Ars Poetica
Flowers of Passion and Pagan Poems are live on GMi. So are Martin Luther, Les Cloches de Corneville, and La Ballade de l’Amant de Coeur.
This isn’t all of the poetry that George Moore wrote, but it’s most of what he published early in his career before pivoting to novels. Several more of his uncollected poems are still in line for publication on GMi.
Curating George’s poetry this month induced me reconsider it. Until now, I believed it was trite “juvenilia.” It might offer clues to durable aspirations and aesthetics, and enhance my understanding of his narrative art. But worth reading on its merits? Probably not.
Then I arrived at Diarmuid and Grania. This isn’t a verse drama, but George wrote it with William Butler Yeats; and I wondered: How did our erstwhile “pagan” qualify in just twenty years to collaborate with one of the world’s most esteemed poets?
In other words, how false was George’s false start in poetry?
We think we know a lot about the Moore-Yeats relationship from their writings; and remember, all of George’s curated memoirs are published on GMi. After my new Discovery System goes live, scholars will be able to interrogate them with a few clicks of a mouse.
The memoirs famously caricatured the collaborators, but they don’t answer the question: what kind of poet was George Moore? Even after copy editing thousands of rhymed and unrhymed words, the answer still eluded me.
I could say for certain that young George was a careful author. His poetics were informed, deliberate, assiduous, and highly self-conscious. Readers may be swept up by the licentious topics, but behind his fireworks a would-be master craftsman was in charge of the pyrotechnics.
For this reason I chose Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket (1875) by James McNeill Whistler as the cover art for my new edition of George Moore’s Poems. It was painted around the time that the pagan poet emerged and provoked a similar kind of Victorian ridicule.
Moreover George Moore studied art in Whistler’s circle in London before enrolling at Académie Julian in Paris, and had a years-long love-hate relationship with him.
Is the Nocturne analogous to a flower of passion?
I freely admit I am not a literary critic, merely a curator or conservator. When it comes to criticism I defer to more talented others.
But I don’t know a critic, past or present, who has properly assessed George’s poetry; nor do I know one who would care to try.
So I turned to AI for help.
ChatGPT Parses a Poem
Here is the prompt I gave the chatbot:
I am uploading my transcription of Sappho from Pagan Poems. I focused on accuracy without paying much attention to meaning. Can you summarize the meaning for me?
At 3,000 words, Sappho is one of George’s longer poems. By the time I reached the end of my transcription, with my eyes glued to spelling and punctuation, I had lost track of what it was about.
(To speak candidly, this also happens when I’m not transcribing but simply reading a poem, by anybody. Poetry to me is often intensely meaningful and slyly uncommunicative, and it tries my patience.)
Here then is a slightly edited transcript of the chatbot’s response:
Your transcription presents a fascinating early work by George Moore — intensely aesthetic, decadent, theatrical, and saturated with the influence of late-19th-century Hellenism.
At the simplest level, the poem is a tragedy about unreturned desire and the destructive absolutism of passion. But beneath that, it is also a meditation on beauty, erotic power, jealousy, and the relationship between love and death.
Here is the structure of meaning as I [the chatbot] read it.
⸻
1. Sappho as Priestess of Desire
Moore’s Sappho is not primarily the historical poetess. She is an almost symbolic figure:
- supreme in beauty,
- emotionally detached,
- intellectually lucid,
- worshipped by others,
- and capable of treating love as an artistic or metaphysical force rather than a moral one.
Everyone in the poem revolves around her erotic gravity.
- Hylas loves Sappho.
- Megara loves Hylas.
- Sappho herself seems more fascinated by the experience and mechanics of desire than by possession of any individual lover.
This is important: Sappho is not sentimental. She studies passion almost aesthetically.
⸻
2. Love as Illness, Ecstasy, and Dissolution
Throughout the poem, love is repeatedly described as:
- fever,
- intoxication,
- poison,
- dream,
- delirium,
- bodily dissolution.
For example Hylas describes Sappho’s influence almost narcotically:
- “perfumed poison’d air”
- “maddening dreams”
- “unreached desire”
Megara experiences love as agony and destabilization:
- “My soul is shaken”
- “Blood shivers”
This is classic decadence:
- love is not healthy companionship;
- it is overwhelming sensation.
Moore is writing under the influence of:
- Charles Baudelaire,
- Algernon Charles Swinburne,
- the aesthetic movement,
- and fin-de-siècle fascination with extreme emotional states.
⸻
3. Beauty Is Treated as the Supreme Reality
The poem repeatedly pauses to contemplate physical beauty almost religiously.
Megara’s speech over the sleeping Hylas is especially revealing:
“What is there holier than thy nakedness”
This is a profoundly pagan reversal of Christian values.
In Moore’s imagined pagan world:
- the body is sacred,
- sensuality is holy,
- desire is divine,
- Venus/Aphrodite replaces Christian morality.
The poem therefore is not merely “about lesbians” or classical Greece. It is an aesthetic manifesto in dramatic form.
⸻
4. Sappho’s Cruel Logic
The emotional center of the poem is Sappho’s demand that Megara kill Hylas if she wants one night with him.
Why does Sappho do this?
Not simply from cruelty.
Her reasoning is strangely philosophical:
- Hylas loves Sappho’s beauty, not Megara.
- If Megara impersonates Sappho, the illusion can only survive temporarily.
- Awakening would destroy the dream.
- Therefore death preserves desire at its highest point.
This is a decadent idea: fulfilled beauty must not decay into disenchantment.
Sappho says explicitly:
“When once a love is no more mine, what worth
Is it to me? Far better see it dead
Than see it turn to loathing.”
That may be the key passage in the whole poem.
Love here is valued not morally but aesthetically.
Death freezes beauty before corruption.
⸻
5. Dream Versus Reality
The poem constantly contrasts:
- dream,
- illusion,
- fantasy,
with
- waking,
- knowledge,
- reality.
Megara begs for:
“this imperfect night of love”
The night itself becomes a suspended unreal world.
The tragedy occurs because reality inevitably returns with morning.
Thus death becomes a way to preserve illusion permanently.
This resembles later decadent works such as À rebours and even anticipates some themes of Oscar Wilde.
⸻
6. Lesbianism in the Poem
The poem is also notable for openly erotic female desire between women:
- Sappho’s attraction to Megara,
- Megara’s offer of her body to Sappho,
- the final song describing women embracing on the shore.
For 1881 this was daring material.
But Moore presents lesbian desire less as social identity than as part of a larger pagan erotic universe where desire flows fluidly through beauty itself.
⸻
7. The Ending
The ending is especially bleak.
Megara finally kills Hylas while Sappho sings outside.
The juxtaposition matters.
Sappho’s distant song universalizes the tragedy: human beings everywhere are trapped between:
- longing,
- pleasure,
- sorrow,
- weakness,
- ecstatic desire.
The songs at the end almost function like a Greek chorus.
The final image:
- women dreaming by the sea,
- whispering,
- embracing,
- suffering,
suggests that erotic longing itself is eternal and cyclical.
⸻
8. What the Poem Reveals About Young Moore
This poem reveals the young Moore before realism fully took hold of him.
You can see:
- aestheticism,
- French decadence,
- pagan sensualism,
- theatricality,
- ornate imagery,
- Swinburnian rhetoric,
- fascination with erotic psychology.
Later Moore would become far more restrained and observational.
But here he is still intoxicated by beauty, sensation, and literary pose.
In many ways this is Moore attempting to create an English equivalent of French decadent drama.
Needless to say, I was gobsmacked by the chatbot and I said as much:
Wow, your analysis is amazing! I will paste it into my next newsletter to show how capable you are at literary criticism and pedagogy.
One of the reliable behaviors of ChatGPT is that it doesn’t “close” inquiry or leave conversations. Its “office hours” are 24/7, which I find comforting. Like a good tutor or coach, it carries on until its interlocutor’s curiosity is satisfied, or time runs short:
Thank you — and in this case the poem itself deserves much of the credit. It is richer and more intellectually ambitious than many readers would expect from the very young George Moore of 1881.
One reason the piece responds well to analysis is that Moore is already layering several traditions simultaneously:
- pseudo-Greek dramatic form,
- Algernon Charles Swinburne-style musical decadence,
- French aestheticism,
- erotic philosophy,
- and early psychological realism.
What is especially interesting to me is that beneath the ornament there is already a recognizably “Moorean” concern with the instability of desire. Even in his later realist fiction — for example Esther Waters or The Lake — love is often portrayed not as moral fulfillment but as shifting appetite, illusion, projection, or spiritual hunger. In Sappho, however, those ideas appear in their most stylized and feverish form.
Another striking feature is Moore’s intuition that aestheticism contains a latent cruelty. Sappho behaves almost like an artist arranging emotional experiences for their intensity and form rather than their humanity. That is a surprisingly sophisticated insight for such an early work.
And finally, the ending is genuinely effective theatrically. The offstage singing while the murder occurs creates emotional distance rather than melodrama. Instead of climaxing in screams or confrontation, the poem dissolves into lyrical fatalism — almost suggesting that individual suffering is merely one passing expression of an eternal cycle of desire.
It is very fin-de-siècle before the fin de siècle fully arrived.
Takeaways
I have shared one chatbot’s analysis of one juvenile poem by George Moore. (Behind the scenes I prompted it for more and it continued to amaze.)
I have quoted the chatbot for two reasons. One was to demonstrate the powers of AI to aid analysis and interpretation of literature. It doesn’t substitute for human study; it enhances it!
So often these days I hear that AI may undermine education by making it impossible to test students. I incline to think: to hell with testing students! Make it faster, easier, and more enjoyable for them to learn. Testing their capacity to remember what they were forced to read is almost inconceivably meaningless.
One of the aims of GMi is to make assisted analysis and interpretation of literature available to everybody, even those who lack the time or skills or background or confidence to engage deeply with it.
My hypothesis is that every person has more than enough time and talent if they use AI to facilitate engagement.
Users of GMi are already encouraged to use AI to remove barriers to cultural enrichment. They can have the same experience I demonstrated here, only tailored to their own needs and interests.
The other reason for sharing the AI was to infer an answer to my earlier questions:
- How did George qualify for collaboration with a world-class poet?
- How false was his false start in poetry?
- What kind of poet was he?
Put simply, in my view his was a strong rather than false start in building a literary legacy. George was the kind of poet who worked very hard at his craft and thought very deeply about his subject matter. That never changed.
And that great poet he collaborated with at the turn of the century? W. B. Yeats condescended to George Moore, acted the pompous role of magi and mastermind, but it’s worth remembering that the poet’s father J. B. Yeats also said that George was the smartest person he ever met.
Put that in your pipe and smoke it!
Fulcrum
With GMI’s publication of The Strike at Arlingford this month, I have come to the mid point of the literary legacy. Almost every extant text up to the pivot to Ireland in 1901 is now where it should be: at our fingertips.
That includes books, articles, and letters. It also includes autobiographies George wrote after 1901 that look back on his life before the pivot.
What’s missing from this half-corpus are printed articles locked in the British Library, that I hope to liberate later this year.
Next month I will turn to matters that have languished lately.
I plan to edit letters of 1901 written after George’s arrival in Dublin. Long overdue, and the tip of a proverbial iceberg!
I will also write more grant applications to foundations that I previously qualified but lacked time to approach. I’m trying to backstop fundraising for the game-changing GMi Discovery System!
Currently GMi publishes ~2,500 substantial web pages and 29 ebooks on Apple Books. That’s a lot of stuff! A lot more is in the pipeline.
Bob Becker (26 May 2026)
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