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In thy eight-fold embraces enfolden

Let our empty existence escape;

Give us death that is glorious and golden,

Crushed all out of shape!

Ah, thy red limbs lascivious and luscious,

With death in their amorous kiss!

Cling round us and clasp us and crush us,

With bitings of agonized bliss!

We are sick with the poison of pleasure,

Dispense us the potion of pain;

Ope thy mouth to its uttermost measure,

And bite us again!

A. C. Hilton (1851-1877)

This extraordinarily clever parody of Swinburne’s “Dolores” was written by Arthur Clement Hilton, when he was an undergraduate at St. John’s, Cambridge. It appeared in The Light Green, a clever but short-lived magazine published in Cambridge in the early seventies as a rival to The Dark Blue, published in London by Oxford men. Hilton was the main contributor to The Light Green. He died when only twenty-six years of age. This brilliant young author is not included in The Dictionary of National Biography.

“The Octopus” is one of the best of English parodies. I had not seen it for forty years, until I recently found it in Adam and White’s Parodies and Imitations (1912). In that book, although the authors presumably had The Light Green to print from, the punctuation is inferior to that in my copy, and the word “Dispose” instead of “Dispense” in the third last line must be a misprint.