Delphi Complete Poetical Works of Algernon Charles Swinburne (Illustrated) (Delphi Poets Series)

by Algernon Charles Swinburne

  XII

  Hath not the sunset strewn across the sea

  A way majestical enough for thee?

  What hour save this should be thine hour — and mine,

  If thou have care of any less divine

  Than thine own soul; if thou take thought of me,

  Marlowe, as all my soul takes thought of thine?

  XIII

  Before the moon’s face as before the sun

  The morning star and evening star are one

  For all men’s lands as England. O, if night

  Hang hard upon us, — ere our day take flight,

  Shed thou some comfort from thy day long done

  On us pale children of the latter light!

  XIV

  For surely, brother and master and lord and king,

  Where’er thy footfall and thy face make spring

  In all souls’ eyes that meet thee wheresoe’er,

  And have thy soul for sunshine and sweet air —

  Some late love of thine old live land should cling,

  Some living love of England, round thee there.

  XV

  Here from her shore across her sunniest sea

  My soul makes question of the sun for thee,

  And waves and beams make answer. When thy feet

  Made her ways flowerier and their flowers more sweet

  With childlike passage of a god to be,

  Like spray these waves cast off her foemen’s fleet.

  XVI

  Like foam they flung it from her, and like weed

  Its wrecks were washed from scornful shoal to shoal,

  From rock to rock reverberate; and the whole

  Sea laughed and lightened with a deathless deed

  That sowed our enemies in her field for seed

  And made her shores fit harbourage for thy soul.

  XVII

  Then in her green south fields, a poor man’s child,

  Thou hadst thy short sweet fill of halfblown joy,

  That ripens all of us for time to cloy

  With fullblown pain and passion; ere the wild

  World caught thee by the fiery heart, and smiled

  To make so swift end of the godlike boy.

  XVIII

  For thou, if ever godlike foot there trod

  These fields of ours, wert surely like a god.

  Who knows what splendour of strange dreams was shed

  With sacred shadow and glimmer of gold and red

  From hallowed windows, over stone and sod,

  On thine unbowed bright insubmissive head?

  XIX

  The shadow stayed not, but the splendour stays,

  Our brother, till the last of English days.

  No day nor night on English earth shall be

  For ever, spring nor summer, Junes nor Mays,

  But somewhat as a sound or gleam of thee

  Shall come on us like morning from the sea.

  XX

  Like sunrise never wholly risen, nor yet

  Quenched; or like sunset never wholly set,

  A light to lighten as from living eyes

  The cold unlit close lids of one that lies

  Dead, or a ray returned from death’s far skies

  To fire us living lest our lives forget.

  XXI

  For in that heaven what light of lights may be,

  What splendour of what stars, what spheres of flame

  Sounding, that none may number nor may name,

  We know not, even thy brethren; yea, not we

  Whose eyes desire the light that lightened thee,

  Whose ways and thine are one way and the same.

  XXII

  But if the riddles that in sleep we read,

  And trust them not, be flattering truth indeed,

  As he that rose our mightiest called them, — he,

  Much higher than thou as thou much higher than we —

  There, might we say, all flower of all our seed,

  All singing souls are as one sounding sea.

  XXIII

  All those that here were of thy kind and kin,

  Beside thee and below thee, full of love,

  Fullsouled for song, — and one alone above

  Whose only light folds all your glories in —

  With all birds’ notes from nightingale to dove

  Fill the world whither we too fain would win.

  XXIV

  The world that sees in heaven the sovereign light

  Of sunlike Shakespeare, and the fiery night

  Whose stars were watched of Webster; and beneath,

  The twinsouled brethren of the single wreath,

  Grown in kings’ gardens, plucked from pastoral heath,

  Wrought with all flowers for all men’s heart’s delight.

  XXV

  And that fixed fervour, ironred like Mars,

  In the mid moving tide of tenderer stars,

  That burned on loves and deeds the darkest done,

  Athwart the incestuous prisoner’s bridehouse bars;

  And thine, most highest of all their fires but one,

  Our morning star, sole risen before the sun.

  XXVI

  And one light risen since theirs to run such race

  Thou hast seen, O Phosphor, from thy pride of place.

  Thou hast seen Shelley, him that was to thee

  As light to fire or dawn to lightning; me,

  Me likewise, O our brother, shalt thou see,

  And I behold thee, face to glorious face?

  XXVII

  You twain the same swift year of manhood swept

  Down the steep darkness, and our father wept.

  And from the gleam of Apollonian tears

  A holier aureole rounds your memories, kept

  Most ferventfresh of all the singing spheres,

  And Aprilcoloured through all months and years.

  XXVIII

  You twain fate spared not half your fiery span;

  The longer date fulfils the lesser man.

  Ye from beyond the dark dividing date

  Stand smiling, crowned as gods with foot on fate.

  For stronger was your blessing than his ban,

  And earliest whom he struck, he struck too late.

  XXIX

  Yet love and loathing, faith and unfaith yet

  Bind less to greater souls in unison,

  And one desire that makes three spirits as one

  Takes great and small as in one spiritual net

  Woven out of hope toward what shall yet be done

  Ere hate or love remember or forget.

  XXX

  Woven out of faith and hope and love too great

  To bear the bonds of life and death and fate:

  Woven out of love and hope and faith too dear

  To take the print of doubt and change and fear:

  And interwoven with lines of wrath and hate

  Bloodred with soils of many a sanguine year.

  XXXI

  Who cannot hate, can love not; if he grieve,

  His tears are barren as the unfruitful rain

  That rears no harvest from the green sea’s plain,

  And as thorns crackling this man’s laugh is vain.

  Nor can belief touch, kindle, smite, reprieve

  His heart who has not heart to disbelieve.

  XXXII

  But you, most perfect in your hate and love,

  Our great twinspirited brethren; you that stand

  Head by head glittering, hand made fast in hand,

  And underfoot the fangdrawn worm that strove

  To wound you living; from so far above,

  Look love, not scorn, on ours that was your land.

  XXXIII

  For love we lack, and help and heat and light

  To clothe us and to comfort us with might.

  What help is ours to take or give? but ye —

  O, more than sunrise to the blind cold sea,
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  That wailed aloud with all her waves all night,

  Much more, being much more glorious, should you be.

  XXXIV

  As fire to frost, as ease to toil, as dew

  To flowerless fields, as sleep to slackening pain,

  As hope to souls long weaned from hope again

  Returning, or as blood revived anew

  To drydrawn limbs and every pulseless vein,

  Even so toward us should no man be but you.

  XXXV

  One rose before the sunrise was, and one

  Before the sunset, lovelier than the sun.

  And now the heaven is dark and bright and loud

  With wind and starry drift and moon and cloud,

  And night’s cry rings in straining sheet and shroud,

  What help is ours if hope like yours be none?

  XXXVI

  O wellbeloved, our brethren, if ye be,

  Then are we not forsaken. This kind earth

  Made fragrant once for all time with your birth,

  And bright for all men with your love, and worth

  The clasp and kiss and wedlock of the sea,

  Were not your mother if not your brethren we.

  XXXVII

  Because the days were dark with gods and kings

  And in time’s hand the old hours of time as rods,

  When force and fear set hope and faith at odds,

  Ye failed not nor abased your plumeplucked wings;

  And we that front not more disastrous things,

  How should we fail in face of kings and gods?

  XXXVIII

  For now the deep dense plumes of night are thinned

  Surely with winnowing of the glimmering wind

  Whose feet are fledged with morning; and the breath

  Begins in heaven that sings the dark to death.

  And all the night wherein men groaned and sinned

  Sickens at heart to hear what sundawn saith.

  XXXIX

  O firstborn sons of hope and fairest, ye

  Whose prows first clove the thoughtunsounded sea

  Whence all the dark dead centuries rose to bar

  The spirit of man lest truth should make him free,

  The sunrise and the sunset, seeing one star,

  Take heart as we to know you that ye are.

  XL

  Ye rise not and ye set not; we that say

  Ye rise and set like hopes that set and rise

  Look yet but seaward from a landlocked bay;

  But where at last the sea’s line is the sky’s

  And truth and hope one sunlight in your eyes,

  No sunrise and no sunset marks their day.

  A FORSAKEN GARDEN

  In a coign of the cliff between lowland and highland,

  At the seadown’s edge between windward and lee,

  Walled round with rocks as an inland island,

  The ghost of a garden fronts the sea.

  A girdle of brushwood and thorn encloses

  The steep square slope of the blossomless bed

  Where the weeds that grew green from the graves of its roses

  Now lie dead.

  The fields fall southward, abrupt and broken,

  To the low last edge of the long lone land.

  If a step should sound or a word be spoken,

  Would a ghost not rise at the strange guest’s hand?

  So long have the grey bare walks lain guestless,

  Through branches and briars if a man make way,

  He shall find no life but the seawind’s, restless

  Night and day.

  The dense hard passage is blind and stifled

  That crawls by a track none turn to climb

  To the strait waste place that the years have rifled

  Of all but the thorns that are touched not of time.

  The thorns he spares when the rose is taken;

  The rocks are left when he wastes the plain.

  The wind that wanders, the weeds windshaken,

  These remain.

  Not a flower to be pressed of the foot that falls not;

  As the heart of a dead man the seedplots are dry;

  From the thicket of thorns whence the nightingale calls not,

  Could she call, there were never a rose to reply.

  Over the meadows that blossom and wither

  Rings but the note of a seabird’s song;

  Only the sun and the rain come hither

  All year long.

  The sun burns sere and the rain dishevels

  One gaunt bleak blossom of scentless breath.

  Only the wind here hovers and revels

  In a round where life seems barren as death.

  Here there was laughing of old, there was weeping,

  Haply, of lovers none ever will know,

  Whose eyes went seaward a hundred sleeping

  Years ago.

  Heart handfast in heart as they stood, “Look thither,”

  Did he whisper? “look forth from the flowers to the sea;

  For the foamflowers endure when the roseblossoms wither,

  And men that love lightly may die — but we?”

  And the same wind sang and the same waves whitened,

  And or ever the garden’s last petals were shed,

  In the lips that had whispered, the eyes that had lightened,

  Love was dead.

  Or they loved their life through, and then went whither?

  And were one to the end — but what end who knows?

  Love deep as the sea as a rose must wither,

  As the rosered seaweed that mocks the rose.

  Shall the dead take thought for the dead to love them?

  What love was ever as deep as a grave?

  They are loveless now as the grass above them

  Or the wave.

  All are at one now, roses and lovers,

  Not known of the cliffs and the fields and the sea.

  Not a breath of the time that has been hovers

  In the air now soft with a summer to be.

  Not a breath shall there sweeten the seasons hereafter

  Of the flowers or the lovers that laugh now or weep,

  When as they that are free now of weeping and laughter

  We shall sleep.

  Here death may deal not again for ever;

  Here change may come not till all change end.

  From the graves they have made they shall rise up never,

  Who have left nought living to ravage and rend.

  Earth, stones, and thorns of the wild ground growing,

  While the sun and the rain live, these shall be;

  Till a last wind’s breath upon all these blowing

  Roll the sea.

  Till the slow sea rise and the sheer cliff crumble,

  Till terrace and meadow the deep gulfs drink,

  Till the strength of the waves of the high tides humble

  The fields that lessen, the rocks that shrink,

  Here now in his triumph where all things falter,

  Stretched out on the spoils that his own hand spread,

  As a god selfslain on his own strange altar,

  Death lies dead.

  RELICS

  This flower that smells of honey and the sea,

  White laurustine, seems in my hand to be

  A white star made of memory long ago

  Lit in the heaven of dear times dead to me.

  A star out of the skies love used to know

  Here held in hand, a stray left yet to show

  What flowers my heart was full of in the days

  That are long since gone down dead memory’s flow.

  Dead memory that revives on doubtful ways,

  Half hearkening what the buried season says

  Out of the world of the unapparent dead

  Where the lost Aprils are, and the lost Mays.

  Flower, once I knew thy starwhite brethren bred

  Nigh wh
ere the last of all the land made head

  Against the sea, a keenfaced promontory,

  Flowers on salt wind and sprinkled seadews fed.

  Their hearts were glad of the free place’s glory;

  The wind that sang them all his stormy story

  Had talked all winter to the sleepless spray,

  And as the sea’s their hues were hard and hoary.

  Like things born of the sea and the bright day,

  They laughed out at the years that could not slay,

  Live sons and joyous of unquiet hours,

  And stronger than all storms that range for prey.

  And in the close indomitable flowers

  A keenedged odour of the sun and showers

  Was as the smell of the fresh honeycomb

  Made sweet for mouths of none but paramours.

  Out of the hard green wall of leaves that clomb

  They showed like windfalls of the snowsoft foam,

  Or feathers from the weary southwind’s wing,

  Fair as the spray that it came shoreward from.

  And thou, as white, what word hast thou to bring?

  If my heart hearken, whereof wilt thou sing?

  For some sign surely thou too hast to bear,

  Some word far south was taught thee of the spring.

  White like a white rose, not like these that were

  Taught of the wind’s mouth and the winter air,

  Poor tender thing of soft Italian bloom,

  Where once thou grewest, what else for me grew there?

  Born in what spring and on what city’s tomb,

  By whose hand wast thou reached, and plucked for whom?

  There hangs about thee, could the soul’s sense tell,

  An odour as of love and of love’s doom.