Delphi Complete Poetical Works of Algernon Charles Swinburne (Illustrated) (Delphi Poets Series)
Page 59
The sea deride them, and that lord of the air
Who took by violent hand thy child to wife
With his loud lips bemock them, by his breath
Swept out of sight of being; so great a grace
Shall this day give thee, that makes one in heart
With mine the deep sea’s godhead, and his son
With him that was thine helmsman, king with king, 1710
Dead man with dead; such only names as these
Shalt thou call royal, take none else or less
To hold of men in honour; but with me
Shall these be worshipped as one God, and mix
With mine the might of their mysterious names
In one same shrine served singly, thence to keep
Perpetual guard on Athens; time and change,
Masters and lords of all men, shall be made
To thee that knowest no master and no lord
Servants; the days that lighten heaven and nights 1720
That darken shall be ministers of thine
To attend upon thy glory, the great years
As light-engraven letters of thy name
Writ by the sun’s hand on the front of the earth
For world-beholden witness; such a gift
For one fair chaplet of three lives enwreathed
To hang for ever from thy storied shrine,
And this thy steersman fallen with tiller in hand
To stand for ever at thy ship’s helm seen,
Shall he that bade their threefold flower be shorn 1730
And laid him low that planted, give thee back
In sign of sweet land reconciled with sea
And heavenlike earth with heaven; such promise-pledge
I daughter without mother born of God
To the most woful mother born of man
Plight for continual comfort. Hail, and live
Beyond all human hap of mortal doom
Happy; for so my sire hath sworn and I.
PRAXITHEA.
O queen Athena, from a heart made whole
Take as thou givest us blessing; never tear 1740
Shall stain for shame nor groan untune the song
That as a bird shall spread and fold its wings
Here in thy praise for ever, and fulfil
The whole world’s crowning city crowned with thee
As the sun’s eye fulfils and crowns with sight
The circling crown of heaven. There is no grief
Great as the joy to be made one in will
With him that is the heart and rule of life
And thee, God born of God; thy name is ours,
And thy large grace more great than our desire. 1750
CHORUS.
From the depth of the springs of my spirit a fountain is poured
of thanksgiving,
My country, my mother, for thee,
That thy dead for their death shall have life in thy sight and
a name everliving
At heart of thy people to be.
In the darkness of change on the waters of time they shall turn
from afar
To the beam of this dawn for a beacon, the light of these pyres
for a star.
They shall see thee who love and take comfort, who hate thee
shall see and take warning,
Our mother that makest us free;
And the sons of thine earth shall have help of the waves that
made war on their morning,
And friendship and fame of the sea. 1760
POEMS AND BALLADS (SECOND SERIES)
CONTENTS
THE LAST ORACLE
IN THE BAY
A FORSAKEN GARDEN
RELICS
AT A MONTH’S END
SESTINA
THE YEAR OF THE ROSE
A WASTED VIGIL
THE COMPLAINT OF LISA
FOR THE FEAST OF GIORDANO BRUNO, PHILOSOPHER AND MARTYR
AVE ATQUE VALE
MEMORIAL VERSES ON THE DEATH OF THÉOPHILE GAUTIER
SONNET (WITH A COPY OF MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN)
AGE AND SONG
IN MEMORY OF BARRY CORNWALL
EPICEDE
TO VICTOR HUGO
INFERIAE
A BIRTHSONG
EXVOTO
A BALLAD OF DREAMLAND
CYRIL TOURNEUR
A BALLAD OF FRANÇOIS VILLON
PASTICHE
BEFORE SUNSET
SONG: LOVE LAID HIS SLEEPLESS HEAD
A VISION OF SPRING IN WINTER
CHORIAMBICS
AT PARTING
A SONG IN SEASON
TWO LEADERS
VICTOR HUGO IN 1877
CHILD’S SONG
TRIADS
FOUR SONGS OF FOUR SEASONS
WINTER IN NORTHUMBERLAND
SPRING IN TUSCANY
SUMMER IN AUVERGNE
AUTUMN IN CORNWALL
THE WHITE CZAR
RIZPAH
TO LOUIS KOSSUTH
TRANSLATIONS FROM THE FRENCH OF VILLON
THE COMPLAINT OF THE FAIR ARMOURESS
A DOUBLE BALLAD OF GOOD COUNSEL
FRAGMENT ON DEATH
BALLAD OF THE LORDS OF OLD TIME
BALLAD OF THE WOMEN OF PARIS
BALLAD WRITTEN FOR A BRIDEGROOM
BALLAD AGAINST THE ENEMIES OF FRANCE
THE DISPUTE OF THE HEART AND BODY OF FRANÇOIS VILLON
EPISTLE IN FORM OF A BALLAD TO HIS FRIENDS
THE EPITAPH IN FORM OF A BALLAD
FROM VICTOR HUGO
NOCTURNE
THÉOPHILE GAUTIER
ODE (LE TOMBEAU DE THÉOPHILE GAUTIER)
IN OBITUM THEOPHILI POETÆ
AD CATULLUM
DEDICATION, 1878
Caricature of Swinburne featured in Vanity Fair, November 1874
INSCRIBED
TO
RICHARD F. BURTON
IN REDEMPTION OF AN OLD PLEDGE AND IN RECOGNITION OF A FRIENDSHIP WHICH I MUST ALWAYS COUNT AMONG THE HIGHEST HONOURS OF MY LIFE
THE LAST ORACLE
(A.D. 361)
Years have risen and fallen in darkness or in twilight,
Ages waxed and waned that knew not thee nor thine,
While the world sought light by night and sought not thy light,
Since the sad last pilgrim left thy dark mid shrine.
Dark the shrine and dumb the fount of song thence welling,
Save for words more sad than tears of blood, that said:
Tell the king, on earth has fallen the glorious dwelling,
And the watersprings that spake are quenched and dead.
Not a cell is left the God, no roof, no cover
In his hand the prophet laurel flowers no more.
And the great king’s high sad heart, thy true last lover,
Felt thine answer pierce and cleave it to the core.
And he bowed down his hopeless head
In the drift of the wild world’s tide,
And dying, Thou hast conquered, he said,
Galilean; he said it, and died.
And the world that was thine and was ours
When the Graces took hands with the Hours
Grew cold as a winter wave
In the wind from a wide-mouthed grave,
As a gulf wide open to swallow
The light that the world held dear.
O father of all of us, Paian, Apollo,
Destroyer and healer, hear!
Age on age thy mouth was mute, thy face was hidden,
And the lips and eyes that loved thee blind and dumb;
Song forsook their tongues that held thy name forbidden,
Light their eyes that saw the strange God’s kingdom come.
Fire for light and hell for heaven and psalms for pæans
Filled the clearest eyes and lips most sweet of song,
When for chant of Greeks the wail of Galileans
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Made the whole world moan with hymns of wrath and wrong.
Yea, not yet we see thee, father, as they saw thee,
They that worshipped when the world was theirs and thine,
They whose words had power by thine own power to draw thee
Down from heaven till earth seemed more than heaven divine.
For the shades are about us that hover
When darkness is half withdrawn
And the skirts of the dead night cover
The face of the live new dawn.
For the past is not utterly past
Though the word on its lips be the last,
And the time be gone by with its creed
When men were as beasts that bleed,
As sheep or as swine that wallow,
In the shambles of faith and of fear.
O father of all of us, Paian, Apollo,
Destroyer and healer, hear!
Yet it may be, lord and father, could we know it,
We that love thee for our darkness shall have light
More than ever prophet hailed of old or poet
Standing crowned and robed and sovereign in thy sight.
To the likeness of one God their dreams enthralled thee,
Who wast greater than all Gods that waned and grew;
Son of God the shining son of Time they called thee,
Who wast older, O our father, than they knew.
For no thought of man made Gods to love or honour
Ere the song within the silent soul began,
Nor might earth in dream or deed take heaven upon her
Till the word was clothed with speech by lips of man.
And the word and the life wast thou,
The spirit of man and the breath;
And before thee the Gods that bow
Take life at thine hands and death.
For these are as ghosts that wane,
That are gone in an age or twain;
Harsh, merciful, passionate, pure,
They perish, but thou shalt endure;
Be their flight with the swan or the swallow,
They pass as the flight of a year.
O father of all of us, Paian, Apollo,
Destroyer and healer, hear!
Thou the word, the light, the life, the breath, the glory,
Strong to help and heal, to lighten and to slay,
Thine is all the song of man, the world’s whole story;
Not of morning and of evening is thy day.
Old and younger Gods are buried or begotten
From uprising to downsetting of thy sun,
Risen from eastward, fallen to westward and forgotten,
And their springs are many, but their end is one.
Divers births of godheads find one death appointed,
As the soul whence each was born makes room for each;
God by God goes out, discrowned and disanointed,
But the soul stands fast that gave them shape and speech.
Is the sun yet cast out of heaven?
Is the song yet cast out of man?
Life that had song for its leaven
To quicken the blood that ran
Through the veins of the songless years
More bitter and cold than tears,
Heaven that had thee for its one
Light, life, word, witness, O sun,
Are they soundless and sightless and hollow,
Without eye, without speech, without ear?
O father of all of us, Paian, Apollo,
Destroyer and healer, hear!
Time arose and smote thee silent at his warning,
Change and darkness fell on men that fell from thee;
Dark thou satest, veiled with light, behind the morning,
Till the soul of man should lift up eyes and see.
Till the blind mute soul get speech again and eyesight,
Man may worship not the light of life within;
In his sight the stars whose fires grow dark in thy sight
Shine as sunbeams on the night of death and sin.
Time again is risen with mightier word of warning,
Change hath blown again a blast of louder breath;
Clothed with clouds and stars and dreams that melt in morning,
Lo, the Gods that ruled by grace of sin and death!
They are conquered, they break, they are stricken,
Whose might made the whole world pale;
They are dust that shall rise not or quicken
Though the world for their death’s sake wail.
As a hound on a wild beast’s trace,
So time has their godhead in chase;
As wolves when the hunt makes head,
They are scattered, they fly, they are fled;
They are fled beyond hail, beyond hollo,
And the cry of the chase, and the cheer.
O father of all of us, Paian, Apollo,
Destroyer and healer, hear!
Day by day thy shadow shines in heaven beholden,
Even the sun, the shining shadow of thy face:
King, the ways of heaven before thy feet grow golden;
God, the soul of earth is kindled with thy grace.
In thy lips the speech of man whence Gods were fashioned,
In thy soul the thought that makes them and unmakes;
By thy light and heat incarnate and impassioned,
Soul to soul of man gives light for light and takes.
As they knew thy name of old time could we know it,
Healer called of sickness, slayer invoked of wrong,
Light of eyes that saw thy light, God, king, priest, poet,
Song should bring thee back to heal us with thy song.
For thy kingdom is past not away,
Nor thy power from the place thereof hurled;
Out of heaven they shall cast not the day,
They shall cast not out song from the world.
By the song and the light they give
We know thy works that they live;
With the gift thou hast given us of speech
We praise, we adore, we beseech,
We arise at thy bidding and follow,
We cry to thee, answer, appear,
O father of all of us, Paian, Apollo,
Destroyer and healer, hear!
IN THE BAY
I
Beyond the hollow sunset, ere a star
Take heart in heaven from eastward, while the west,
Fulfilled of watery resonance and rest,
Is as a port with clouds for harbour bar
To fold the fleet in of the winds from far
That stir no plume now of the bland sea’s breast:
II
Above the soft sweep of the breathless bay
Southwestward, far past flight of night and day,
Lower than the sunken sunset sinks, and higher
Than dawn can freak the front of heaven with fire,
My thought with eyes and wings made wide makes way
To find the place of souls that I desire.
III
If any place for any soul there be,
Disrobed and disentrammelled; if the might,
The fire and force that filled with ardent light
The souls whose shadow is half the light we see,
Survive and be suppressed not of the night;
This hour should show what all day hid from me.
IV
Night knows not, neither is it shown to day,
By sunlight nor by starlight is it shown,
Nor to the full moon’s eye nor footfall known,
Their world’s untrodden and unkindled way.
Nor is the breath nor music of it blown
With sounds of winter or with winds of May.
V
But here, where light and darkness reconciled
Hold earth between them as a weanling child
Between the balanced hands of death and birth,
Even as they held the newborn shape of earth
When first life trembled in her limbs and smiled,
Here hope might think to find what hope were worth.
VI
Past Hades, past Elysium, past the long
Slow smooth strong lapse of Lethe — past the toil
Wherein all souls are taken as a spoil,
The Stygian web of waters — if your song
Be quenched not, O our brethren, but be strong
As ere ye too shook off our temporal coil;
VII
If yet these twain survive your worldly breath,
Joy trampling sorrow, life devouring death,
If perfect life possess your life all through
And like your words your souls be deathless too,
Tonight, of all whom night encompasseth,
My soul would commune with one soul of you.
VIII
Above the sunset might I see thine eyes
That were above the sundawn in our skies,
Son of the songs of morning, — thine that were
First lights to lighten that rekindling air
Wherethrough men saw the front of England rise
And heard thine loudest of the lyrenotes there —
IX
If yet thy fire have not one spark the less,
O Titan, born of her a Titaness,
Across the sunrise and the sunset’s mark
Send of thy lyre one sound, thy fire one spark,
To change this face of our unworthiness,
Across this hour dividing light from dark.
X
To change this face of our chill time, that hears
No song like thine of all that crowd its ears,
Of all its lights that lighten all day long
Sees none like thy most fleet and fiery sphere’s
Outlightening Sirius — in its twilight throng
No thunder and no sunrise like thy song.
XI
Hath not the seawind swept the sealine bare
To pave with stainless fire through stainless air
A passage for thine heavenlier feet to tread
Ungrieved of earthly floorwork? hath it spread
No covering splendid as the sungod’s hair
To veil or to reveal thy lordlier head?