8 - ‘Is This the End?’: Swinburne's Paradoxical Tribute to Sir John Franklin (1860)

Summary

‘Many the woes he suffered in his heart upon the sea.’ With this epigraph from the first lines of the Odyssey, Owen Vidal, a student from Trinity College, Oxford, wished to place his poem dedicated to Sir John Franklin's quest for the Northwest Passage under the glorious aegis of Homer. This now forgotten poetic tribute won in 1860 the £50 prize offered by the University of Oxford for ‘the best English poem on the Life, the Character and the Death of the heroic seaman, Sir John Franklin, with special reference to the time, place, and discovery of his death’. Among the other contributors who competed for this coveted literary prize – which the Guardian had advertised on 8 February 1860 – was Algernon Charles Swinburne, a rebellious young poet who had just been rusticated from Balliol College, officially for having neglected his academic work, in fact for having publicly expressed strong Republican, agnostic and antiNapoleonic feelings. The poet had certainly seized the opportunity offered by this competition to try and make up for his poor academic achievements and launch his poetic career. But he was most doubtful of his success, as he explained in a letter to his mother:

You may have seen in the Guardian that there is a prize at Oxford of £50 (I think) for a poem on the subject of Sir John Franklin and the late discoveries. […]