The failure itself lays bare the never-ending dialogue between the human and natural. In the criticism we do have, there are diametrically opposed readings of the vision of the world the speaker presents. The garden dies, lovers die, love, which should be eternal, dies, the earth dies, and, in a triumph that is in every sense absolute, death, with no more victims and still insatiable, turns upon himself. 4 Taking a middle ground somewhere between McGann and Riede, Pauline Fletcher argues that Swinburne's garden exists in limbo between land, order, and civilisation on the one hand, and sea, chaos, and wilderness on the other. It is also caught between life and eternity.
Eternity belongs to the sea.
Fletcher is correct, I think, in stressing the importance of time in the poem, but her relegation of the garden to the category of an imitated eternity misses the significance of the speaker's attempt to represent the garden as partaking of a temporal frame different from that of the natural processes at work outside it. This temporal fusion manifests itself in the speaker's falling into explicit contradictions in an unsuccessful attempt to describe a garden all death. Here there was laughing of old, there was weeping, Haply, of lovers none ever will know, Whose eyes went seaward a hundred sleeping Years ago. In the air now soft with a summer to be. We shall sleep.