This essay offers a critical analysis of the fictional poem "Swammerdam," written by the invented Victorian poet Randolph Henry Ash in A.S. Byatt's novel Possession. The paper examines how Byatt uses the poem as a layered intratextual device, revealing Ash's character, his pursuit of Christabel LaMotte, and the novel's central male/female dichotomy. The analysis traces the poem's egg imagery, its allusions to historical microscopist Jan Swammerdam, and its connections to Darwin, Donne, Browning, and Coleridge. The essay also considers how twentieth-century scholars within the novel interpret the poem, and how Byatt ultimately uses it to articulate the novel's unifying theme: that all human obsessions lead back to a single, shared origin.
A.S. Byatt's novel Possession succeeds brilliantly in the monumental technical achievement of creating a deeply layered romance in which two twentieth-century literary scholars, Roland Michell and Maud Bailey, become themselves romantically involved as they investigate a startling connection between the two Victorian poets on whom they have made specialized study. Byatt's feat is an especially remarkable tour de force, as she invents and adroitly interlaces the poetic works of both Randolph Henry Ash and Christabel LaMotte into her narrative. This essay presents a critical analysis of Ash's poem "Swammerdam" as it reveals its intricate intratextual roles in the novel.
Randolph Henry Ash writes the poem "Swammerdam" during the period in which he and Christabel LaMotte are initiating the secret correspondence that will develop into the great passion of their lives. Byatt intends the reader to understand that Ash aimed this poem specifically at Christabel as its audience. The poem itself plays a role in the plot: the first copied draft sent by Ash is intercepted by Christabel's companion Blanche, verifying her suspicions, and Blanche presents the poem to Ash's wife as proof of the affair. Ash sends a second copy of the poem, to which he finds it necessary to make numerous changes, and Ellen returns the original draft to Ash when he reveals the affair to her. "Swammerdam" reveals much about the character of the poet — his perfectionism, his pride in his erudition, his pomposity, his literary pretension. It is a form of his ventriloquism, the style in which he prides himself on looking closely at historical figures, getting inside them, and speaking through them.
The first lines of "Swammerdam" include echoes of Coleridge's "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," as the speaker begs to be heard. Indeed, the name Christabel itself comes from a Coleridge poem. Thus Byatt evokes multiple layers of literary meaning as she equates her fictional poet with Robert Browning, who in his "Mr. Sludge, 'the Medium'" demonstrates a skepticism of spiritualist phenomena that he shares with Ash. Taking this Ash poem in the context of his other works as created by Byatt, the reader can also perceive the presence of John Donne, whose attitude toward women's minds as expressed in "Love Alchemy" makes it evident that Ash agrees that men must "Hope not for mind in women." From the same Donne poem, Ash takes his title "Mummy Possessed," his own satiric response to Christabel's belief in spiritualism.
In identifying Ash with Donne, Byatt categorizes him as a metaphysical poet. Ash's connection with experience, like Donne's, is male and intellectual. These poets distance themselves from life and use their poetry to mentally stimulate their readers, requiring depth of knowledge for full understanding. The overall tone of "Swammerdam" can be read as a superior male talking down to an inferior-minded female.
The egg imagery with which Ash begins the poem is vital to its essential meaning and to the relationship of the poem to the novel as a whole. Early in their correspondence, Christabel poses a riddle for Ash — "a fragile Riddle, in white and Gold with life in the middle of it" (151) — to which the answer is the egg of Christabel's life, which Ash is likely to crush. There is even an unspoken implication from Byatt that Ash may be stealing this image from LaMotte when he uses it in his poem. Christabel writes brilliantly in her letter describing her solitude as her egg, "sealed and smooth," within which "gold cage" she has "Wings to spread." In magnificent words that reveal her true promise as a poet, Christabel says:
Shattering an Egg is unworthy of you, no Pass time for men. Think what you would have in your hand if you put forth your Giant strength and crushed the solid stone. Something slippery and cold and unthinkably disagreeable (152).
With this image Byatt embodies the central male/female dichotomy of the novel, in which men and women scholars vie to interpret and defend their poetic counterparts. As "Swammerdam" continues with its obsession with eggs, larvae, and ovaries, we find encapsulated the ironic saga of Christabel's fate — a woman destined to be known merely as a minor poet, later to be championed by twentieth-century feminists, the egg of whose life is indeed crushed by her relationship to the "Giant" poet. The fertilization of her egg and the resultant pregnancy, childbirth, and aftermath are so much more overwhelming to her life than to his.
As Ash works with the egg image, Byatt reveals much of his character. The simple picture of life being crushed as presented by Christabel becomes intellectually complex and convoluted in Ash's poetic mind. He must include every possible association — hatching, shell, pricking, sucking — as he develops his image. His intention is to show that he is an examiner of minute details, like Swammerdam himself. In his attempt to impress Christabel with his knowledge and his investigative nature, he instead reveals that he is pedantic, long-winded, and full of himself, and that often, as he seeks "to know the origins of life" (225), he obfuscates rather than clarifies.
Jan Swammerdam was a seventeenth-century Dutch microscopist who, through the development of new instruments, careful dissections, and precise experimentation in insect development, made discoveries demonstrating that spontaneous generation was a fallacy and that the same organism continues through its various stages. His studies became the foundation for the developing understanding of morphogenesis, contributing to Darwin's theories of evolution that were so prominent in Victorian minds. The year 1859, in which Christabel LaMotte and R.H. Ash begin the correspondence that includes the sharing of "Swammerdam" — to be followed by a shared holiday on the Yorkshire coast studying geology and marine life — is the same year in which Darwin's On the Origin of Species is published, popularizing the theory of natural selection and creating a climate of doubt in the previously secure world of Victorian religious faith. Ash's scientific interest in marine biology parallels Swammerdam's perfectionistic study of insects. Both seek the underlying principles behind life.
As the poem begins, Swammerdam is composing his will, allocating his few worldly belongings as he prepares to die. The Frenchman Thévenot, who is to receive Swammerdam's pens and manuscripts, is a historical person who, after Swammerdam's death, managed to publish at least one volume of his work under the title The Bible of Nature. The phrase "Nature's Bible," which Swammerdam uses to describe his discoveries, serves multiple purposes in the work of Byatt and Ash, as it evokes the Victorian concern with Darwin's supposed destruction of the Bible's version of creation.
Byatt introduces the word "possessed" (225) as Swammerdam considers his obsession with insects. From the title of the book it is obvious that Byatt herself is possessed with the ways in which humans throughout history become possessed by one thing or another. Scholars are possessed by long-dead poets, men and women are romantically possessed by one another — mentally and physically — and Swammerdam and Ash are possessed by obsessions to study "forms of life" (225). As Swammerdam "crucified" "frail dark wings" for his own knowledge and "amusement," the reader sees the analogy to Ash's poetic crucifixions of his poetic characterizations, and even feels a foreboding knowledge of Christabel's fate as she will succumb to the pins and microscope of Ash's possession.
As Swammerdam describes his worldly work, which he "thought much, but men thought otherwise" (221), it is easy to see Ash's ego comparing his own poetry to the scientific exhibits of his subject:
Well nigh three thousand winged or creeping things
Lively in death, injected by my Art,
Lovingly entered, opened and displayed — (222)
Ash wants to be identified in the eyes of Christabel with the men who "dared to probe / Secrets beyond their frame's unaided scope," and "Who saw Infinity through countless cracks / In the blank skin of things" (222). Like Swammerdam, who proved that from the insect's egg the larvae emerged and then further developed into "The monstrous female or the winged drone / Or hurrying worker, each in its degree" (222), Ash wants to be seen as an
Expert in smallness, in the smallest things
The inconsiderable and overlooked,
The curious and the ephemeral (222).
Ash carefully details the evolution of Swammerdam from youthful collector to worldly explorer, describing the exacting work that weakened Swammerdam's eyes "straining over motes and specks of living matter" (223). With his poetic cataloguing, Ash, like Swammerdam, aspires to "part / Medicine from myth" (224). Like Swammerdam, Ash has "precocious yearnings of the mind" and, through his interest in marine biology — soon to be shared with Christabel — shows that he agrees "true anatomy" begins "not in the human heart and hands," but in "primal forms." For both poet and microscopist, the "clue of life" lies "in the blind white worm / That eats away the complex flesh of men," and "rational anatomy / Begins at the foot o' the ladder, on the rung / Nearest the fertile heat of Mother Earth" (225).
Possessed as he is with his pursuit of Christabel as he writes about Swammerdam, Ash returns to the egg image, this time associating it not with the ordinary barnyard egg but with the grander "Mundane Egg" of ancient Egypt, enlarging the image to "mythic" proportions, incorporating Eros, and allying his burgeoning love with the pursuit of "truth" and the desire "to know the origins of life." The "lawful knowledge" Swammerdam seeks, magnified under his lenses, parallels the knowledge the poet seeks. The "plans and links / Of dizzying order and complexity" (225) of insect anatomy allow Swammerdam to say:
I saw a new world in this world of ours —
A world of miracle, a world of truth —
"Ash's pursuit of Christabel through Swammerdam's lens"
"Blackadder, Cropper, and Maud on Ash's poem"
Swammerdam, Ash, and Byatt all share the same seemingly contradictory urges. All three examine the human need to intensely investigate the obsessions by which they are possessed, and all allow for some divine contribution to the Mystery. The metaphor of the poem and the poet is the metaphor of the novel. Scholars explore the lives of writers with microscopes, as Swammerdam explores the origin of insect life, as Ash explores life through his poetry. As Blackadder points out at the end of the novel, when it is discovered that Maud is descended from both Ash and LaMotte, "how strangely appropriate to have been exploring all along the myth — no, the truth — of your own origins" (547). Byatt is saying, as Ash says in "Swammerdam," that "Life is One" (224) — that all our studies of everything by which we are possessed lead us to the one source of our unified origin. Or perhaps she is agreeing with Ash, who on his deathbed, weary of considerations, said: "I see why Swammerdam longed for the quiet dark" (487).
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