C. Swinburne's "By the North Sea" describes and repetitively
highlights various extremes in the landscape that is the poem's
setting. He constructs an intense description of this barren
site that mimics the downfall of the Christian church. This
landscape bordered by the sea where "earth lies exhausted," is a
bleak stretch of territory where the landscape is depicted in
striking extremes. Swinburne's poetry ascends in many stanzas to
a climax of dreary desolation. At the beginning of the poem, in
stanza's 1 and 3, Swinburne draws on words such as "endless,"
"boundless," "flowerless," "fruitless," powerless," "herdless,"
"sheepless," "relentless," "sleepless," "restless," "songless,"
"breathless," and "deathless" to create an image of a place so
empty that it is devoid of almost all life and even death.
Swinburne's portrayal of this isolated land is filled with
contradictions, however, as in the first and second stanzas of
the third section, where he reflects on this setting: Miles, and
miles, and miles of des