Not like the lowlying head of Him, the King,
The flame that made of Troy a ruinous thing,
Thou liest, and on this dust no tears could quicken
There fall no tears like theirs that all men hear
Fall tear by sweet imperishable tear
Down the opening leaves of holy poets’ pages.
Thee not Orestes, not Electra mourns;
But bending usward with memorial urns
The most high Muses that fulfil all ages
Weep, and our God’s heart yearns.
XIII
For, sparing of his sacred strength, not often
Among us darkling here the lord of light
Makes manifest his music and his might
In hearts that open and in lips that soften
With the soft flame and heat of songs that shine.
Thy lips indeed he touched with bitter wine,
And nourished them indeed with bitter bread;
Yet surely from his hand thy soul’s food came,
The fire that scarred thy spirit at his flame
Was lighted, and thine hungering heart he fed
Who feeds our hearts with fame.
XIV
Therefore he too now at thy soul’s sunsetting,
God of all suns and songs, he too bends down
To mix his laurel with thy cypress crown,
And save thy dust from blame and from forgetting.
Therefore he too, seeing all thou wert and art,
Compassionate, with sad and sacred heart,
Mourns thee of many his children the last dead,
And hallows with strange tears and alien sighs
Thine unmelodious mouth and sunless eyes,
And over thine irrevocable head
Sheds light from the under skies.
XV
And one weeps with him in the ways Lethean,
And stains with tears her changing bosom chill:
That obscure Venus of the hollow hill,
That thing transformed which was the Cytherean,
With lips that lost their Grecian laugh divine
Long since, and face no more called Erycine;
A ghost, a bitter and luxurious god.
Thee also with fair flesh and singing spell
Did she, a sad and second prey, compel
Into the footless places once more trod,
And shadows hot from hell.
XVI
And now no sacred staff shall break in blossom,
No choral salutation lure to light
A spirit sick with perfume and sweet night
And love’s tired eyes and hands and barren bosom.
There is no help for these things; none to mend
And none to mar; not all our songs, O friend,
Will make death clear or make life durable.
Howbeit with rose and ivy and wild vine
And with wild notes about this dust of thine
At least I fill the place where white dreams dwell
And wreathe an unseen shrine.
XVII
Sleep; and if life was bitter to thee, pardon,
If sweet, give thanks; thou hast no more to live;
And to give thanks is good, and to forgive.
Out of the mystic and the mournful garden
Where all day through thine hands in barren braid
Wove the sick flowers of secrecy and shade,
Green buds of sorrow and sin, and remnants grey,
Sweetsmelling, pale with poison, sanguinehearted,
Passions that sprang from sleep and thoughts that started,
Shall death not bring us all as thee one day
Among the days departed?
XVIII
For thee, O now a silent soul, my brother,
Take at my hands this garland, and farewell.
Thin is the leaf, and chill the wintry smell,
And chill the solemn earth, a fatal mother,
With sadder than the Niobean womb,
And in the hollow of her breasts a tomb.
Content thee, howsoe’er, whose days are done;
There lies not any troublous thing before,
Nor sight nor sound to war against thee more,
For whom all winds are quiet as the sun,
All waters as the shore.
MEMORIAL VERSES ON THE DEATH OF THÉOPHILE GAUTIER
Death, what hast thou to do with me? So saith
Love, with eyes set against the face of Death;
What have I done, O thou strong Death, to thee,
That mine own lips should wither from thy breath?
Though thou be blind as fire or as the sea,
Why should thy waves and storms make war on me?
Is it for hate thou hast to find me fair,
Or for desire to kiss, if it might be,
My very mouth of song, and kill me there?
So with keen rains vexing his crownless hair.
With bright feet bruised from no delightful way,
Through darkness and the disenchanted air,
Lost Love went weeping half a winter’s day.
And the armèd wind that smote him seemed to say,
How shall the dew live when the dawn is fled,
Or wherefore should the Mayflower outlast May?
Then Death took Love by the right hand and said,
Smiling: Come now and look upon thy dead.
But Love cast down the glories of his eyes,
And bowed down like a flower his flowerless head.
And Death spake, saying: What ails thee in such wise,
Being god, to shut thy sight up from the skies?
If thou canst see not, hast thou ears to hear?
Or is thy soul too as a leaf that dies?
Even as he spake with fleshless lips of fear,
But soft as sleep sings in a tired man’s ear,
Behold, the winter was not, and its might
Fell, and fruits broke forth of the barren year.
And upon earth was largess of great light,
And moving music winged for worldwide flight,
And shapes and sounds of gods beheld and heard,
And day’s foot set upon the neck of night.
And with such song the hollow ways were stirred
As of a god’s heart hidden in a bird,
Or as the whole soul of the sun in spring
Should find full utterance in one flowersoft word,
And all the season should break forth and sing
From one flower’s lips, in one rose triumphing;
Such breath and light of song as of a flame
Made ears and spirits of them that heard it ring.
And Love beholding knew not for the same
The shape that led him, nor in face nor name,
For he was bright and great of thews and fair,
And in Love’s eyes he was not Death, but Fame.
Not that grey ghost whose life is empty and bare
And his limbs moulded out of mortal air,
A cloud of change that shifts into a shower
And dies and leaves no light for time to wear:
But a god clothed with his own joy and power,
A god rerisen out of his mortal hour
Immortal, king and lord of time and space,
With eyes that look on them as from a tower.
And where he stood the pale sepulchral place
Bloomed, as new life might in a bloodless face,
And where men sorrowing came to seek a tomb
With funeral flowers and tears for grief and grace,
They saw with light as of a world in bloom
The portal of the House of Fame illume
The ways of life wherein we toiling tread,
And watched the darkness as a brand consume.
And through the gates where rule the deathless dead
The sound of a new singer’s soul was shed
That sang among
his kinsfolk, and a beam
Shot from the star on a new ruler’s head.
A new star lighting the Lethean stream,
A new song mixed into the song supreme
Made of all souls of singers and their might,
That makes of life and time and death a dream.
Thy star, thy song, O soul that in our sight
Wast as a sun that made for man’s delight
Flowers and all fruits in season, being so near
The sungod’s face, our god that gives us light.
To him of all gods that we love or fear
Thou amongst all men by thy name wast dear,
Dear to the god that gives us spirit of song
To bind and burn all hearts of men that hear.
The god that makes men’s words too sweet and strong
For life or time or death to do them wrong,
Who sealed with his thy spirit for a sign
And filled it with his breath thy whole life long.
Who made thy moist lips fiery with new wine
Pressed from the grapes of song, the sovereign vine,
And with all love of all things loveliest
Gave thy soul power to make them more divine.
That thou might’st breathe upon the breathless rest
Of marble, till the brows and lips and breast
Felt fall from off them as a cancelled curse
That speechless sleep wherewith they lived opprest.
Who gave thee strength and heat of spirit to pierce
All clouds of form and colour that disperse,
And leave the spirit of beauty to remould
In types of clean chryselephantine verse.
Who gave thee words more golden than fine gold
To carve in shapes more glorious than of old,
And build thy songs up in the sight of time
As statues set in godhead manifold:
In sight and scorn of temporal change and clime
That meet the sun rerisen with refluent rhyme
— As god to god might answer face to face —
From lips whereon the morning strikes sublime.
Dear to the god, our god who gave thee place
Among the chosen of days, the royal race,
The lords of light, whose eyes of old and ears
Saw even on earth and heard him for a space.
There are the souls of those once mortal years
That wrought with fire of joy and light of tears
In words divine as deeds that grew thereof
Such music as he swoons with love who hears.
There are the lives that lighten from above
Our under lives, the spheral souls that move
Through the ancient heaven of songillumined air
Whence we that hear them singing die with love.
There all the crowned Hellenic heads, and there
The old gods who made men godlike as they were,
The lyric lips wherefrom all songs take fire,
Live eyes, and light of Apollonian hair.
There, round the sovereign passion of that lyre
Which the stars hear and tremble with desire,
The ninefold light Pierian is made one
That here we see divided, and aspire,
Seeing, after this or that crown to be won;
But where they hear the singing of the sun,
All form, all sound, all colour, and all thought
Are as one body and soul in unison.
There the song sung shines as a picture wrought,
The painted mouths sing that on earth say nought,
The carven limbs have sense of blood and growth
And largeeyed life that seeks nor lacks not aught.
There all the music of thy living mouth
Lives, and all loves wrought of thine hand in youth
And bound about the breasts and brows with gold
And coloured pale or dusk from north or south.
Fair living things made to thy will of old,
Born of thy lips, no births of mortal mould,
That in the world of song about thee wait
Where thought and truth are one and manifold.
Within the graven lintels of the gate
That here divides our vision and our fate,
The dreams we walk in and the truths of sleep,
All sense and spirit have life inseparate.
There what one thinks, is his to grasp and keep;
There are no dreams, but very joys to reap,
No foiled desires that die before delight,
No fears to see across our joys and weep.
There hast thou all thy will of thought and sight,
All hope for harvest, and all heaven for flight;
The sunrise of whose goldenmouthed glad head
To paler songless ghosts was heat and light.
Here where the sunset of our year is red
Men think of thee as of the summer dead,
Gone forth before the snows, before thy day,
With unshod feet, with brows unchapleted.
Couldst thou not wait till age had wound, they say,
Round those wreathed brows his soft white blossoms? Nay,
Why shouldst thou vex thy soul with this harsh air,
Thy brightwinged soul, once free to take its way?
Nor for men’s reverence hadst thou need to wear
The holy flower of grey timehallowed hair;
Nor were it fit that aught of thee grew old,
Fair lover all thy days of all things fair.
And hear we not thy words of molten gold
Singing? or is their light and heat acold
Whereat men warmed their spirits? Nay, for all
These yet are with us, ours to hear and hold.
The lovely laughter, the clear tears, the call
Of love to love on ways where shadows fall,
Through doors of dim division and disguise,
And music made of doubts unmusical;
The love that caught strange light from death’s own eyes,1
And filled death’s lips with fiery words and sighs,
And half asleep let feed from veins of his
Her close red warm snake’s mouth, Egyptianwise:
And that great night of love more strange than this,2
When she that made the whole world’s bale and bliss
Made king of all the world’s desire a slave,
And killed him in mid kingdom with a kiss;
Veiled loves that shifted shapes and shafts, and gave,3
Laughing, strange gifts to hands that durst not crave,
Flowers doubleblossomed, fruits of scent and hue
Sweet as the bridebed, stranger than the grave;
All joys and wonders of old lives and new
That ever in love’s shine or shadow grew,
And all the grief whereof he dreams and grieves,
And all sweet roots fed on his light and dew;
All these through thee our spirit of sense perceives,
As threads in the unseen woof thy music weaves,
Birds caught and snared that fill our ears with thee,
Bayblossoms in thy wreath of browbound leaves.
Mixed with the masque of death’s old comedy
Though thou too pass, have here our flowers, that we
For all the flowers thou gav’st upon thee shed,
And pass not crownless to Persephone.
Blue lotusblooms and white and rosyred
We wind with poppies for thy silent head,
And on this margin of the sundering sea
Leave thy sweet light to rise upon the dead.
1 La Morte Amoureuse.
2 Une Nuit de Cléopâtre.
3 Mademoiselle de Maupin.
SONNET (WITH A COPY OF MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN)
This is the golden book of spirit and sense,
The holy writ of beauty; he that wro
ught
Made it with dreams and faultless words and thought
That seeks and finds and loses in the dense
Dim air of life that beauty’s excellence
Wherewith love makes one hour of life distraught
And all hours after follow and find not aught.
Here is that height of all love’s eminence
Where man may breathe but for a breathingspace
And feel his soul burn as an altarfire
To the unknown God of unachieved desire,
And from the middle mystery of the place
Watch lights that break, hear sounds as of a quire,
But see not twice unveiled the veiled God’s face.
AGE AND SONG
(TO BARRY CORNWALL)
I
In vain men tell us time can alter
Old loves or make old memories falter,
That with the old year the old year’s life closes.
The old dew still falls on the old sweet flowers,
The old sun revives the newfledged hours,
The old summer rears the newborn roses.
II
Much more a Muse that bears upon her
Raiment and wreath and flower of honour,
Gathered long since and long since woven,
Fades not or falls as fall the vernal
Blossoms that bear no fruit eternal,
By summer or winter charred or cloven.
III
No time casts down, no time upraises,
Such loves, such memories, and such praises,
As need no grace of sun or shower,
No saving screen from frost or thunder
To tend and house around and under
The imperishable and fearless flower.
IV
Delphi Complete Poetical Works of Algernon Charles Swinburne (Illustrated) (Delphi Poets Series) Page 63