A Forsaken Garden: What Is Left

In reading Algernon (not the mouse) Charles Swinburne's A Forsaken Garden, there are quite a few images with thematic attachments to nature. The metaphor of the rose garden and the ocean wind are constant throughout the poem, working to focus the reader not on what is there, but what is left over. I can sense some sort of allegory in this poem, focusing on social issues of some kind, but the specificity is what eludes me. There are a flood of images that imply that some large event has happened and because of this the poem carries a sense of rebuilding or focusing on the pieces that were not taken. War immediately comes to mind.

In the first stanza, Swinburne write of "the blossomless bed/where the weeds that grew green from the graves of its roses/now lie dead" implying that there used to be flowers in the bed, which then died from the growing of the weeds, which then died and now we are left with nothingness. Death is emphasized strongly but mostly  in that living people are no longer present in the garden. A religious reading of the text might suggest that it is the Garden of Eden, no longer habitable to any human since the days of Adam and Eve. "Here there was laughing of old, there was weeping/haply, of lovers none will ever know/whose eyes went seaward a hundred sleeping/year ago." This stanza focuses mostly on the human emotion that used to enliven the garden and the fact that there is nothing left implies that they either went seaward or just simply died out. The allegory for the sea could be represented by the unknown and that when man "looked forth from the flowers to the sea" he went in search of the unknown and left the sanctuary of the Garden, thus betraying God and leaving the garden empty and barren.