# Swinburne's defeated pagan speaks

Commentary on Orthodoxy by G. K. Chesterton.

On [CH06.P009](https://glosses.org/orthodoxy/pg16769-r1/CH06.P009/#char=1,37): "Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilæan"

The line is from Swinburne's ‘Hymn to Proserpine’, first published in *Poems and Ballads* (1866), line 35. The University of Toronto's transcription of the 1924 Heinemann collected edition reads ‘grey from thy breath’; Chesterton's supplied text has ‘gray … with Thy breath’. These are small verbal differences, not a change in the accusation: Christ's triumph has drained the world's colour. ‘Galilean’ addresses Christ. The poem's subtitle places the lament after Christianity's proclamation in Rome; its Latin epigraph, *Vicisti, Galilaee*, anticipates the line's acknowledgement of conquest. [Text and edition](https://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/content/hymn-proserpine).

The speaker appeals to Proserpine for rest from life's pleasures and suffering. His old gods are themselves cruel; Christian worship appears barren to him, but the poem also imagines Christianity yielding to time and death. Thus the pagan world is already troubled within the very poem Chesterton quotes: his next paragraph's turn to *Atalanta* is not the only available evidence. This is a reading of the dramatic lament, rather than evidence that a historical pagan uttered it. [1904 Chatto & Windus text, opening, quoted line and conclusion](https://swinburne.luddy.indiana.edu/acs0000001-01-i011.html).

There is also a qualification to Chesterton's movement from a poet's words to the poet's personal pessimism. In the dedicatory epistle to his collected poems, Swinburne explicitly distinguishes poems drawn from experience from imaginary or dramatic compositions and objects to critics confusing them. He calls this hymn a ‘deathsong of spiritual decadence’, paired with the ‘Hymn of Man’ as a birthsong of renewal. That retrospective description complicates treating the defeated speaker as Swinburne's complete philosophical position, although it does not remove the poem's attack on Christianity. The inspected witness is the 1917 Heinemann reprint of the collected volume first printed in 1904. [Dedicatory epistle](https://www.gutenberg.org/files/35402/35402-h/35402-h.htm).

## Sources

- [Algernon Charles Swinburne, Hymn to Proserpine (RPO)](https://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/content/hymn-proserpine), Edition statement: Collected Poetical Works (Heinemann, 1924), I, 67–73; subtitle, epigraph and line 35
- [Hymn to Proserpine, The Algernon Charles Swinburne Project](https://swinburne.luddy.indiana.edu/acs0000001-01-i011.html), 1904 Chatto & Windus source description; opening, ‘Yea, is not even Apollo’, ‘Thou hast conquered’, ‘Yet thy kingdom shall pass’, and final stanza
- [Swinburne, Poems and Ballads, First Series, collected edition](https://www.gutenberg.org/files/35402/35402-h/35402-h.htm), 1917 Heinemann title and printing statements; Dedicatory Epistle, paragraphs beginning ‘For its author the most amusing’ and ‘Nor, I presume, should this title be denied’

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