Everything about Dolores Notre-dame Des Sept Douleurs totally explained
Dolores (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", named thusly at the close of many of its stanzas.
Themes
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.
Meter
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.
Controversial Aspects
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, for example, "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 (
277 What 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 (
397 I could hurt thee — but pain would delight thee, etc.)
Related Works
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 figure of the
Lady of Pain as invented by Swinburne was borrowed by the
Planescape Dungeons & Dragons campaign setting based on the poem's central character.
Further Information
Get more info on 'Dolores Notre-dame Des Sept Douleurs'.
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