Original poem reprinted online here: "A Ballad of Dreamland" by Algernon Charles Swinburne Originally read: July 14, 2013 More information about the Poet: Algernon Charles Swinburne Ballad . So what appears to be octaves are actually two quatrains with a "abab" rhyme scheme pushed together. And even though the meter may be a bit loose, the rhyme scheme alternates between soft sounds (-es, -red) to harsh sounds (-art). Also what the octave form brings is immediate juxtaposition that ties in together rather than separate individual stanzas. In the first stanza the focus is with the speaker, "I hid my heart in a nest of roses" and past me wrote "flowery metaphor" as more of a pun. But this is the direction the poem goes in the beginning -- the comparison to the self to metaphor on a slight hyperbolic scale. The image is nice, but lines like, "Under the roses I hid my heart" invite a symbolic interpretation that leads to the same -- ...
Formerly the RetailMFA, This is the Poetry Blog of Darrell Dela Cruz