How shall not the bonds of the thraldom of old be broken,
And right put might in the hands of them that break?
For clear as a tocsin from the steeple
Is the cry gone forth along the land,
Take heed, ye unwise among the people:
O ye fools, when will ye understand?
A BALLAD AT PARTING.
Sea to sea that clasps and fosters England, uttering ever-more
Song eterne and praise immortal of the indomitable shore,
Lifts aloud her constant heart up, south to north and east to west,
Here in speech that shames all music, there in thunder-throated roar,
Chiming concord out of discord, waking rapture out of rest.
All her ways are lovely, all her works and symbols are divine,
Yet shall man love best what first bade leap his heart and bend his knee;
Yet where first his whole soul worshipped shall his soul set up her shrine:
Nor may love not know the lovelier, fair as both beheld may be,
Here the limitless north-eastern, there the strait south-western sea.
Though their chant bear all one burden, as ere man was born it bore;
Though the burden be diviner than the songs all souls adore;
Yet may love not choose but choose between them which to love the best.
Me the sea my nursing-mother, me the Channel green and hoar,
Holds at heart more fast than all things, bares for me the goodlier breast,
Lifts for me the lordlier love-song, bids for me more sunlight shine,
Sounds for me the stormier trumpet of the sweeter strain to me.
So the broad pale Thames is loved not like the tawny springs of Tyne:
Choice is clear between them for the soul whose vision holds in fee
Here the limitless north-eastern, there the strait south-western sea.
Choice is clear, but dear is either; nor has either not in store
Many a likeness, many a written sign of spirit-searching lore,
Whence the soul takes fire of sweet remembrance, magnified and blest.
Thought of songs whose flame-winged feet have trod the unfooted water-floor
When the lord of all the living lords of souls bade speed their quest,
Soft live sound like children’s babble down the rippling sand’s incline,
Or the lovely song that loves them, hailed with thankful prayer and plea;
These are parcels of the harvest here whose gathered sheaves are mine,
Garnered now, but sown and reaped where winds make wild with wrath or glee
Here the limitless north-eastern, there the strait south-western sea.
Song, thy name is freedom, seeing thy strength was born of breeze and brine.
Fare now forth and fear no fortune; such a seal is set on thee.
Joy begat and memory bare thee, seeing in spirit a two-fold sign,
Even the sign of those thy fosters, each as thou from all time free,
Here the limitless north-eastern, there the strait south-western sea.
A CENTURY OF ROUNDELS
Later in his career Swinburne developed the poetic form called the roundel, which was a variation of the French rondeau form. The rondeau originated from medieval poetry and was considered one of the most commonly verse forms set to music between the late 13th and the 15th centuries. It is structured around a fixed pattern of repetition of material involving a refrain. The rondeau is believed to have originated in dance songs involving alternating singing of the refrain elements by a group and of other lines by a soloist. Swinburne adapted his own forms of the rondeau in the 1883 collection A Century of Roundels, which he dedicated to his friend and fellow poet Christina Rossetti, who then started writing roundels herself.
Swinburne’s roundel makes use of refrains, repeated according to a certain stylised pattern. A roundel consists of nine lines each having the same number of syllables, as well as a refrain after the third line and after the last line. The refrain must be identical with the beginning of the first line, though it may be a half-line, and rhymes with the second line. It has three stanzas and its rhyme scheme is as follows: A B A R ; B A B ; A B A R ; where R is the refrain.
For example, Swinburne’s first roundel, The Roundel:
A roundel is wrought as a ring or a starbright sphere, (A)
With craft of delight and with cunning of sound unsought, (B)
That the heart of the hearer may smile if to pleasure his ear (A)
A roundel is wrought. (R)
Its jewel of music is carven of all or of aught - (B)
Love, laughter, or mourning - remembrance of rapture or fear - (A)
That fancy may fashion to hang in the ear of thought. (B)
As a bird’s quick song runs round, and the hearts in us hear (A)
Pause answer to pause, and again the same strain caught, (B)
So moves the device whence, round as a pearl or tear, (A)
A roundel is wrought. (R)
At the time of publication of A Century of Roundels, Swinburne wrote to Edward Burne-Jones in 1883: “I have got a tiny new book of songs or songlets, in one form and all manner of metres... just coming out, of which Miss Rossetti has accepted the dedication. I hope you and Georgie will find something to like among a hundred poems of nine lines each, twenty-four of which are about babies or small children.” The collection met with mixed reviews, with some reviewers finding the roundels captivating and brilliant, while others shrugged them off as merely artificial and contrived.
Swinburne, 1894
CONTENTS
DEDICATION TO CHRISTINA G. ROSSETTI
IN HARBOUR
THE WAY OF THE WIND
HAD I WIST
RECOLLECTIONS
TIME AND LIFE
A DIALOGUE
PLUS ULTRA
A DEAD FRIEND
PAST DAYS
AUTUMN AND WINTER
THE DEATH OF RICHARD WAGNER
TWO PRELUDES
LOHENGRIN
TRISTAN UND ISOLDE
THE LUTE AND THE LYRE
PLUS INTRA
CHANGE
A BABY’S DEATH
ONE OF TWAIN
DEATH AND BIRTH
BIRTH AND DEATH
BENEDICTION
ETUDE REALISTE
BABYHOOD
FIRST FOOTSTEPS
A NINTH BIRTHDAY FEBRUARY 4, 1883
NOT A CHILD
TO DORA DORIAN
THE ROUNDEL
AT SEA
WASTED LOVE
BEFORE SUNSET
A SINGING LESSON
FLOWER-PIECES
THREE FACES
EROS
SORROW
SLEEP
ON AN OLD ROUNDEL TRANSLATED BY D. C. ROSSETTI FROM THE FRENCH OF VILLON
A LANDSCAPE BY COURBET
A FLOWER-PIECE BY FANTIN
A NIGHT-PIECE BY MILLET
MARZO PAZZO
DEAD LOVE
DISCORD
CONCORD
MOURNING
APEROTOS EROS
TO CATULLUS
INSULARUM OCELLE
IN SARK
IN GUERNSEY TO THEODORE WATTS
ENVOI
Christina Rossetti (1830-1894) to whom Swinburne dedicated this poetry collection. Rossetti was an English poet who wrote a variety of romantic, devotional, and children’s poems and she is best known for her long poem ‘Goblin Market’ and the love poem ‘Remember’.
DEDICATION TO CHRISTINA G. ROSSETTI
Songs light as these may sound, though deep and strong
The heart spake through them, scarce should hope to please
Ears tuned to strains of loftier thoughts than throng
Songs light as these.
Yet grace may set their sometime doubt at ease,
Nor need their too rash reverence fear to wrong
The shrine it serves at and the hope it sees.
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br /> For childlike loves and laughters thence prolong
Notes that bid enter, fearless as the breeze,
Even to the shrine of holiest-hearted song,
Songs light as these.
IN HARBOUR
I.
Goodnight and goodbye to the life whose signs denote us
As mourners clothed with regret for the life gone by;
To the waters of gloom whence winds of the dayspring float us
Goodnight and goodbye.
A time is for mourning, a season for grief to sigh;
But were we not fools and blind, by day to devote us
As thralls to the darkness, unseen of the sundawn’s eye?
We have drunken of Lethe at length, we have eaten of lotus;
What hurts it us here that sorrows are born and die?
We have said to the dream that caressed and the dread that smote us
Goodnight and goodbye.
II.
Outside of the port ye are moored in, lying
Close from the wind and at ease from the tide,
What sounds come swelling, what notes fall dying
Outside?
They will not cease, they will not abide:
Voices of presage in darkness crying
Pass and return and relapse aside.
Ye see not, but hear ye not wild wings flying
To the future that wakes from the past that died?
Is grief still sleeping, is joy not sighing
Outside?
THE WAY OF THE WIND
The wind’s way in the deep sky’s hollow
None may measure, as none can say
How the heart in her shows the swallow
The wind’s way.
Hope nor fear can avail to stay
Waves that whiten on wrecks that wallow,
Times and seasons that wane and slay.
Life and love, till the strong night swallow
Thought and hope and the red last ray,
Swim the waters of years that follow
The wind’s way.
HAD I WIST
Had I wist, when life was like a warm wind playing
Light and loud through sundawn and the dew’s bright trust,
How the time should come for hearts to sigh in saying
’Had I wist’ -
Surely not the roses, laughing as they kissed,
Not the lovelier laugh of seas in sunshine swaying,
Should have lured my soul to look thereon and list.
Now the wind is like a soul cast out and praying
Vainly, prayers that pierce not ears when hearts resist:
Now mine own soul sighs, adrift as wind and straying,
’Had I wist.’
RECOLLECTIONS
I.
Years upon years, as a course of clouds that thicken
Thronging the ways of the wind that shifts and veers,
Pass, and the flames of remembered fires requicken
Years upon years.
Surely the thought in a man’s heart hopes or fears
Now that forgetfulness needs must here have stricken
Anguish, and sweetened the sealed-up springs of tears.
Ah, but the strength of regrets that strain and sicken,
Yearning for love that the veil of death endears,
Slackens not wing for the wings of years that quicken -
Years upon years.
II.
Years upon years, and the flame of love’s high altar
Trembles and sinks, and the sense of listening ears
Heeds not the sound that it heard of love’s blithe psalter
Years upon years.
Only the sense of a heart that hearkens hears,
Louder than dreams that assail and doubts that palter,
Sorrow that slept and that wakes ere sundawn peers.
Wakes, that the heart may behold, and yet not falter,
Faces of children as stars unknown of, spheres
Seen but of love, that endures though all things alter,
Years upon years.
III.
Years upon years, as a watch by night that passes,
Pass, and the light of their eyes is fire that sears
Slowly the hopes of the fruit that life amasses
Years upon years.
Pale as the glimmer of stars on moorland meres
Lighten the shadows reverberate from the glasses
Held in their hands as they pass among their peers.
Lights that are shadows, as ghosts on graveyard grasses,
Moving on paths that the moon of memory cheers,
Shew but as mists over cloudy mountain passes
Years upon years.
TIME AND LIFE
I.
Time, thy name is sorrow, says the stricken
Heart of life, laid waste with wasting flame
Ere the change of things and thoughts requicken,
Time, thy name.
Girt about with shadow, blind and lame,
Ghosts of things that smite and thoughts that sicken
Hunt and hound thee down to death and shame.
Eyes of hours whose paces halt or quicken
Read in bloodred lines of loss and blame,
Writ where cloud and darkness round it thicken,
Time, thy name.
II.
Nay, but rest is born of me for healing,
- So might haply time, with voice represt,
Speak: is grief the last gift of my dealing?
Nay, but rest.
All the world is wearied, east and west,
Tired with toil to watch the slow sun wheeling,
Twelve loud hours of life’s laborious quest.
Eyes forspent with vigil, faint and reeling,
Find at last my comfort, and are blest,
Not with rapturous light of life’s revealing -
Nay, but rest.
A DIALOGUE
I.
Death, if thou wilt, fain would I plead with thee:
Canst thou not spare, of all our hopes have built,
One shelter where our spirits fain would be,
Death, if thou wilt?
No dome with suns and dews impearled and gilt,
Imperial: but some roof of wildwood tree,
Too mean for sceptre’s heft or swordblade’s hilt.
Some low sweet roof where love might live, set free
From change and fear and dreams of grief or guilt;
Canst thou not leave life even thus much to see,
Death, if thou wilt?
II.
Man, what art thou to speak and plead with me?
What knowest thou of my workings, where and how
What things I fashion? Nay, behold and see,
Man, what art thou?
Thy fruits of life, and blossoms of thy bough,
What are they but my seedlings? Earth and sea
Bear nought but when I breathe on it must bow.
Bow thou too down before me: though thou be
Great, all the pride shall fade from off thy brow,
When Time and strong Oblivion ask of thee,
Man, what art thou?
III.
Death, if thou be or be not, as was said,
Immortal; if thou make us nought, or we
Survive: thy power is made but of our dread,
Death, if thou be.
Thy might is made out of our fear of thee:
Who fears thee not, hath plucked from off thine head
The crown of cloud that darkens earth and sea.
Earth, sea, and sky, as rain or vapour shed,
Shall vanish; all the shows of them shall flee:
Then shall we know full surely, quick or dead,
Death, if thou be.
PLUS ULTRA
Far beyond the sunrise and the sunset rises
Heaven, with worlds on worlds that lighten and respond:
Thought can see not thence the goal of hope’s surmises
Far beyond.
Night and day have made an everlasting bond
Each with each to hide in yet more deep disguises
Truth, till souls of men that thirst for truth despond.
All that man in pride of spirit slights or prizes,
All the dreams that make him fearful, fain, or fond,
Fade at forethought’s touch of life’s unknown surprises
Far beyond.
A DEAD FRIEND
I.
Gone, O gentle heart and true,
Friend of hopes foregone,
Hopes and hopeful days with you
Gone?
Days of old that shone
Saw what none shall see anew,
When we gazed thereon.
Soul as clear as sunlit dew,
Why so soon pass on,
Forth from all we loved and knew
Gone?
II.
Friend of many a season fled,
What may sorrow send
Toward thee now from lips that said
’Friend’?
Sighs and songs to blend
Praise with pain uncomforted
Though the praise ascend?
Darkness hides no dearer head:
Why should darkness end
Day so soon, O dear and dead
Friend?
III.
Dear in death, thou hast thy part
Delphi Complete Poetical Works of Algernon Charles Swinburne (Illustrated) (Delphi Poets Series) Page 119