Lionel Johnson's lines epitomise Symons’ artistic method of the refining circularity of perception, both in his poetry and critical prose. Crucially, the eyes are roused by what might be suggested by the rich phantasmagorias tightly packed in London's metropolitan spaces. The city's rich external stimuli flood the eyesight, but instead of Romantic transformations engendered by the imagination, the eyes elaborate and augment the city's sensations, resulting in a ‘wonderland, all fair and strange’. Symons’ poetics is situated in a loop generated between subjectivity and the circumambience of the city. Quoting from Symons’ ‘Modernity in Verse’, Patricia Clements sums up Symons’ two most important themes: ‘“oneself and one's surroundings”: “sensation and nerves” and London’ (1985: 188). When the young Symons relocated from the controlling Methodist, rural environment of Milford Haven to the enormous, emancipatory capital and its seedy life, it was an epiphanic revelation. Right from the beginning of his poetic endeavours, from the quasi-Realist poems of Days and Nights (1889), Symons demonstrates his preference for urban themes. In the ‘Preface: Being a Word on Behalf of Patchouli’ to the second edition of Silhouettes in 1896 he rejects nature in favour of the ‘effects of artificial light’ that only the ‘town landscape’ can afford (S, xv). Symons naturalises the artificial landscape, inverting and reconditioning the Romantic language of nature, turning Wordsworth's ‘science of feelings’ into a science of sensations, essentially adopting an ‘urban pastoral’ (LD, 221–2): a whole new idiom comprised of ‘[t]he iron lilies of the Strand’ and ‘hansoms’ hovering ‘like dragonflies’, as Richard Le Gallienne writes in ‘A Ballad of London’ (1895: 26).

In Days and Nights (1889), Silhouettes (1892) and London Nights (1895) Symons adopts the short, impressionistic lyric that captures a ‘vague’ and ‘evanescent’ mood right at the moment of its flight (DM, 860). In the ‘Preface’ to the revised edition of London Nights (1897) he writes that his lyrics therein are a collection of ‘moods’ lasting ‘no longer than a ripple's duration’ (CW, I. 166).