Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837-1909) was a Victorian era English poet.
Swinburne's father was an admiral, and his mother was a daughter of the 3rd Earl of Ashburnham.
He attended Eton and Balliol College, Oxford, which he left in 1860 without taking a degree. There he met William Morris, Edward Burne-Jones, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti and was attracted to their Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.
An allowance from his father enabled him to follow a literary career.
Swinburne's health became undermined by alcoholism and by the excesses resulting from his abnormal temperament and masochistic tendencies and in 1879 he collapsed completely and was rescued and restored to health by his friend Theodore Watts-Dunton.
The last 30 years of his life were spent at The Pines, Putney, under the guardianship of Watts-Dunton, who maintained a strict regimen and encouraged Swinburne to devote himself to writing.
Swinburne eventually became a figure of respectability and adopted reactionary views.
His poetry was highly controversial in its day, much of it containing recurring themes of sadomasochism, death-wish, lesbianism and irreligion.
Many of his poems are rather long, so today I am posting this shorter erotic verse.
LOVE AND SLEEP
Lying asleep between the strokes of night
I saw my love lean over my sad bed,
Pale as the duskiest lily's leaf or head,
Smooth-skinned and dark, with bare throat made to bite,
Too wan for blushing and too warm for white,
But perfect-coloured without white or red.
And her lips opened amorously, and said--
I wist not what, saving one word--Delight
And all her face was honey to my mouth,
And all her body pasture to mine eyes;
The long lithe arms and hotter hands than fire,
The quivering flanks, hair smelling of the south,
The bright light feet, the splendid supple thighs
And glittering eyelids of my soul's desire.
Algernon Charles Swinburne
