The sea, to be sure, is a large department; and that is how it succeeded in attracting Swinburne’s attention; for he seldom noticed any object of external nature unless it was very large, very brilliant, or very violently coloured. But the sea as an object of poetry is somewhat barren. Those poets who have a true eye for nature and a sure pen for describing it, spend few words describing the sea; and their few words describe it better than Swinburne’s thousands. It is historically certain that he had seen the sea, but if it were not, it could not with certainty have been inferred from his descriptions: they might have been written by a man who had never been outside Warwickshire. Descriptions of nature equally accurate, though not equally eloquent, have actually been composed by persons blind from their birth, merely by combining anew the words and phrases which they have had read to them from books. When Swinburne writes thus –
And the night was alive and anhungered of life as a tiger from toils cast free:
And a rapture of rage made joyous the spirit and strength of the soul of the sea.
All the weight of the wind bore down on it, freighted with death for fraught:
And the keen waves kindled and quickened as things transfigured or things distraught.
And madness fell on them laughing and leaping; and madness came on the wind:
And the might and the light and the darkness of storm were as storm in the heart of Ind.
Such glory, such terror, such passion, as lighten and harrow the far fierce East,
Rang, shone, spake, shuddered around us: the night was an altar with death for priest –
it would be cruel to set against such a passage a single line of Tennyson’s or a single epithet of Shakespeare’s: I take instead a snatch of verse whose author few of you know and most of you never heard of:
Hurry me, Nymphs, O, hurry me
Far above the grovelling sea,
Which, with blind weakness and bass roar
Casting his white age on the shore,
Wallows along that slimy floor;
With his wide-spread webbèd hands
Seeking to climb the level sands,
But rejected still to rave
Alive in his uncovered grave.[From George Darley’s “Nepenthe” (1835)]
Admirers of the sea may call that a lampoon or a caricature, but they cannot deny that it is life-like: the man who wrote it had seen the sea, and the man who reads it sees the sea again.
• Poems and Brickbats — A.E. Housman on A.C. Swinburne
Overlord In Terms of Core Issues Around Maximal Engagement with Key Notions of the Über-Feral 
“With his wide-spread webbèd hands.” Embarrassing but I didn’t know what the accent mark over the e meant. Wikipedia says:
So webbèd = web-bed? Because the sea has a bed, ha ha? Is that what he’s doing? It does have a lot of energy.
The Swinburne was fun too, in a different way. He seems to like assonance or alliteration or whatever it’s called (weight of the wind, keen waves kindled) far more than meaning: often the resulting image is nonsense (the air was…heavy? the water…caught fire?). Vague filler words like “rage” and “madness” and “passion” mean too many things and don’t really tell the reader much. They could be inserted into nearly any poem.
I think Swinburne’s poems would be improved by a gifted orator, who could use his voice to add some missing texture and particularity to these words. Like how David Bowie’s lyrics are poor when read but often spark to surprising life when sung in his thin, reedy quaver.
Tennyson called Swinburne “a reed through which all things blow into music.” But Swinburne could mock himself:
I think with a lot of pop and rock the words aren’t meant to be meaningful, just to be part of the music. I’m surprised Bowie’s lyrics were so bad so often, because he was an intelligent bloke.
Bowie should’ve pre-echoed what the Melvins and the Cocteau Twins did and made a virtue of vacuity:
• Feeling without understanding: The Cocteau Twins’ lack of lyrics — What is it to ache without knowing the true meaning behind it? The Cocteau Twins’ lyricless songs entrance, enthrall, and encourage you to fade away.