Ruddy birth
Ruddy
birth
In Brief
After quoting from "Algy" Swinburne's poems twice in Telemachus
and echoing him quietly in Scylla and Charybdis,
Mulligan goes on quoting him in Wandering Rocks and Oxen
of the Sun, now as an example of artistic achievement
that Stephen Dedalus could never possibly attain. He cites a
line from the Victorian aesthete's "Genesis"––"One thing the
white death and the ruddy birth"––as exemplifying a "note"
that all true poets strike. He deems Stephen's
Christianity-twisted consciousness to be incapable of grasping
its insights, but the novel shows him to be wrong.
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"Genesis" was published in Songs Before Sunrise
(1871), Swinburne's third book of poetry. It asserts a kind of
non-Christian cosmogony focused on the contrary forces of
"life and death" (8). Anticipating Wallace Stevens's
proclamation that "Death is the mother of beauty," Swinburne
argues that these contraries coincide, "For if death were not,
then should growth not be" (41):
For the great labour of growth, being many, is one;
One thing the white death and the ruddy birth;
The invisible air and the all-beholden sun,
And barren water and many-childed earth. (33-36)
In his Hellenising
fashion, Mulligan hears these lines embodying an "Attic"
wisdom antithetical to the Christian war between good and
evil. Stephen's jesuitical "visions of hell" blind him to
Swinburne's pagan wisdom, so he will never draw on the life
force of creation. But in fact Joyce did come to write about
ruddy births: Rudy's face was "mauve" with poorly
oxygenated blood, and his burial sweater is echoed in
the "ruddy
wool" that Stephen imagines wrapping the fetus in the
midwife's bag. He wrote about white deaths as well: Bloom
thinks of "Saltwhite crumbling mush of corpse: smell, taste
like raw white turnips." This mind trained in the abstractions
of Christian theology turned toward studying life in the body
as intensively as any writer ever has. Joyce also regularly
played with the coincidence of contraries, as in Circe:
"Jewgreek is greekjew. Extremes meet. Death is the highest
form of life. Bah!"
William Bell Scott's 1860 painted portrait of Algernon Charles Swinburne standing by the Northumberland coast. Source: mypoeticside.com.