"...and it's intention is to ridicule." well, to shorten a point anyway...

I could type another long screed explaining in tedious detail how linguistic metaphor is confused with reality and poetry, and used to obfuscate and complicate the entire process of coping with it all....but...........

oh..he ain't MY Mr. Swinburne...and HIS poetry was to reply to one by Tennyson. I think Swinburne & I have a similar feeling about how exactly to express how such internalizing of conceptual hyperbole looks when dissected. If I simply critique it in technical format, I get suggestions that I need to 'open myself' to the wisdom and subtleties of ..... I'm not sure what. Sometimes I DO the critique, sometimes I leave a parody or silly remark....mostly for others, since YOU are already committed to the metaphor.

" The poem is a parody of Tennyson's "The Higher Pantheism." Swinburne writes in a letter of January 15, 1870: "I looked at Tennyson's `Higher Pantheism' again -- not bad verse altogether, but what gabble and babble of half-hatched thoughts in half-baked words!