The Revisionist “Disembodied Voice” in the Decadent Stella Maris poetry of John Addington Symonds and Arthur Symons

Abstract

This essay examines French symbolist influences on two English poets who wrote autobiographical poetry in the context of late nineteenth century decadence. John Addington Symonds and Arthur Symons admired Paul Verlaine, and they answer his call for “nuance” in poetry, rather than distinction and clarity, a style that Verlaine inherited from his model Baudelaire and that Verlaine developed into a trope particularly effective in confessional poetry—the disembodied voice. Symonds and Symons employ this trope in autobiographical poems they title “Stella Maris,” thereby addressing the Virgin Mary in her role as “Star of the Sea.” Stella Maris historically guides sailors through tumultuous waters, keeping them safe physically and ensuring that in the event of disaster, she helps them navigate their way to redemption through her son, Christ. Over time, this “voyage” assumed a metaphorical dimension and came to represent the difficulty of navigating the dangerous “waters” of living unconventionally, particularly with respect to sexual matters. Both Symonds and Symons struggled with the tension between the deeply inscribed Victorian values according to which they had been raised and sexual urges that contravened these values but that were consistent with late nineteenth-century decadence. In the case of the married Symonds, these were homosexual desires, and in the case of the Methodist-raised Symons these were sexual desires that manifested themselves in his propensity for London prostitutes and the less restrictive space of the London music hall. Both poets enable the disembodied voice of the trope of Catholic mediation, the Stella Maris, temporarily embodied in poetry as representative objects of their desire. Through this trope, the speakers are led through a process of transforming what they feared was profane into what they needed to believe was sacred, and, in each case, the speaker experiences love that reaffirms French symbolist values in the fin-de-siècle shift toward the modernist culture that could accommodate what had been in Victorian culture forbidden.