O all fair lovers about the world, There is none of you, none, that shall comfort me. My thoughts are as dead things, wrecked and whirled Round and round in a gulf of the sea; And still, through the sound and the straining stream, Through the coil and chafe, they gleam in a dream, The bright fine lips so cruelly curled, And strange swift eyes where the soul sits free.

The Tragedies of Algernon Charles Swinburne 5 vols. Poems and Ballads caused a sensation when it was first publiAlgernon Charles Swinburned especially the poems written in homage of Sappho of Lesbos such as "Anactoria" and "Sapphics": Moxon and Co. One of them A Baby's Death was set to music by the English composer Sir Edward Elgar as the song Roundel: The little eyes that never knew Light.

Algernon Charles Swinburne (London 5 April 1837 – London 10 April 1909) was an English poet playwright novelist and critic. He invented the roundel form wrote several novels and contributed to the famous Eleventh Edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in every year from 1903 to 1907 and again in 1909.