And his peace but a truce for strife,
Who knows if haply the shadow of death
May be not the light of life?
For the storm and the rain and the darkness borrow
But an hour from the suns to be,
But a strange swift passage, that we
May rejoice, who have mourned not to-day, to-morrow,
In the sun and the wind and the sea.
BY THE WAYSIDE
Summer’s face was rosiest, skies and woods were mellow,
Earth had heaven to friend, and heaven had earth to fellow,
When we met where wooded hills and meadows meet.
Autumn’s face is pale, and all her late leaves yellow,
Now that here again we greet.
Wan with years whereof this eightieth nears December,
Fair and bright with love, the kind old face I know
Shines above the sweet small twain whose eyes remember
Heaven, and fill with April’s light this pale November,
Though the dark year’s glass run low.
Like a rose whose joy of life her silence utters
When the birds are loud, and low the lulled wind mutters,
Grave and silent shines the boy nigh three years old.
Wise and sweet his smile, that falters not nor flutters,
Glows, and turns the gloom to gold.
Like the new-born sun’s that strikes the dark and slays it,
So that even for love of light it smiles and dies,
Laughs the boy’s blithe face whose fair fourth year arrays it
All with light of life and mirth that stirs and sways it
And fulfils the deep wide eyes.
Wide and warm with glowing laughter’s exultation,
Full of welcome, full of sunbright jubilation,
Flash my taller friend’s quick eyebeams, charged with glee;
But with softer still and sweeter salutation
Shine my smaller friend’s on me.
Little arms flung round my bending neck, that yoke it
Fast in tender bondage, draw my face down too
Toward the flower-soft face whose dumb deep smiles invoke it;
Dumb, but love can read the radiant eyes that woke it,
Blue as June’s mid heaven is blue.
How may men find refuge, how should hearts be shielded,
From the weapons thus by little children wielded,
When they lift such eyes as light this lustrous face —
Eyes that woke love sleeping unawares, and yielded
Love for love, a gift of grace,
Grace beyond man’s merit, love that laughs, forgiving
Even the sin of being no more a child, nor worth
Trust and love that lavish gifts above man’s giving,
Touch or glance of eyes and lips the sweetest living,
Fair as heaven and kind as earth?
NIGHT
I
FROM THE ITALIAN OF GIOVANNI STROZZI
Night, whom in shape so sweet thou here may’st see
Sleeping, was by an Angel sculptured thus
In marble, and since she sleeps hath life like us:
Thou doubt’st? Awake her: she will speak to thee.
II
FROM THE ITALIAN OF MICHELANGELO BUONARROTI
Sleep likes me well, and better yet to know
I am but stone. While shame and grief must be,
Good hap is mine, to feel not, nor to see:
Take heed, then, lest thou wake me: ah, speak low.
IN TIME OF MOURNING
“Return,” we dare not as we fain
Would cry from hearts that yearn:
Love dares not bid our dead again
Return.
O hearts that strain and burn
As fires fast fettered burn and strain!
Bow down, lie still, and learn.
The heart that healed all hearts of pain
No funeral rites inurn:
Its echoes, while the stars remain,
Return.
May 1885.
THE INTERPRETERS
I
Days dawn on us that make amends for many
Sometimes,
When heaven and earth seem sweeter even than any
Man’s rhymes.
Light had not all been quenched in France, or quelled
In Greece,
Had Homer sung not, or had Hugo held
His peace.
Had Sappho’s self not left her word thus long
For token,
The sea round Lesbos yet in waves of song
Had spoken.
II
And yet these days of subtler air and finer
Delight,
When lovelier looks the darkness, and diviner
The light —
The gift they give of all these golden hours,
Whose urn
Pours forth reverberate rays or shadowing showers
In turn —
Clouds, beams, and winds that make the live day’s track
Seem living —
What were they did no spirit give them back
Thanksgiving?
III
Dead air, dead fire, dead shapes and shadows, telling
Time nought;
Man gives them sense and soul by song, and dwelling
In thought.
In human thought their being endures, their power
Abides:
Else were their life a thing that each light hour
Derides.
The years live, work, sigh, smile, and die, with all
They cherish;
The soul endures, though dreams that fed it fall
And perish.
IV
In human thought have all things habitation;
Our days
Laugh, lower, and lighten past, and find no station
That stays.
But thought and faith are mightier things than time
Can wrong,
Made splendid once with speech, or made sublime
By song.
Remembrance, though the tide of change that rolls
Wax hoary,
Gives earth and heaven, for song’s sake and the soul’s,
Their glory.
July 16, 1885.
THE RECALL
Return, they cry, ere yet your day
Set, and the sky grow stern:
Return, strayed souls, while yet ye may
Return.
But heavens beyond us yearn;
Yea, heights of heaven above the sway
Of stars that eyes discern.
The soul whose wings from shoreward stray
Makes toward her viewless bourne
Though trustless faith and unfaith say,
Return.
BY TWILIGHT
If we dream that desire of the distance above us
Should be fettered by fear of the shadows that seem,
If we wake, to be nought, but to hate or to love us
If we dream,
Night sinks on the soul, and the stars as they gleam
Speak menace or mourning, with tongues to reprove us
That we deemed of them better than terror may deem.
But if hope may not lure us, if fear may not move us,
Thought lightens the darkness wherein the supreme
Pure presence of death shall assure us, and prove us
If we dream.
A BABY’S EPITAPH
April made me: winter laid me here away asleep.
Bright as Maytime was my daytime; night is soft and deep:
Though the morrow bring forth sorrow, well are ye that weep.
Ye that held me dear beheld me not a twelvemonth long:
All the while ye saw me smile, ye knew not whence the song
Came that made me smile, and laid me here, and wrought you wrong.
Angels, calling from your brawling world on
e undefiled,
Homeward bade me, and forbade me here to rest beguiled:
Here I sleep not: pass, and weep not here upon your child.
ON THE DEATH OF SIR HENRY TAYLOR
Fourscore and five times has the gradual year
Risen and fulfilled its days of youth and eld
Since first the child’s eyes opening first beheld
Light, who now leaves behind to help us here
Light shed from song as starlight from a sphere
Serene as summer; song whose charm compelled
The sovereign soul made flesh in Artevelde
To stand august before us and austere,
Half sad with mortal knowledge, all sublime
With trust that takes no taint from change or time,
Trust in man’s might of manhood. Strong and sage,
Clothed round with reverence of remembering hearts,
He, twin-born with our nigh departing age,
Into the light of peace and fame departs.
IN MEMORY OF JOHN WILLIAM INCHBOLD
Farewell: how should not such as thou fare well,
Though we fare ill that love thee, and that live,
And know, whate’er the days wherein we dwell
May give us, thee again they will not give?
Peace, rest, and sleep are all we know of death,
And all we dream of comfort: yet for thee,
Whose breath of life was bright and strenuous breath,
We think the change is other than we see.
The seal of sleep set on thine eyes to-day
Surely can seal not up the keen swift light
That lit them once for ever. Night can slay
None save the children of the womb of night.
The fire that burns up dawn to bring forth noon
Was father of thy spirit: how shouldst thou
Die as they die for whom the sun and moon
Are silent? Thee the darkness holds not now:
Them, while they looked upon the light, and deemed
That life was theirs for living in the sun,
The darkness held in bondage: and they dreamed,
Who knew not that such life as theirs was none.
To thee the sun spake, and the morning sang
Notes deep and clear as life or heaven: the sea
That sounds for them but wild waste music rang
Notes that were lost not when they rang for thee.
The mountains clothed with light and night and change,
The lakes alive with wind and cloud and sun,
Made answer, by constraint sublime and strange,
To the ardent hand that bade thy will be done.
We may not bid the mountains mourn, the sea
That lived and lightened from thine hand again
Moan, as of old would men that mourned as we
A man beloved, a man elect of men,
A man that loved them. Vain, divine and vain,
The dream that touched with thoughts or tears of ours
The spirit of sense that lives in sun and rain,
Sings out in birds, and breathes and fades in flowers.
Not for our joy they live, and for our grief
They die not. Though thine eye be closed, thine hand
Powerless as mine to paint them, not a leaf
In English woods or glades of Switzerland
Falls earlier now, fades faster. All our love
Moves not our mother’s changeless heart, who gives
A little light to eyes and stars above,
A little life to each man’s heart that lives.
A little life to heaven and earth and sea,
To stars and souls revealed of night and day,
And change, the one thing changeless: yet shall she
Cease too, perchance, and perish. Who shall say?
Our mother Nature, dark and sweet as sleep,
And strange as life and strong as death, holds fast,
Even as she holds our hearts alive, the deep
Dumb secret of her first-born births and last.
But this, we know, shall cease not till the strife
Of nights and days and fears and hopes find end;
This, through the brief eternities of life,
Endures, and calls from death a living friend;
The love made strong with knowledge, whence confirmed
The whole soul takes assurance, and the past
(So by time’s measure, not by memory’s, termed)
Lives present life, and mingles first with last.
I, now long since thy guest of many days,
Who found thy hearth a brother’s, and with thee
Tracked in and out the lines of rolling bays
And banks and gulfs and reaches of the sea —
Deep dens wherein the wrestling water sobs
And pants with restless pain of refluent breath
Till all the sunless hollow sounds and throbs
With ebb and flow of eddies dark as death —
I know not what more glorious world, what waves
More bright with life, — if brighter aught may live
Than those that filled and fled their tidal caves —
May now give back the love thou hast to give.
Tintagel, and the long Trebarwith sand,
Lone Camelford, and Boscastle divine
With dower of southern blossom, bright and bland
Above the roar of granite-baffled brine,
Shall hear no more by joyous night or day
From downs or causeways good to rove and ride
Or feet of ours or horse-hoofs urge their way
That sped us here and there by tower and tide.
The headlands and the hollows and the waves,
For all our love, forget us: where I am
Thou art not: deeper sleeps the shadow on graves
Than in the sunless gulf that once we swam.
Thou hast swum too soon the sea of death: for us
Too soon, but if truth bless love’s blind belief
Faith, born of hope and memory, says not thus:
And joy for thee for me should mean not grief.
And joy for thee, if ever soul of man
Found joy in change and life of ampler birth
Than here pens in the spirit for a span,
Must be the life that doubt calls death on earth.
For if, beyond the shadow and the sleep,
A place there be for souls without a stain,
Where peace is perfect, and delight more deep
Than seas or skies that change and shine again,
There none of all unsullied souls that live
May hold a surer station: none may lend
More light to hope’s or memory’s lamp, nor give
More joy than thine to those that called thee friend.
Yea, joy from sorrow’s barren womb is born
When faith begets on grief the godlike child:
As midnight yearns with starry sense of morn
In Arctic summers, though the sea wax wild,
So love, whose name is memory, thrills at heart,
Remembering and rejoicing in thee, now
Alive where love may dream not what thou art
But knows that higher than hope or love art thou.
“Whatever heaven, if heaven at all may be,
Await the sacred souls of good men dead,
There, now we mourn who loved him here, is he,”
So, sweet and stern of speech, the Roman said,
Erect in grief, in trust erect, and gave
His deathless dead a deathless life even here
Where day bears down on day as wave on wave
And not man’s smile fades faster than his tear.
Albeit this gift be given not me to give,
Nor power be mine to break time’s silent spell,
Not less shall love that dies not while I live
Bid thee, be
loved in life and death, farewell.
NEW YEAR’S DAY
New Year, be good to England. Bid her name
Shine sunlike as of old on all the sea:
Make strong her soul: set all her spirit free:
Bind fast her homeborn foes with links of shame
More strong than iron and more keen than flame:
Seal up their lips for shame’s sake: so shall she
Who was the light that lightened freedom be,
For all false tongues, in all men’s eyes the same.
O last-born child of Time, earth’s eldest lord,
God undiscrowned of godhead, who for man
Begets all good and evil things that live,
Do thou, his new-begotten son, implored
Of hearts that hope and fear not, make thy span
Bright with such light as history bids thee give.
Jan. 1, 1889.
TO SIR RICHARD F. BURTON
(ON HIS TRANSLATION OF “THE ARABIAN NIGHTS”)
Westward the sun sinks, grave and glad; but far
Eastward, with laughter and tempestuous tears,
Cloud, rain, and splendour as of orient spears,
Keen as the sea’s thrill toward a kindling star,
The sundawn breaks the barren twilight’s bar
And fires the mist and slays it. Years on years
Vanish, but he that hearkens eastward hears
Bright music from the world where shadows are.
Delphi Complete Poetical Works of Algernon Charles Swinburne (Illustrated) (Delphi Poets Series) Page 74