ABSTRACT
In ‘Sestina’ Algernon Charles Swinburne describes his soul as barred from the delight that others know by day, but instead consoled by a vision seen in darkness. On 9 June Lord Ronald Gower saw Swinburne in Putney, and observed, ‘while fully aware of the divine gifts within him, he is as simple and unaffected as a child.’ Swinburne said ‘Off-Shore’ was intended to repeat the metrical effect of ‘Hertha’; ‘The Garden of Cymodoce’ was ‘an attempt to supersede Murray by a simple and complete “handbook” in rhyme’. The defiant invocation of Pan and Apollo in ‘The Last Oracle’ celebrated the power of the poetic imagination in language which gave the verse the same internal tensions as ‘Hertha’. The privacy of the regime at The Pines during the early 1880s has possibly been exaggerated by those who did not have the access to Swinburne they desired.
