A Century of Roundels

Description

A Century of Roundels is a variety of French rondeau that uses refrains, repeated in a certain stylized pattern. A roundel consists of nine lines having the same number of syllables, plus an added refrain after the third line and after the last line. The refrain should be similar with the start of the first line: it might be a half-line, rhyming with the second line. It is composed of three stanzas and the rhyme scheme is: A B A R ; B A B ; A B A R ; where R stands for refrain. He published these poems in dedication to his friend Christina Rossetti, who also wrote roundels herself.

Algernon Charles Swinburne was a British poet, dramatist, novelist, and critic. He wrote a number of novels and poetry volumes such as Poems and Ballads, and wrote to the popular Eleventh Edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica. Swinburne is a well-known author, but a sado-masochist and drunkard, he was into Middle Ages and lesbianism.

Swinburne wrote several sensitive themes, like lesbianism, cannibalism, sado-masochism, and anti-theism. His poems have a number of simple concepts, like the Ocean, Time, and Death. Many classical people are hyphened in his poems, like Sappho, Anactoria, Jesus (“Hymn to Proserpine”: Galilaee) and Catullus.

Swinburne was born in Grosvenor Place, London to Captain Charles Henry Swinburne and Lady Jane Henrietta, daughter of the 3rd Earl of Ashburnham, a prestigious Northumbrian family. He grew up at East Dene in Bon church on the Isle of Wight.

He went to Eton College and began writing poems. At Eton, he won in French and Italian as first place. He continued studying at Balliol College, Oxford with a short interruption when he was expelled from the university in supporting the attempted murder of Napoleon III by Felice Orsini. He pursued his studies but he never got a degree.
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