ABSTRACT
Swinburne apparently minded the imputations of blasphemy far less than he did those of sexual 'indecency'. Swinburne was by turns an avid admirer and detractor of Robert Browning's and Matthew Arnold's poetry. Swinburne parodies the way in which Browning used the form as a vehicle for Christian apologetics by instead pressing it into the service of his own anti-Christian agenda. Browning aims to recuperate religious doubt for Christianity by revealing that it was always already woven into the fabric of faith. Of the Browning religious monologues, Cleon is the crucial intertext for Hymn to Proserpine. The protagonist of Cleon is a fictional first century ad Greek polymath who, over the course of the poem, unwittingly exposes the depths of his spiritual sterility. Like Hymn to Proserpine, The Leper aims to expose, to repeat Swinburne's phrase, in which he believed 'lurked' not only in Browning's religious monologues but in the interstices of the official historical record.
