Collection: Poems and Ballads, Second Series

Overview
Poems and Ballads, Second Series continues the intense, provocative voice Algernon Charles Swinburne established in his earlier collection. Published in 1878, it gathers lyrics and longer pieces that deepen the poet's engagement with classical myth, erotic desire, and meditations on death and oblivion. The collection returns to the sensuality and formal daring of the first Poems and Ballads while widening the range to include sharper political and historical reflections.
Swinburne balances lyric brevity with extended sequences, mixing elegiac moments with furious invective and languid eroticism. The poems show a mature command of metric variety and rhetorical force, pairing lush imagistic surfaces with philosophical questions about time, religion, and human yearning.

Themes
Myth and pagan imagery recur as modes for exploring desire and transgression. Classical allusion provides a counterpoint to Victorian moral strictures, allowing Swinburne to imagine erotic and ritual life outside Christian proscriptions. Desire appears both as a generative force and as a source of ruin; passion is celebrated even as it is shown to accelerate decay.
Mortality and the passage of time are central preoccupations. Many pieces dwell on memory, loss, and the pull of oblivion, often fused with a defiant relish for sensation. Political and historical themes thread through the collection as well, with sympathy for rebellion, critiques of clerical authority, and reflections on national character that give the erotically charged verses a public and civic dimension.

Form and Language
The collection showcases Swinburne's adventurous formal instincts. He employs a wide array of meters and stanza forms, from compact lyric meters to looser, more declamatory sequences. The musicality of sound, internal rhyme, alliteration, assonance, serves both ornament and argument, creating an atmosphere in which sense and sonic effect are tightly bound.
Imagery is rich and often baroque; nature scenes, ritual tableaux, and sensuous details accumulate to produce poems that read as both incantation and argument. Classical diction and archaic resonances mingle with contemporary idiom, creating a voice that can be at once elegiac, scolding, licentious, and elegiac.

Tone and Voice
Swinburne's voice in this series is polyvalent: playful and imperious, tender and scathing. He can adopt the guise of a mourning speaker, a blasphemous celebrant, or a satirist attacking hypocrisy. That shifting personaality allows the collection to sustain tensions between celebration and critique, yielding poems that revel in sensation even as they interrogate its consequences.
There is an underlying melancholy threaded through the bravado. Even poems that exult in physicality often circle back to the knowledge of finitude, giving the collection a bittersweet thrust. The mixture of bravura performance and intimate disclosure gives the book its persistent emotional charge.

Reception and Legacy
Contemporary reception was mixed; admiration for technical accomplishment sat alongside outrage at explicit eroticism and anti-clerical sentiments. Critics praised the poet's verbal mastery while censuring what they took to be immorality. Over time, however, the collection's daring formal experiments and intense imagistic power secured Swinburne's place among the most audacious Victorian poets.
Poems and Ballads, Second Series influenced later symbolist and decadent writers, and it has been read as a pivotal statement in the evolution of late nineteenth-century poetic modernism. Its uncompromising fusion of sensuality, classical revivalism, and political edge continues to provoke and reward close reading.