ABSTRACT
This chapter explores Swinburne's response to Shelley through readings of paired poems across a range of literary kinds: lyric, remodellings of classical drama, elegy, and extended metapoetic rhapsodies-cum-meditations. At times implicitly and yet ultimately, it will argues that Swinburne's poetry, with its shifts of tone and stance, invites one to reanimate the understanding of Decadence, and accord it more purpose, power, and energy than is often allowed. Swinburne, like Shelley, is able to suggest that an ideology is defunct, even as he shows the dangerous vitality that defunct ideology can possess. Before leaving the stanza quoted from Hertha, one might note how, in its final long line, Swinburne alludes to a central figuration in Shelley's The Triumph of Life, that of the sunrise treading out a star. Swinburne saw Shelley with gorgeous hyperbole as a son and soldier of light, an archangel winged and weaponed for angel's work.
