Love, Kissed into Verse: Swinburne, Tennyson, and the Failure of Love in Consummation Versus the Triumph of Love Through Time in Poetry

At its core, this project seeks to examine the veracity of identifying love and sex as inextricable concepts within romantic relationships. Locating this exploration in the study of Victorian poetry, various poems from A.C. Swinburne’s “Poems and Ballads” and Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s elegy “In Memoriam A.H.H.” provide portraits of love with and without consummation. The first chapter focuses its gaze upon Swinburne’s poems, where consummation in romantic relationships erodes love and causes love’s inability to survive through time. The second chapter analyzes “In Memoriam A.H.H.” and its portrayal of loving, even after the death of the beloved. Ultimately, after considering love in tandem with consummation and love without consummation, poetry is established as the method through which love can endure the passage of time