So love wounds as we grasp it and blackens and burns as a flame;
I have loved much in my life; when the live bud bursts with the blossom
Bitter as ashes or tears is the fruit, and the wine thereof shame."
Even in "The Leper" he gives us an inkling of his great love by describing the devotion of the lover for the smitten lady. "She might have loved me a little too, had I been humbler for her sake."
All these poems appeared in his first volume and were written within at least two years after his sorrow. He can scarcely write a poem or chant about a woman or retell an old myth or legend, or venture a bit of philosophy but he unconsciously introduces his aching heart. The burden is always that love has an end or lives but a day.
There are other poems in the first volume where the personal note is present and yet very little attention has been called to this.
The poem "Felise," with its quotation from Villon, "Where are the Snows of Yesterday," is I believe a personal poem, based on an actual or desired change between him and his lost sweetheart, that is, if this poem refers to her. Some day new data may appear to tell us whether the facts of the poem had any basis in reality. It seems that a year after the poet's love was rejected by the girl, she wished to win his love back and that he now scorned her. The poem was written, Gosse conjectures, in 1864, but 1863 is most likely the date from the internal evidence, as she rejected him in 1862. Swinburne refers to the change a year had brought:
"I had died for this last year, to know
You loved me. Who shall turn on fate?
I care not if love come or go