"Blessed among women" is an old phrase. In the Gospel of Luke it is how Elizabeth greets Mary, and Swinburne borrows it for his title, then adds a dedication to the Signora Cairoli. That pairing hints at a comparison between the Virgin and a living woman, though the stanza itself never leaves the Virgin. It is about Mary as the mother of Christ, and its central idea is that her holiness comes from what she carried: not just a child, but "the likeness of all love," love given a human body. The final line explains why this matters. The earth she gave him to is "man-tormented."
The construction is compact. The rhymes run AABCCBDD: *bare/fair*, then *love* answered by *dove* after a pair of rhymed lines in between (*womb/whom*), and finally *birth/earth*. The line lengths do as much work as the rhymes. The short lines (five to seven syllables) have a hushed, almost whispered quality, like a phrase repeated in prayer. Twice they swell into longer lines, the ten-syllable "For all men's sake the likeness of all love" and the eleven-syllable line about the dove. The stanza then ends on a twelve-syllable line, an alexandrine, which is longer than anything before it. After all that compression, the last line opens out and takes the whole earth into its sweep, and the slow, heavy phrase "man-tormented earth" gives the ending its weight.
The repeated word "Blessed" opens the first line and the seventh, so the stanza is bracketed by the same blessing. The two openings do slightly different jobs, though. "Blessed was she that bare" is a plain statement. "Blessed, who brought to gracious birth" drops the "was she" and rushes forward. The verbs mark the same shift: *bare* means carrying, while *brought to birth* means delivering. The movement runs from something hidden to something revealed, and the stanza follows that movement through the second line's "Hidden in flesh most fair."
That phrase holds the poem's central paradox. Flesh is usually the thing that limits and wears us down, yet here it is a hiding place for something divine, and it is called "most fair." Even the abstract noun is given a body. Love is not a feeling but a "likeness," an image you could look at. The phrase "For all men's sake" widens the circle at once, so that one woman's labour becomes a gift to everyone.
The dove carries the stanza's gentlest image. It is the familiar emblem of the Holy Spirit, and Swinburne chooses the verb with care. The "glory of God" does not strike or flood the virgin; it "alighted," as a bird lands. A huge abstraction ("glory") arrives with the lightness of a bird, and the long line settles down onto the rhyme word *dove* the same way.
One small phrase shifts the tone: "The old record saith." Swinburne could have written "the Gospel tells us," but he picks something cooler and more distant. The line reports the story without quite swearing to it. That is an inference from the wording, but it fits a speaker who cares more about what the story means than about defending it as doctrine. The last line then packs its argument into two hyphenated compounds, "sweet-souled" and "man-tormented." They sit on either side of the word "Saviour" like opposing forces: sweetness against torment, and a child against a world that people themselves have made cruel. The torment belongs to men, not fate, and that choice of blame is sharp and memorable.
What makes the stanza significant is the way it turns sacred language toward praise of motherhood. Swinburne is well known for verse that is musical and rich in sound, and these eight lines show how much music he can build from a few rhymes and one carefully placed long line. They also show him using a famous religious phrase for a new occasion. Judging by the title, the old blessing is meant to fall on someone new. The stanza's answer to the question of why a mother deserves blessing is that she brings something into a hurt world, and "for all men's sake" makes motherhood a public matter, not only a private one.