What is the view of life presented in Atalanta in Calydon?

Atalanta in Calydon is a poetic tragedy by Algernon Charles Swinburne published in 1865. It made the young poet famous overnight.
The tragedy is based on the ancient Greek material, the myth of the Calydonian hunt. No Greek tragedian had used this story, so for Swinburne, this was an opportunity to build his own myth on the classical model.
The myth, which is fully developed in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, is about hunting the boar who is sent to the Calydonian fields as a retribution for irreverence toward the goddess Artemis. The protagonist, Meleager, kills the boar and gives the spoils to the virgin huntress Atalanta, but he dies because he has broken the laws of his kin.
Early in the work, the theme of fate, or doom, transpires.

Upon his birth came the three Fates and prophesied of him three things, namely these; that he should have great strength of his hands, and good fortune in this life, and that he should live no longer when the brand then in the fire were consumed. (1, p. xi)

The protagonist’s life depends on the piece of wood, and his mother, Althaea, must guard it to perpetuate his life.
Althaea is conscious of the futility of life as she talks about the human predicament in reference to the destiny allotted by the gods:

Weeping or laughing, we whom eyesight fails,Knowledge and light efface and perfect heart,And hands we lack, and wit; and all our daysSin, and have hunger, and die infatuated.For madness have ye given us and not health,And sins whereof we know not; and for theseDeath, and sudden destruction unaware.What shall we say now? what thing comes of us? (1, p. 78)

Before Atalanta comes to the stage, Meleager is in harmony with his mother, which reflects life in its natural cycles of birth, growth, and death.
The first chorus praises the return of spring, the time of renewal. At the same time, it conveys the main truth of the tragic universe: even though the process of transformations and changes is continuous, there is no happiness in life to be found. There is only the pursuit of it.
This truth is picked up by the second chorus, which contains a paradigmatic definition of man’s destiny:

In his heart is a blind desire,In his eyes foreknowledge of death. (1, p. 17)

The whole of Swinburne’s tragedy artistically confirms this fatal truth. The climax of the work is Meleager’s last soliloquy, in which the motifs of the incinerated brand, of winter, and of the night coalesce. The brand, which is reduced to ashes, and Meleager’s "ashen life" (1, p. 108) symbolize delusive attempts to attain a transcendental ideal.