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

by Algernon Charles Swinburne

  Love, that sounds loud or light in all men’s ears,

  Whence all men’s eyes take fire from sparks of tears,

  That binds on all men’s feet or chains or wings;

  Love that is root and fruit of terrene things;

  Love, that the whole world’s waters shall not drown,

  The whole world’s fiery forces not burn down;

  Love, that what time his own hands guard his head

  The whole world’s wrath and strength shall not strike dead;

  Love, that if once his own hands make his grave

  The whole world’s pity and sorrow shall not save;

  Love, that for very life shall not be sold,

  Nor bought nor bound with iron nor with gold;

  So strong that heaven, could love bid heaven farewell,

  Would turn to fruitless and unflowering hell;

  So sweet that hell, to hell could love be given,

  Would turn to splendid and sonorous heaven;

  Love that is fire within thee and light above,

  And lives by grace of nothing but of love;

  Through many and lovely thoughts and much desire

  Led these twain to the life of tears and fire;

  Through many and lovely days and much delight

  Led these twain to the lifeless life of night.

  Yea, but what then? albeit all this were thus,

  And soul smote soul and left it ruinous,

  And love led love as eyeless men lead men,

  Through chance by chance to deathward — Ah, what then?

  Hath love not likewise led them further yet,

  out through the years where memories rise and set,

  Some large as suns, some moon-like warm and pale

  Some starry-sighted, some through clouds that sail

  Seen as red flame through spectral float of fume,

  Each with the blush of its own special bloom

  On the fair face of its own coloured light,

  Distinguishable in all the host of night,

  Divisible from all the radiant rest

  And separable in splendour? Hath the best

  Light of love’s all, of all that burn and move,

  A better heaven than heaven is? Hath not love

  Made for all these their sweet particular air

  To shine in, their own beams and names to bear,

  Their ways to wander and their wards to keep,

  Till story and song and glory and all things sleep?

  Hath he not plucked from death of lovers dead

  Their musical soft memories, and kept red

  The rose of their remembrance in men’s eyes,

  The sunsets of their stories in his skies,

  The blush of their dead blood in lips that speak

  Of their dead lives, and in the listener’s cheek

  That trembles with the kindling pity lit

  In gracious hearts for some sweet fever-fit,

  A fiery pity enkindled of pure thought

  By tales that make their honey out of nought,

  The faithless faith that lives without belief

  Its light life through, the griefless ghost of grief?

  Yea, as warm night refashions the sere blood

  In storm-struck petal or in sun-struck bud,

  With tender hours and tempering dew to cure

  The hunger and thirst of day’s distemperature

  And ravin of the dry discolouring hours,

  Hath he not bid relume their flameless flowers

  With summer fire and heat of lamping song,

  And bid the short-lived things, long dead, live long,

  And thought remake their wan funereal fames,

  And the sweet shining signs of women’s names

  That mark the months out and the weeks anew

  He moves in changeless change of seasons through

  To fill the days up of his dateless year

  Flame from Queen Helen to Queen Guenevere?

  For first of all the sphery signs whereby

  Love severs light from darkness, and most high,

  In the white front of January there glows

  The rose-red sign of Helen like a rose:

  And gold-eyed as the shore-flower shelterless

  Whereon the sharp-breathed sea blows bitterness,

  A storm-star that the seafarers of love

  Strain their wind-wearied eyes for glimpses of,

  Shoots keen through February’s grey frost and damp

  The lamplike star of Hero for a lamp;

  The star that Marlowe sang into our skies

  With mouth of gold, and morning in his eyes;

  And in clear March across the rough blue sea

  The signal sapphire of Alcyone

  Makes bright the blown bross of the wind-foot year;

  And shining like a sunbeam-smitten tear

  Full ere it fall, the fair next sign in sight

  Burns opal-wise with April-coloured light

  When air is quick with song and rain and flame,

  My birth-month star that in love’s heaven hath name

  Iseult, a light of blossom and beam and shower,

  My singing sign that makes the song-tree flower;

  Next like a pale and burning pearl beyond

  The rose-white sphere of flower-named Rosamond

  Signs the sweet head of Maytime; and for June

  Flares like an angered and storm-reddening moon

  Her signal sphere, whose Carthaginian pyre

  Shadowed her traitor’s flying sail with fire;

  Next, glittering as the wine-bright jacinth-stone,

  A star south-risen that first to music shone,

  The keen girl-star of golden Juliet bears

  Light northward to the month whose forehead wears

  Her name for flower upon it, and his trees

  Mix their deep English song with Veronese;

  And like an awful sovereign chrysolite

  Burning, the supreme fire that blinds the night,

  The hot gold head of Venus kissed by Mars,

  A sun-flower among small sphered flowers of stars,

  The light of Cleopatra fills and burns

  The hollow of heaven whence ardent August yearns;

  And fixed and shining as the sister-shed

  Sweet tears for Phaethon disorbed and dead,

  The pale bright autumn’s amber-coloured sphere,

  That through September sees the saddening year

  As love sees change through sorrow, hath to name

  Francesca’s; and the star that watches flame

  The embers of the harvest overgone

  Is Thisbe’s, slain of love in Babylon,

  Set in the golden girdle of sweet signs

  A blood-bright ruby; last save one light shines

  An eastern wonder of sphery chrysopras,

  The star that made men mad, Angelica’s;

  And latest named and lordliest, with a sound

  Of swords and harps in heaven that ring it round,

  Last love-light and last love-song of the year’s,

  Gleams like a glorious emerald Guenevere’s.

  These are the signs wherethrough the year sees move,

  Full of the sun, the sun-god which is love,

  A fiery body blood-red from the heart

  Outward, with fire-white wings made wide apart,

  That close not and unclose not, but upright

  Steered without wind by their own light and might

  Sweep through the flameless fire of air that rings

  From heaven to heaven with thunder of wheels and wings

  And antiphones of motion-moulded rhyme

  Through spaces out of space and timeless time.

  So shine above dead chance and conquered change

  The spherèd signs, and leave without their range

  Doubt and desire, and hope with fear for wife,

  Pale pains, and pleasures long worn ou
t of life.

  Yea, even the shadows of them spiritless,

  Through the dim door of sleep that seem to press,

  Forms without form, a piteous people and blind,

  Men and no men, whose lamentable kind

  The shadow of death and shadow of life compel

  Through semblances of heaven and false-face hell,

  Through dreams of light and dreams of darkness tost

  On waves innavigable, are these so lost?

  Shapes that wax pale and shift in swift strange wise,

  Voice faces with unspeculative eyes,

  Dim things that gaze and glare, dead mouths that move,

  Featureless heads discrowned of hate and love,

  Mockeries and masks of motion and mute breath,

  Leavings of life, the superflux of death —

  If these things and no more than these things be

  Left when man ends or changes, who can see?

  Or who can say with what more subtle sense

  Their subtler natures taste in air less dense

  A life less thick and palpable than ours,

  Warmed with faint fires and sweetened with dead flowers

  And measured by low music? how time fares

  In that wan time-forgotten world of theirs,

  Their pale poor world too deep for sun or star

  To live in, where the eyes of Helen are,

  And hers who made as God’s own eyes to shine

  The eyes that met them of the Florentine,

  Wherein the godhead thence transfigured lit

  All time for all men with the shadow of it?

  Ah, and these too felt on them as God’s grace

  The pity and glory of this man’s breathing face;

  For these, too, these my lovers, these my twain,

  Saw Dante, saw God visible by pain,

  With lips that thundered and with feet that trod

  Before men’s eyes incognisable God;

  Saw love and wrath and light and night and fire

  Live with one life and one mouths respire,

  And in one golden sound their whole soul heard

  Sounding, one sweet immitigable word.

  They have the night, who had like us the day;

  We, whom day binds, shall have the night as they.

  We, from the fetters of the light unbound,

  Healed of our wound of living, shall sleep sound.

  All gifts but one the jealous God may keep

  From our soul’s longing, one he cannot — sleep.

  This, though he grudge all other grace to prayer,

  This grace his closed hand cannot choose but spare.

  This, though his hear be sealed to all that live,

  Be it lightly given or lothly, God must give.

  We, as the men whose name on earth is none,

  We too shall surely pass out of the sun;

  Out of the sound and eyeless light of things,

  Wide as the stretch of life’s time-wandering wings,

  Wide as the naked world and shadowless,

  And long-lived as the world’s own weariness.

  Us too, when all the fires of time are cold,

  The heights shall hide us and the depths shall hold.

  Us too, when all the tears of time are dry,

  The night shall lighten from her tearless eye.

  Blind is the day and eyeless all its light,

  But the large unbewildered eye of night

  Hath sense and speculation; and the sheer

  Limitless length of lifeless life and clear,

  The timeless space wherein the brief worlds move

  Clothed with light life and fruitful with light love,

  With hopes that threaten, and with fears that cease,

  Past fear and hope, hath in it only peace.

  Yet of these lives inlaid with hopes and fears,

  Spun fine as fire and jewelled thick with tears,

  These lives made out of loves that long since were,

  Lives wrought as ours of earth and burning air,

  Fugitive flame, and water of secret springs,

  And clothed with joys and sorrows as with wings,

  Some yet are good, if aught be good, to save

  Some while from washing wreck and wrecking wave.

  Was such not theirs, the twain I take, and give

  Out of my life to make their dead life live

  Some days of mine, and blow my living breath

  Between dead lips forgotten even of death?

  So many and many of old have given my twain

  Love and live song and honey-hearted pain,

  Whose root is sweetness and whose fruit is sweet,

  So many and with such joy have tracked their feet,

  What should I do to follow? yet I too,

  I have the heart to follow, many or few

  Be the feet gone before me; for the way,

  Rose-red with remnant roses of the day

  Westward, and eastward white with stars that break,

  Between the green and foam is fair to take

  For any sail the sea-wind steers for me

  From morning into morning, sea to sea.

  THE SAILING OF THE SWALLOW

  About the middle music of the spring

  Came from the castled shore of Ireland’s king

  A fair ship stoutly sailing, eastward bound

  And south by Wales and all its wonders round

  To the loud rocks and ringing reaches home

  That take the wild wrath of the Cornish foam,

  Past Lyonesse unswallowed of the tides

  And high Carlion that now the steep sea hides

  To the wind-hollowed heights and gusty bays

  Of sheer Tintagel, fair with famous days.

  Above the stem a gilded swallow shone,

  Wrought with straight wings and eyes of glittering stone

  As flying sunward oversea, to bear

  Green summer with it through the singing air.

  And on the deck between the rowers at dawn,

  As the bright sail with brightening wind was drawn,

  Sat with full face against the strengthening light

  Iseult, more fair than foam or dawn was white.

  Her gaze was glad past love’s own singing of,

  And her face lovely past desire of love.

  Past thought and speech her maiden motions were,

  And a more golden sunrise was her hair.

  The very veil of her bright flesh was made

  As of light woven and moonbeam-coloured shade

  More fine than moonbeams; white her eyelids shone

  As snow sun-stricken that endures the sun,

  And through their curled and coloured clouds of deep

  Luminous lashes thick as dreams in sleep

  Shone as the sea’s depth swallowing up the sky’s

  The springs of unimaginable eyes.

  As the wave’s subtler emerald is pierced through

  With the utmost heaven’s inextricable blue,

  And both are woven and molten in one sleight

  Of amorous colour and implicated light

  Under the golden guard and gaze of noon,

  So glowed their awless and amorous plenilune,

  Azure and gold and ardent grey, made strange

  With fiery difference and deep interchange

  Inexplicable of glories multiform;

  Now as the sullen sapphire swells toward storm

  Foamless, their bitter beauty grew acold,

  And now afire with ardour of fine gold.

  Her flower-soft lips were meek and passionate,

  For love upon them like a shadow sate

  Patient, a foreseen vision of sweet things,

  A dream with eyes fast shut and plumeless wings

  That knew not what man’s love or life should be,

  Nor had it sight nor heart to hope or see

  What thing should come, but childlike
satisfied

  Watched out its virgin vigil in soft pride

  And unkissed expectation; and the glad

  Clear cheeks and throat and tender temples had

  Such maiden heat as if a rose’s blood

  Beat in the live heart of a lily-bud.

  Between the small round breasts a white way led

  Heavenward, and from slight foot to slender head

  The whole fair body flower-like swayed and shone

  Moving, and what her light hand leant upon

  Grew blossom-scented: her warm arms began

  To round and ripen for delight of man

  That they should clasp and circle: her fresh hands,

  Like regent lilies of reflowering lands

  Whose vassal firstlings, crown and star and plume,

  Bow down to the empire of that sovereign bloom,

  Shone sceptreless, and from her face there went

  A silent light as of a God content;

  Save when, more swift and keen than love or shame,

  Some flash of blood, light as the laugh of flame,

  Broke it with sudden beam and shining speech,

  As dream by dream shot through her eyes, and each

  Outshone the last that lightened, and not one

  Showed her such things as should be borne and done.

  Though hard against her shone the sunlike face

  That in all change and wreck of time and place

  Should be the star of her sweet living soul.

  Nor had love made it as his written scroll

  For evil will and good to read in yet;

  But smooth and mighty, without scar or fret,

  Fresh and high-lifted was the helmless brow

  As the oak-tree flower that tops the topmost bough,

  Ere it drops off before the perfect leaf;

  And nothing save his name he had of grief,

  The name his mother, dying as he was born,

  Made out of sorrow in very sorrow’s scorn,

  And set it on him smiling in her sight,

  Tristram; who now, clothed with sweet youth and might,

  As a glad witness wore that bitter name,

  The second symbol of the world for fame.

  Famous and full of fortune was his youth

  Ere the beard’s bloom had left his cheek unsmooth,

  And in his face a lordship of strong joy

  And height of heart no chance could curb or cloy

  Lightened, and all that warmed them at his eyes

  Loved them as larks that kindle as they rise

  Toward light they turn to music love the blue strong skies.

  So like the morning through the morning moved

  Tristram, a light to look on and be loved.

  Song spring between his lips and hands, and shone

  Singing, and strengthened and sat down thereon

  As a bird settles to the second flight,