Dolores (Notre-Dame des Sept Douleurs)

The speaker of the poem is the voice of a besotted lover, faced with, and lamenting, Swinburne's particular ruthless and grim representation of the sacred feminine, embodied here as the Lady of Pain.

The poem's meter is a fairly regular anapestic trimeter with some use of iambs and the final line of each stanza containing only two feet.

It laments the passing of the worship of classical deities in favour of Christian morality (277 What ailed us, O gods, to desert you | For creeds that refuse and restrain?

The Planescape campaign setting of Dungeons & Dragons features a character called the Lady of Pain, which was inspired by the poem's central character, as explored by author Troy Denning in his 1997 novel Pages of Pain which directly quotes Dolores and reimagines many elements of the poem into the narrative.

The short comics story "How They Met Themselves", by Neil Gaiman (originally published in Vertigo: Winter's Edge #3, reprinted in Absolute Sandman Volume III, pp.