Clothed round by sweet art with the spacious
Warm heaven of her imminent wings,
Let them enter, unfledged and nigh fainting,
For the love of old loves and lost times;
And receive in your palace of painting
This revel of rhymes.
Then come the final verses quoted above. These are somewhat detached in meaning from the rest, and form a sort of Envoi: “Whatever changes or passes, there is always some beautiful thing that survives.”
As might be expected Swinburne was much parodied (and indeed in the Heptalogia and in the poems lately published he parodied himself). The above poem has been cleverly parodied by a lawyer, Sir Frederick Pollock. (Although parodies go as far back as the Fifth Century B.C. I know of no other lawyer who, qua lawyer, has successfully taken a hand in the game.) In his parody Pollock’s subject was the great changes effected by the Judicature Act, when the old Courts of Common Law, Chancery, and others were consolidated into one Supreme Court, and the various classes of business assigned to different “Divisions.” Also owing to changes in procedure, much of the old technical learning became obsolete. His last verse is as follows (compare with the second verse quoted above):
Though the Courts that were manifold dwindle
To divers Divisions of one,