Astrophel and Other Poems: Taken from the Collected Poetical Works of Algernon Charles: Swinburne, Vol. VI

In this lushly melancholic collection, Swinburne turns his formidable gifts to elegy and homage, weaving reveries through the lives and legends of England's greatest poets. The titular Astrophel meditates on Sir Philip Sidney, that Elizabethan paragon of courtly love and martial honor, threading the poet's own mortality through the golden memory of a national hero. Here are verses that sing of nightingales and spring, of roses and the sea, of pleasure shadowed by the knowledge that all things beautiful must fade. Swinburne's prosody remains supremely musical, his stanzas rolling forward with the oceanic rhythm that made him Victorian England's most exhilarating formalist. These are poems for readers who believe poetry can resurrect the dead, that language woven with sufficient care might hold back time itself. Volume VI of his collected works offers some of his most personally reflective verse, haunted by the ghosts of literary tradition and the poet's own mounting years.