The Tale of Balen

Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837-1909) was a Victorian era English poet. His poetry was highly controversial in its day. He is considered a decadent poet. Many of his early and still admired poems evoke the Victorian fascination with the Middle Ages, and some of them are explicitly medieval in style, tone and construction, including The Leper, Laus Veneris, and St Dorothy. His mastery of vocabulary, rhyme and metre arguably put him among the most talented English language poets in history, altho