ricks shows many parallels and a possible influence on Bob Dylan's song "Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands".
The fourth stanza of the poem was read by the character Persephone in a cinematic in the MMORG The Matrix Online .
In poetry, a hendecasyllable is a line of eleven syllables. The term may refer to several different poetic meters, the older of which are quantitative and used chiefly in classical poetry, and the newer of which are syllabic or accentual-syllabic and used in medieval and modern poetry.
A quatrain is a type of stanza, or a complete poem, consisting of four lines.
A sestina is a fixed verse form consisting of six stanzas of six lines each, normally followed by a three-line envoi. The words that end each line of the first stanza are used as line endings in each of the following stanzas, rotated in a set pattern.
"Dies irae" is a Latin sequence attributed to either Thomas of Celano of the Franciscans (1200–1265) or to Latino Malabranca Orsini, lector at the Dominican studium at Santa Sabina, the forerunner of the Pontifical University of Saint Thomas Aquinas in Rome. The sequence dates from the 13th century at the latest, though it is possible that it is much older, with some sources ascribing its origin to St. Gregory the Great, Bernard of Clairvaux (1090–1153), or Bonaventure (1221–1274).
"I Vow to Thee, My Country" is a British patriotic hymn, created in 1921 when music by Gustav Holst had a poem by Sir Cecil Spring Rice set to it. The music originated as a wordless melody, which Holst later named "Thaxted", taken from the "Jupiter" movement of Holst's 1917 suite The Planets.
Dolores, Spanish for "pain; grief", most commonly refers to:
"The Tyger" is a poem by the English poet William Blake, published in 1794 as part of his Songs of Experience collection and rising to prominence in the romantic period. The poem is one of the most anthologised in the English literary canon, and has been the subject of both literary criticism and many adaptations, including various musical versions. The poem explores and questions Christian religious paradigms prevalent in late 18th century and early 19th century England, discussing God's intention and motivation for creating both the tiger and the Lamb.
Common metre or common measure—abbreviated as C. M. or CM—is a poetic metre consisting of four lines that alternate between iambic tetrameter and iambic trimeter, with each foot consisting of an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable. The metre is denoted by the syllable count of each line, i.e. 8.6.8.6, 86.86, or 86 86, depending on style, or by its shorthand abbreviation "CM".
Tail rhyme is a family of stanzaic verse forms used in poetry in French and especially English during and since the Middle Ages, and probably derived from models in medieval Latin versification.
"Ode on Melancholy" is one of five odes composed by English poet John Keats in the spring of 1819, along with "Ode on a Grecian Urn", "Ode to a Nightingale", "Ode on Indolence", and "Ode to Psyche". The narrative of the poem describes the poet's perception of melancholy through a lyric discourse between the poet and the reader, along with the introduction to Ancient Grecian characters and ideals.
De contemptu mundi is the most well-known work of Bernard of Cluny. It is a 3,000 verse poem of stinging satire directed against the secular and religious failings he observed in the world around him. He spares no one; priests, nuns, bishops, monks, and even Rome itself are mercilessly scourged for their shortcomings. For this reason it was first printed by Matthias Flacius in Varia poemata de corrupto ecclesiae statu as one of his testes veritatis, or witnesses of the deep-seated corruption of medieval society and of the Church, and was often reprinted by Protestants in the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
This is a glossary of poetry terms.
"The Garden of Proserpine" is a poem by Algernon Charles Swinburne, published in Poems and Ballads in 1866.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and introduction to poetry:
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.
A masculine ending and feminine ending or weak ending are terms used in prosody, the study of verse form. "Masculine ending" refers to a line ending in a stressed syllable. "Feminine ending" is its opposite, describing a line ending in a stressless syllable. This definition is applicable in most cases; see below, however, for a more refined characterization.
The Awntyrs off Arthure at the Terne Wathelyne is an Arthurian romance of 702 lines written in Middle English alliterative verse. Despite its title, it centres on the deeds of Sir Gawain. The poem, thought to have been composed in Cumberland in the late 14th or early 15th century, survives in four different manuscripts from widely separated areas of England.
Notre-Dame-des-Sept-Douleurs is an island municipality in the Bas-Saint-Laurent region of Quebec, Canada, part of the Rivière-du-Loup Regional County Municipality. It is located on and contiguous with Île Verte in the Estuary of St. Lawrence, about 20 kilometres (12 mi) north-east of Rivière-du-Loup. The name Île Verte was given in 1621 by Samuel de Champlain written "Isle Verte".
Algernon Charles Swinburne was an English poet, playwright, novelist, and critic. He wrote several novels and collections of poetry such as Poems and Ballads, and contributed to the Eleventh Edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica.
"In dir ist Freude" is a German hymn with text attributed to Cyriacus Schneegaß, written to a 1591 dance song melody by Giovanni Giacomo Gastoldi. It was first published in a collection of Christmas carols in Erfurt in 1594, and then published again in 1598. Johann Sebastian Bach composed a chorale prelude, BWV 615, as part of his Orgelbüchlein. The song is part of the common Protestant hymnal Evangelisches Gesangbuch, and of many hymnals and songbooks, including ecumenical collections. It was translated by Catherine Winkworth as "In Thee Is Gladness".