Marriage Quote by Algernon Charles Swinburne

Time is the quiet vandal in Swinburne's line: not dramatic catastrophe but the slow, sneering force that turns yesterday into something you can only mock. "Derision" is the key choice. He isn't mourning lost innocence; he's accusing the calendar of making memory itself feel embarrassing, like a once-serious passion now rendered ridiculous by distance. That bite is pure Swinburne: lush music carrying a corrosive thesis.

The shock move is how love is reduced to two fates, both stripping it of heat. "Corpses" is obvious, but "wives" lands as an intentionally ungallant rhyme with death, treating respectable domesticity as another kind of burial. It's not merely misogyny (though there's plenty of Victorian gender baggage in the air); it's a broader attack on the social machinery that domesticates desire. Love, in this view, begins as transgressive vitality and ends as either literal extinction or a sanctioned role that can feel like extinction.

Then comes the triple hammer: "marriage and death and division". He stacks them without hierarchy, as if society (marriage), biology (death), and circumstance (division) are equally efficient at erasing the self. The final verb, "Make barren", pushes the poem beyond heartbreak into existential dread: the fear that life, once filtered through time and institutions, produces nothing living at all.

Context matters. Swinburne wrote in a Victorian culture obsessed with propriety, permanence, and moral legibility. This is the counter-song: a decadent, anti-teleological lyric where the future doesn't redeem the past; it humiliates it. The craft mirrors the message - beautiful cadence, bleak accounting - seducing you into admitting how often time wins.