The really embarrassing bodies of aestheticism and Decadence are not those infected by syphilis or ravaged by opium use, but those poetic forms that in their quaint archaisms were seen by the modernists to offer a chintz-like pattern thoroughly out of tune with twentieth- century notions of modernity. A generation of modernist writers gave this poetry a lambasting from which it has still not recovered, and I suggest that reading these forms is still a, if not the, major problem in approaching late nineteenth-century poetry for today's readers. T. E. Hulme's attack in ‘A Lecture on Modern Poetry’ is typical: ‘they were not very fertile; they did not produce anything of great importance; they confined themselves to repeating the same sonnet time after time, their pupils were lost in a state of sterile feebleness’. In a retrospect on the early years of the twentieth century (written in 1920), Ford Madox Hueffer writes that in 1914 the modernists ‘plotted the blowing of Parnassus to the moon’. In my introduction I noted the recent critical impetus that has sought to redeem the relationship between late nineteenth-century poetry and modernity under what one might think of as a modernist set of values. While this might be possible through an emphasis primarily on content and context, one is still left with the ‘problem’ of the poems’ intricately patterned forms. In this chapter I focus on English Parnassian poetry, whose ornate medieval French forms, often archaic language and the nostalgic, antiquated tropes of its subject matter appear to leave no room for such a redemptive reading. English Parnassianism poses, in its purest form, the question of how we should read the ‘gem-like’ forms of the late nineteenth-century lyric (what de Banville calls the ‘precious treasures’); and current scholarly answers to this question – asserting the nostalgic twilight of Decadence, or the art for art's sake emphasis on formal craft – do not do enough to explain the cultural work of those forms in relation to modernity. In this chapter I argue that even in the 1880s it was impossible to read the Parnassian vogue as simply a nostalgic retreat from the modern world. More specifically, I will ultimately be asking what kind of historicism or notion of time is attendant on the strict and compact rhythmical repetitions of Parnassian forms.