"Reconciled" is the first word of Swinburne's poem and the last, and the poem never really leaves it. It is about two dead figures, left unnamed, who were bitterly set apart in life and are now joined. The text says little about who they were, so a reader has to work from what it does say. Both were "reviled," "hated, feared, derided," and the title and refrain suggest they were opposed to one another as well as to the world. The central idea is that death does what the living could not: it ends the quarrel and leaves only what was good in both.
The first stanza makes death a gentle agent. It is a "mild hand" that gives "Peace" and, with peace, "wisdom." The phrase "not more strong than mild" is worth pausing over, because it treats strength and mildness as qualities that can be balanced, as the two dead people now are. Swinburne also delays the main clause. We wait through a long phrase about death's hand before reaching the subject and verb, "Love beholds them." Love is a witness here, not a judge, and the delay gives the sentence the slow feel of a settling.
The middle stanza turns on a list of past participles that grows steadily harsher: "reviled, / Hated, feared, derided." Then comes "and forgiving," and the direction of the line reverses. The people who were attacked turn out to be the ones who forgave. The stanza closes on the plainest word in the poem, "smiled," a single stressed syllable that rhymes back to "reviled" and so answers the abuse with calm. Swinburne also asserts, without argument, that each "had heaven at heart." The poem does not prove this. It states it as something Love can see.
In the last stanza the imagery lifts from the earth to the sky. The two "bright names" are "clothed round with man's thanksgiving," as if gratitude were a garment or a halo, and they "shine, twin stars above the storm-drifts piled." The stars suggest permanence, and "twin" says they belong together. The "storm-drifts" are presumably the old controversies, heaped up like clouds or snow, and now they lie below. Then comes the paradox "Dead and deathless," and the sentence ends on a deliberately ambiguous line: "whom we saw not living / Reconciled." It can mean that we never saw them reconciled while they were alive, or that we never saw them *living* in that state. Either way, the refrain carries the quiet regret that peace came too late for anyone to watch it happen.
The form does much of the work. Eleven lines, two rhyme sounds and a returning refrain make up a roundel, a shape Swinburne used often. Here the two sounds, -iving and -iled, behave like the two figures. They alternate in the first stanza, cross in the second (reviled, forgiving, smiled) and interlock again in the third, and they never break apart. The -iving words are two-syllable "feminine" rhymes, and the -iled words are single-syllable "masculine" ones, so the pairing has a gentle falling note set against a firm closing beat. The rhyme words also form a family: *giving, misgiving, forgiving, thanksgiving, living*. Peace is *given*, there is no *misgiving*, enemies are *forgiving*, and the names receive *thanksgiving*. The rhyme repeats the poem's argument as sound.
The refrain is also the shortest line, only three syllables. Each time it arrives after a long, flowing line, it works like a hush or a hand laid down.
The poem is significant because it shows how completely Swinburne could make sound carry meaning. A reader does not need to know who the two men or women were to feel what the poem is doing. The tight form shows two opposed things sharing one pattern, and the repeated word shows reconciliation as something that can be heard. The poem leaves us with a hard thought, that people are often only understood, and forgiven, when they can no longer answer back, and a hopeful one, that the quarrel does not have the last word.