Spring into Spanking!

As the weather gets warmer, I'm reminded of a verse from Algernon Charles Swinburne's Atalanta in Calydon, "When the hounds of spring;"

WHEN the hounds of spring are on winter’s traces,
The mother of months in meadow or plain
Fills the shadows and windy places
With lisp of leaves and ripple of rain;
And the brown bright nightingale amorous
Is half assuaged for Itylus,
For the Thracian ships and the foreign faces,
The tongueless vigil, and all the pain.

In addition to turning out amazing poetry, Swinburne was also a spankophile, one of a generation of Englishmen who enjoyed a birch rod across their backsides so much that the French euphemism for the kink became "la vice anglais." Yet the first flagellation fetishist to come out of the closet was himself a Frenchman, Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

With this in mind, certain things leap out at me in Swinburne's poems.