Delphi Complete Poetical Works of Algernon Charles Swinburne (Illustrated) (Delphi Poets Series)
Page 84
Was even of Æschylus,
And his one word great as the crying of ten,
Crying in men’s ears of wrath toward wrong,
Of love toward right immortal, sanctified with song.
32.
Him too whom none save one before him ever
Beheld, nor since hath man again beholden,
Whom Dante seeing him saw not, nor the giver
Of all gifts back to man by time withholden,
Shakespeare — him too, whom sea-like ages sever,
As waves divide men’s eyes from lights upholden
To landward, from our songs that find him never,
Seeking, though memory fire and hope embolden —
Him too this one song found,
And raised at its sole sound
Up from the dust of darkling dreams and olden
Legends forlorn of breath,
Up from the deeps of death,
Ulysses: him whose name turns all songs golden,
The wise divine strong soul, whom fate
Could make no less than change and chance beheld him great.
33.
Nor stands the seer who raised him less august
Before us, nor in judgment frail and rathe,
Less constant or less loving or less just,
But fruitful-ripe and full of tender faith,
Holding all high and gentle names in trust
Of time for honour; so his quickening breath
Called from the darkness of their martyred dust
Our sweet Saints Alice and Elizabeth,
Revived and reinspired
With speech from heavenward fired
By love to say what Love the Archangel saith
Only, nor may such word
Save by such ears be heard
As hear the tongues of angels after death
Descending on them like a dove
Has taken all earthly sense of thought away but love.
34.
All sweet, all sacred, all heroic things,
All generous names and loyal, and all wise,
With all his heart in all its wayfarings
He sought, and worshipped, seeing them with his eyes
In very present glory, clothed with wings
Of words and deeds and dreams immortal, rise
Visible more than living slaves and kings,
Audible more than actual vows and lies:
These, with scorn’s fieriest rod,
These and the Lord their God,
The Lord their likeness, tyrant of the skies
As they Lord Gods of earth,
These with a rage of mirth
He mocked and scourged and spat on, in such wise
That none might stand before his rod,
And these being slain the Spirit alone be lord or God.
35.
For of all souls for all time glorious none
Loved Freedom better, of all who have loved her best,
Than he who wrote that scripture of the sun
Writ as with fire and light on heaven’s own crest,
Of all words heard on earth the noblest one
That ever spake for souls and left them blest:
GLADLY WE SHOULD REST EVER, HAD WE WON FREEDOM: WE HAVE LOST, AND VERY GLADLY REST.
O poet hero, lord
And father, we record
Deep in the burning tablets of the breast
Thankfully those divine
And living words of thine
For faith and comfort in our hearts imprest
With strokes engraven past hurt of years
And lines inured with fire of immemorial tears.
36.
But who being less than thou shall sing of thee
Words worthy of more than pity or less than scorn?
Who sing the golden garland woven of three,
Thy daughters, Graces mightier than the morn,
More godlike than the graven gods men see
Made all but all immortal, human born
And heavenly natured? With the first came He,
Led by the living hand, who left forlorn
Life by his death, and time
More by his life sublime
Than by the lives of all whom all men mourn,
And even for mourning praise
Heaven, as for all those days
These dead men’s lives clothed round with glories worn
By memory till all time lie dead,
And higher than all behold the bay round Shakespeare’s head.
37.
Then, fairer than the fairest Grace of ours,
Came girt with Grecian gold the second Grace,
And verier daughter of his most perfect hours
Than any of latter time or alien place
Named, or with hair inwoven of English flowers
Only, nor wearing on her statelier face
The lordlier light of Athens. All the Powers
That graced and guarded round that holiest race,
That heavenliest and most high
Time hath seen live and die,
Poured all their power upon him to retrace
The erased immortal roll
Of Love’s most sovereign scroll
And Wisdom’s warm from Freedom’s wide embrace,
The scroll that on Aspasia’s knees
Laid once made manifest the Olympian Pericles.
38.
Clothed on with tenderest weft of Tuscan air,
Came laughing like Etrurian spring the third,
With green Valdelsa’s hill-flowers in her hair
Deep-drenched with May-dews, in her voice the bird
Whose voice hath night and morning in it; fair
As the ambient gold of wall-flowers that engird
The walls engirdling with a circling stair
My sweet San Gimignano: nor a word
Fell from her flowerlike mouth
Not sweet with all the south;
As though the dust shrined in Certaldo stirred
And spake, as o’er it shone
That bright Pentameron,
And his own vines again and chestnuts heard
Boccaccio: nor swift Elsa’s chime
Mixed not her golden babble with Petrarca’s rhyme.
39.
No lovelier laughed the garden which receives
Yet, and yet hides not from our following eyes
With soft rose-laurels and low strawberry-leaves,
Ternissa, sweet as April-coloured skies,
Bowed like a flowering reed when May’s wind heaves
The reed-bed that the stream kisses and sighs,
In love that shrinks and murmurs and believes
What yet the wisest of the starriest wise
Whom Greece might ever hear
Speaks in the gentlest ear
That ever heard love’s lips philosophize
With such deep-reasoning words
As blossoms use and birds,
Nor heeds Leontion lingering till they rise
Far off, in no wise over far,
Beneath a heaven all amorous of its first-born star.
40.
What sound, what storm and splendour of what fire,
Darkening the light of heaven, lightening the night,
Rings, rages, flashes round what ravening pyre
That makes time’s face pale with its reflex light
And leaves on earth, who seeing might scarce respire,
A shadow of red remembrance? Right nor might
Alternating wore ever shapes more dire
Nor manifest in all men’s awful sight
In form and face that wore
Heaven’s light and likeness more
Than these, or held suspense men’s hearts at height
More fearful, since man first
Slaked with man’s blood his thirst,
Than when Rome clashed with Hannibal in fight,
Till tower on ru
ining tower was hurled
Where Scipio stood, and Carthage was not in the world.
41.
Nor lacked there power of purpose in his hand
Who carved their several praise in words of gold
To bare the brows of conquerors and to brand,
Made shelterless of laurels bought and sold
For price of blood or incense, dust or sand,
Triumph or terror. He that sought of old
His father Ammon in a stranger’s land,
And shrank before the serpentining fold,
Stood in our seer’s wide eye
No higher than man most high,
And lowest in heart when highest in hope to hold
Fast as a scripture furled
The scroll of all the world
Sealed with his signet: nor the blind and bold
First thief of empire, round whose head
Swarmed carrion flies for bees, on flesh for violets fed.
42.
As fire that kisses, killing with a kiss,
He saw the light of death, riotous and red,
Flame round the bent brows of Semiramis
Re-risen, and mightier, from the Assyrian dead,
Kindling, as dawn a frost-bound precipice,
The steely snows of Russia, for the tread
Of feet that felt before them crawl and hiss
The snaky lines of blood violently shed.
Like living creeping things
That writhe but have no stings
To scare adulterers from the imperial bed
Bowed with its load of lust,
Or chill the ravenous gusts
That made her body a fire from heel to head;
Or change her high bright spirit and clear,
For all its mortal stains, from taint of fraud or fear.
43.
As light that blesses, hallowing with a look;
He saw the godhead in Vittoria’s face
Shine soft on Buonarroti’s, till he took,
Albeit himself God, a more godlike grace,
A strength more heavenly to confront and brook
All ill things coiled about his worldly race,
From the bright scripture of that present book
Wherein his tired grand eyes got power to trace
Comfort more sweet than youth,
And hope whose child was truth,
And love that brought forth sorrow for a space,
Only that she might bear
Joy: these things, written there,
Made even his soul’s high heaven a heavenlier place,
Perused with eyes whose glory and glow
Had in their fires the spirit of Michael Angelo.
44.
With balms and dews of blessing he consoled
The fair fame wounded by the black priest’s fang,
Giovanna’s, and washed off her blithe and bold
Boy-bridegroom’s blood, that seemed so long to hang
On her fair hand, even till the stain of old
Was cleansed with healing song, that after sang
Sharp truth by sweetest singers’ lips untold
Of pale Beatrice, though her death-note rang
From other strings divine
Ere his rekindling line
With yet more piteous and intolerant pang
Pierced all men’s hearts anew
That heard her passion through
Till fierce from throes of fiery pity sprang
Wrath, armed for chase of monstrous beasts,
Strong to lay waste the kingdom of the seed of priests.
45.
He knew the high-souled humbleness, the mirth
And majesty of meanest men born free,
That made with Luther’s or with Hofer’s birth
The whole world worthier of the sun to see:
The wealth of spirit among the snows, the dearth
Wherein souls festered by the servile sea
That saw the lowest of even crowned heads on earth
Thronged round with worship in Parthenope.
His hand bade Justice guide
Her child Tyrannicide,
Light winged by fire that brings the dawn to be;
And pierced with Tyrrel’s dart
Again the riotous heart
That mocked at mercy’s tongue and manhood’s knee:
And oped the cell where kinglike death
Hung o’er her brows discrowned who bare Elizabeth.
46.
Toward Spenser or toward Bacon proud or kind
He bared the heart of Essex, twain and one,
For the base heart that soiled the starry mind
Stern, for the father in his child undone
Soft as his own toward children, stamped and signed
With their sweet image visibly set on
As by God’s hand, clear as his own designed
The likeness radiant out of ages gone
That none may now destroy
Of that high Roman boy
Whom Julius and Cleopatra saw their son
True-born of sovereign seed,
Foredoomed even thence to bleed,
The stately grace of bright Cæsarion,
The head unbent, the heart unbowed,
That not the shadow of death could make less clear and proud.
47.
With gracious gods he communed, honouring thus
At once by service and similitude,
Service devout and worship emulous
Of the same golden Muses once they wooed,
The names and shades adored of all of us,
The nurslings of the brave world’s earlier brood,
Grown gods for us themselves: Theocritus
First, and more dear Catullus, names bedewed
With blessings bright like tears
From the old memorial years,
And loves and lovely laughters, every mood
Sweet as the drops that fell
Of their own oenomel
From living lips to cheer the multitude
That feeds on words divine, and grows
More worthy, seeing their world reblossom like a rose.
48.
Peace, the soft seal of long life’s closing story,
The silent music that no strange note jars,
Crowned not with gentler hand the years that glory
Crowned, but could hide not all the spiritual scars
Time writes on the inward strengths of warriors hoary
With much long warfare, and with gradual bars
Blindly pent in: but these, being transitory,
Broke, and the power came back that passion mars:
And at the lovely last
Above all anguish past
Before his own the sightless eyes like stars
Arose that watched arise
Like stars in other skies
Above the strife of ships and hurtling cars
The Dioscurian songs divine
That lighten all the world with lightning of their line.
49.
He sang the last of Homer, having sung
The last of his Ulysses. Bright and wide
For him time’s dark strait ways, like clouds that clung
About the day-star, doubtful to divide,
Waxed in his spiritual eyeshot, and his tongue
Spake as his soul bore witness, that descried,
Like those twin towering lights in darkness hung,
Homer, and grey Laertes at his side
Kingly as kings are none
Beneath a later sun,
And the sweet maiden ministering in pride
To sovereign and to sage
In their more sweet old age:
These things he sang, himself as old, and died.
And if death be not, if life be,
As Homer and as Milton are in heaven is he.
50.
Poet whose large-eyed loy
alty of love
Was pure toward all high poets, all their kind
And all bright words and all sweet works thereof;
Strong like the sun, and like the sunlight kind;
Heart that no fear but every grief might move
Wherewith men’s hearts were bound of powers that bind;
The purest soul that ever proof could prove
From taint of tortuous or of envious mind;
Whose eyes elate and clear
Nor shame nor ever fear
But only pity or glorious wrath could blind;
Name set for love apart,
Held lifelong in my heart,
Face like a father’s toward my face inclined;
No gilts like thine are mine to give,
Who by thine own words only bid thee hail, and live.
Thy lifelong works, Napoleon, who shall write?
Time, in his children’s blood who takes delight.
From the Greek of Landor.
GRAND CHORUS OF BIRDS FROM ARISTOPHANES
Attempted in English verse after the original metre.
I was allured into the audacity of this experiment by consideration of a
fact which hitherto does not seem to have been taken into consideration
by any translator of the half divine humourist in whose incomparable
genius the highest qualities of Rabelais were fused and harmonized with
the supremest gifts of Shelley: namely, that his marvellous metrical
invention of the anapæstic heptameter was almost exactly reproducible in
a language to which all variations and combinations of anapæstic,
iambic, or trochaic metre are as natural and pliable as all dactylic and
spondaic forms of verse are unnatural and abhorrent. As it happens, this
highest central interlude of a most adorable masterpiece is as easy to
detach from its dramatic setting, and even from its lyrical context, as
it was easy to give line for line of it in English. In two metrical
points only does my version vary from the verbal pattern of the
original. I have of course added rhymes, and double rhymes, as necessary
makeweights for the imperfection of an otherwise inadequate language;
and equally of course I have not attempted the impossible and