Photograph of a young Algernon Swinburne. Source: achetron.com.
2010 cut paper image by Vanessa Stone illustrating Swinburne's
lines. Source: vanessastonecutpaper.blogspot.com.
Great sweet mother
"Algy" is Algernon Charles Swinburne, the ostentatiously decadent late Victorian poet from Northumberland. When Mulligan calls the sea “a great sweet mother” in Telemachus he is quoting a phrase from Swinburne’s early poem The Triumph of Time, published in 1866, which treated death at sea as a consummation devoutly to be wished.
The poem is a long (49 stanzas of ottava rima) lament for unrequited love. It returns again and again to the ocean as an image of the self-loss that the speaker desires, now that his hopes of romantic completion have been shipwrecked. Addressing the sea as mother and lover, killer and fulfiller, graveyard and paradise, he seeks a consummation somewhere between eroticism and mysticism:
With their pervasive pessimism, their extravagant longing for dissolution, their pagan ecstasies, their immersion in paradox, and their overtones of incest and necrophilia, these late Romantic stanzas speak to the avant-garde, anti-bourgeois sensibilities of men like Mulligan. Although Stephen is about as much a part of the bohemian scene as Mulligan, his hydrophobic thoughts about the sea tend more to hard-headed contemplation of rotting bodies than to dreams of watery ecstasy. But the strains of a comparable song by Shakespeare do occupy his thoughts.
Swinburne was a friend of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and
Christina Rossetti, and seen by many of his contemporaries as
the late Victorian successor to Tennyson and Browning. Gifford
observes that “In 1904 Swinburne was, in Yeats’ phrase, the
‘King of the Cats,’ the grand old man of the preceding
century’s avant-garde.” Many other poems by this
writer figure in Ulysses, including "The
Oblation," "Hermaphroditus," "On the
Death of Colonel Benson," "Hymn to Proserpine," "Genesis,"
and the play Atalanta in Calydon.
In a page on JJON Geert Lernout writes, "We know from
his surviving correspondence that Joyce's friend Oliver St
John Gogarty, the original of Buck Mulligan, was obsessed with
Algernon Swinburne’s work, which he quotes copiously in his
letters to Joyce and to his Oxford friend G.K.A. Bell. In his
1903 and 1904 letters to Joyce and in the slightly later
correspondence with Bell, Gogarty even talks of plans to go on
a pilgrimage to meet the old English poet at the Rose and
Crown pub in Wimbledon. The language of these letters is
infused with Swinburnean phrases, especially in the letters to
Bell, who shared his obsession. James F. Carens, who edited
the letters to Bell for Dolmen Press, has two footnotes for
the first letter (of 26 June 1904) that identify quotations
from Swinburne poems, one of them the famous Mulligan quote in
Telemachus about the sea being a 'great sweet mother'.
In reality, that first letter alone has five additional
references to four different Swinburne poems: 'Anactoria',
'The Triumph of Time', 'Ave atque Vale' (twice) and 'Ode on
the insurrection in Candia'."
Photograph of a young Algernon Swinburne. Source: achetron.com.
2010 cut paper image by Vanessa Stone illustrating Swinburne's
lines. Source: vanessastonecutpaper.blogspot.com.