She would not hear.
Let us rise up and part; she will not know.
Let us go seaward as the great winds go,
Full of blown sand and foam; what help is here?
There is no help, for all these things are so,
And all the world is bitter as a tear.
And how these things are, though ye strive to show,
She would not know....
That is technically a sheer triumph of metrical skill. Of the rhythmic line of which we have spoken there is nothing. Of the finer enchantment of diction also there is nothing. In fourteen lines there are over a hundred monosyllabic words, and it could hardly be claimed for one of them that it performs any magical evocation, such as do those words quoted of Vaughan and Marvell. The monosyllabic commonplace of the diction is hardly redeemed by the few words that have some stock poetic association, and the diction is, indeed, in itself as insignificant as the rhythm. And yet this is lovely verse, among the best work of a great poet, and its virtue comes from its exquisite metrical authority. So pronounced is this that the absence of rhythmical vitality does not matter, being made good by a metrical beauty that under this poet’s direction is in itself something as satisfying. And the poverty of the diction is no longer poverty, taking from the metrical genius of the verse all that it needs of colour and temperament. Swinburne’s characteristic contribution to the poetic technique of his age was to show that great verse could be produced without the greatest gifts of rhythm or diction. He had an ear that was, in one sense, faultless, but it rarely caught the long haunting undertones of poetry that flow about the structure of most great verse, and he could command every device of verbal luxuriance without being able to penetrate to the last spiritual recesses of language. What, with all his powers, he lacked of greatness in these respects, he made good by his one unchallenged mastery. Since of the three elements of poetic technique, metre, rhythm and diction, metre is least inscrutable in its nature, it followed that Swinburne was at once fatally easy of imitation and less influential than any of his peers upon the living tradition of English poetry. Dozens of poets have written very like Swinburne, but no poet has ever written better because of him.