”Ere any flower of earth’s would blow”: Swinburne’s Flower Imagery

My paper explores the overgrowth, as it were, of floral images in Algernon Charles Swinburne’s oeuvre. From Atalanta in Calydon (1865) and Poems and Ballads (1866) to his late collections, Swinburne’s works are interspersed with depictions of flowers and, perhaps more significantly, with metaphors involving blossoms either as tenor or as vehicle. Swinburne’s flower imagery falls into two large groups. Composed by words indicating a particular species or genus of flowers, the images of the first group are variously concerned with botanical detail and respond to the floral symbolisms that were popular at the time. The images of the second group are formed by modifying the hypernym ‘flower’ with a noun that is drawn from the semantic field of natural elements. Often symbols of Swinburne’s mythopoeia, the snow-flowers, fire-flowers and foam-flowers are the most recurrent blossoms of this group.