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This space is devoted to belated publication of the fragmentary satirical narrative poem A Gift of Roses by the bogus Romantic-era writer George Swain. Swain originally conceived this poem around 1819 as a Gothic shocker in the 'Terror School' mode, but quickly became sidetracked by miscellaneous and sensuous detail, as well as a half-hearted engagement with occult revolutionary activity. The narrative dispersed into a loose sprawl of semi-detached luminosities, in which Swain's formal and technical experimentation sometimes supersedes intelligible content. After tinkering with the poem over a number of years without ever having it printed, George Swain died in Bristol Hotwells around 1832, with only a blue glass ink-pot to bequeathe to his wife Sonia. Since its abandonment in about 1829 A Gift of Roses has languished in MS notebooks, and attracted little scholarly attention (the poem fuelled a single doctoral thesis: Leonigild Keegan, Missouri, 1976) -- deprecated by poetry-lovers, and almost totally overlooked by critics. It appears to have nothing much to do with roses either.
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