ight woven and moonbeam-colored shade
More fine than moonbeams; white her eyelids shone
As snow sun-stricken that endures the sun,
And through their curled and coloured clouds of deep,
Luminous lashes, thick as dreams in sleep,
Shone, as the sea's depth swallowing up the sky's,
The springs of unimaginable eyes.
As the wave's subtler emerald is pierced through
With the utmost heaven's inextricable blue,
And both are woven and molten in one sleight
Of amorous colour and implicated light
Under the golden guard and gaze of noon,
So glowed their aweless amorous plenilune,
Azure and gold and ardent grey, made strange
With fiery difference and deep interchange
Inexplicable of glories multiform;
Now, as the sullen sapphire swells towards storm
Foamless, their bitter beauty grew acold,
And now afire with ardour of fine gold.
Her flower-soft lips were meek and passionate,
For love upon them like a shadow sate
Patient, a foreseen vision of sweet things,
A dream with eyes fast shut and plumeless wings
That knew not what man's love or life should be,
Nor had it sight nor heart to hope or see
What thing should come; but, childlike satisfied,
Watched out its virgin vigil in soft pride
And unkissed expectation; and the glad
Clear cheeks and throat and tender temples had
Such maiden heat as if a rose's blood
Beat in the live heart of a lily-bud."

What distinct image of the woman portrayed does one carry away from all
this squandered wealth of words and tropes? Compare the entire poem with
one of Tennyson's Arthurian "Idyls," or even with Matthew Arnold's not
over-prosperous "Tristram and Iseult," or with any of the stories in "The
Earthly Paradise," and it will be seen how far short it falls of being
good verse narrative--with its excesses of language and retarded
movement. Wordsworth said finely of Shakspere that he could not have
written an epic: "he would have perished from a plethora of thought." It
is not so much plethora of thought as lavishness of style which clogs the
wheels in Swinburne. Too often his tale is

"Like a tale of the little meaning,
Though the words are strong."

But his narrative method has analogies, not only with things like
Shelley's "Laon and Cythna," but with Elizabethan poems such as Marlowe
and Chapman's "Hero and Leander." If not so conceited as these, it is
equally encumbered with sticky sweets which keep the story from gett