Nephelidia

In this brilliantly sustained self-parody, Swinburne turns his notorious gift for lush, alliterative verse into an instrument of hilarious excess. Nephelidia (Greek for "little clouds") lampoons the very qualities that made his poetry famous: the cascading rhythm, the opulent diction, the nearly unbearable beauty of his lines. Here, he loads syllable upon syllable, crams his verses with sound and fury, and lets nothing go unadorned - all while maintaining a perfectly straight face. The result is both affectionate mockery and a strange kind of tribute: to skewer something this precisely, you must first understand it completely. For lovers of Victorian poetry, for anyone who has ever laughed at a poet taking themselves too seriously, this is a rare treat: genius mocking genius, and making it look effortless.