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

by Algernon Charles Swinburne

  As the hills — that I might have been thinking, perhaps, of a poem by Arnold

  When I sang how Ulysses — Odysseus I mean — would have yearned to dishevel her

  Bright hair with his kisses, and painted myself at her feet — a Strayed

  Reveller.

  As for poets who go on a contrary tack to what I go and you go —

  You remember my lyrics translated — like “sweet bully Bottom” — from Hugo?

  Though I will say it’s curious that simply on just that account there should be

  Men so bold as to say that not one of my poems was written by me.

  It would stir the political bile or the physical spleen of a drab or a Tory

  To hear critics disputing my claim to Empedocles, Maud, and the Laboratory.

  Yes, it’s singular — nay, I can’t think of a parallel (ain’t it a high lark?

  As that Countess would say) — there are few men believe it was I wrote the

  Ode to a Skylark.

  And it often has given myself and Lord Albert no end of diversion

  To hear fellows maintain to my face it was Wordsworth who wrote the

  Excursion,

  When they know that whole reams of the verses recur in my authorized works

  Here and there, up and down! Why, such readers are infidels — heretics —

  Turks.

  And the pitiful critics who think in their paltry presumption to pay me a

  Pretty compliment, pairing me off, sir, with Keats — as if he could write Lamia!

  While I never produced a more characteristic and exquisite book,

  One that gave me more real satisfaction, than did, on the whole, Lalla

  Rookh.

  Was it there that I called on all debtors, being pestered myself by a creditor, (he

  Isn’t paid yet) to rise, by the proud appellation of bondsmen — hereditary?

  Yes — I think so. And yet, on my word, I can’t think why I think it was so.

  It more probably was in the poem I made a few seasons ago

  On that Duchess — her name now? ah, thus one outlives a whole cycle of joys!

  Fair supplants black and brown succeeds golden. The poem made rather a noise.

  And indeed I have seen worse verses; but as for the woman, my friend —

  Though his neck had been never so stiff, she’d have made a philosopher bend.

  As the broken heart of a sunset that bleeds pure purple and gold

  In the shudder and swoon of the sickness of colour, the agonies old

  That engirdle the brows of the day when he sinks with a spasm into rest

  And the splash of his kingly blood is dashed on the skirts of the west,

  Even such was my own, when I felt how much sharper than any snake’s tooth

  Was the passion that made me mistake Lady Eve for her niece Lady Ruth.

  The whole world, colourless, lapsed. Earth fled from my feet like a dream,

  And the whirl of the walls of Space was about me, and moved as a stream

  Flowing and ebbing and flowing all night to a weary tune

  (“Such as that of my verses”? Get out!) in the face of a sick-souled moon.

  The keen stars kindled and faded and fled, and the wind in my ears

  Was the wail of a poet for failure — you needn’t come snivelling tears

  And spoiling the mixture, confound you, with dropping your tears into that!

  I know I’m pathetic — I must be — and you soft-hearted and fat,

  And I’m grateful of course for your kindness — there, don’t come hugging me, now —

  But because a fellow’s pathetic, you needn’t low like a cow.

  I should like — on my soul, I should like — to remember — but somehow I can’t —

  If the lady whose love has reduced me to this was the niece or the aunt.

  But whichever it was, I feel sure, when I published my lays of last year

  (You remember their title — The Tramp — only seven-and-sixpence — not dear),

  I sent her a copy (perhaps her tears fell on the title-page — yes —

  I should like to imagine she wept) — and the Bride of Bulgaria (MS.)

  I forwarded with it. The lyrics, no doubt, she found bitter — and sweet;

  But the Bride she rejected, you know, with expressions I will not repeat.

  Well — she did no more than all publishers did. Though my prospects were marred,

  I can pity and pardon them. Blindness, mere blindness! And yet it was hard.

  For a poet, Bill, is a blossom — a bird — a billow — a breeze —

  A kind of creature that moves among men as a wind among trees.

  And a bard who is also the pet of patricians and dowagers doubly can

  Express his contempt for canaille in his fables where beasts are republican.

  Yet with all my disdainful forgiveness for men so deficient in ton

  I cannot but feel it was cruel — I cannot but think it was wrong.

  I with the heat of my heart still burning against all bars

  As the fire of the dawn, so to speak, in the blanched blank brows of the stars —

  I with my tremulous lips made pale by musical breath —

  I with the shade in my eyes that was left by the kisses of Death —

  (For Death came near me in youth, and touched my face with his face,

  And put in my lips the songs that belong to a desolate place —

  Desolate truly, my heart and my lips, till her kiss filled them up!)

  I with my soul like wine poured out with my flesh for the cup —

  It was hard for me — it was hard — Bill, Bill, you great owl, was it not?

  For the day creeps in like a Fate: and I think my grand passion is rot:

  And I dreamily seem to perceive, by the light of a life’s dream done,

  The lotion at six, and the mixture at ten, and the draught before one.

  Yes — I feel rather better. Man’s life is a mull, at the best;

  And the patent perturbator pills are like bullets of lead in my chest.

  When a man’s whole spirit is like the lost Pleiad, a blown-out star,

  Is there comfort in Holloway, Bill? is there hope of salvation in Parr?

  True, most things work to their end — and an end that the shroud overlaps.

  Under lace, under silk, under gold, sir, the skirt of a winding-sheet flaps —

  Which explains, if you think of it, Bill, why I can’t, though my soul thereon broodeth,

  Quite make out if I loved Lady Tamar as much as I loved Lady Judith.

  Yet her dress was of violet velvet, her hair was hyacinth-hued,

  And her ankles — no matter. A face where the music of every mood

  Was touched by the tremulous fingers of passionate feeling, and made

  Strange melodies, scornful, but sweeter than strings whereon sorrow has played

  To enrapture the hearing of mirth when his garland of blossom and green

  Turns to lead on the anguished forehead— “you don’t understand what I mean”?

  Well, of course I knew you were stupid — you always were stupid at school —

  Now don’t say you weren’t — but I’m hanged if I thought you were quite such a fool!

  You don’t see the point of all this? I was talking of sickness and death —

  In that poem I made years ago, I said this— “Love, the flower-time whose breath

  Smells sweet through a summer of kisses and perfumes an autumn of tears

  Is sadder at root than a winter — its hopes heavy-hearted like fears.

  Though I love your Grace more than I love little Letty, the maid of the mill,

  Yet the heat of your lips when I kiss them” (you see we were intimate,

  Bill)

  “And the beat of the delicate blood in your eyelids of azure and white

  Leave the taste of the grave in my mouth and the shadow of death on my sight. />
  Fill the cup — twine the chaplet — come into the garden — get out of the house —

  Drink to me with your eyes — there’s a banquet behind, where worms only carouse!

  As I said to sweet Katie, who lived by the brook on the land Philip farmed —

  Worms shall graze where my kisses found pasture!” The Duchess, I may say, was charmed.

  It was read to the Duke, and he cried like a child. If you’ll give me a pill,

  I’ll go on till past midnight. That poem was said to be — Somebody’s, Bill.

  But you see you can always be sure of my hand as the mother that bore me

  By the fact that I never write verse which has never been written before me.

  Other poets — I blush for them, Bill — may adore and repudiate in turn a

  Libitina, perhaps, or Pandemos; my Venus, you know, is Laverna.

  Nay, that epic of mine which begins from foundations the Bible is built on —

  “Of man’s first disobedience” — I’ve heard it attributed, dammy, to

  Milton.

  Well, it’s lucky for them that it’s not worth my while, as I may say, to break spears

  With the hirelings, forsooth, of the press who assert that Othello was

  Shakespeare’s.

  When he that can run, sir, may read — if he borrows the book, or goes on tick —

  In my poems the bit that describes how the Hellespont joins the Propontic.

  There are men, I believe, who will tell you that Gray wrote the whole of The Bard —

  Or that I didn’t write half the Elegy, Bill, in a Country Churchyard.

  When you know that my poem, The Poet, begins— “Ruin seize thee!” and ends

  With recapitulations of horrors the poet invokes on his friends.

  And I’ll swear, if you look at the dirge on my relatives under the turf, you

  Will perceive it winds up with some lines on myself — and begins with the curfew.

  Now you’ll grant it’s more probable, Bill — as a man of the world, if you please —

  That all these should have prigged from myself than that I should have prigged from all these.

  I could cry when I think of it, friend, if such tears would comport with my dignity,

  That the author of Christabel ever should smart from such vulgar malignity.

  (You remember perhaps that was one of the first little things that I carolled

  After finishing Marmion, the Princess, the Song of the Shirt, and

  Childe Harold.)

  Oh, doubtless it always has been so — Ah, doubtless it always will be —

  There are men who would say that myself is a different person from me.

  Better the porridge of patience a poor man snuffs in his plate

  Than the water of poisonous laurels distilled by the fingers of hate.

  ’Tis a dark-purple sort of a moonlighted kind of a midnight, I know;

  You remember those verses I wrote on Irene, from Edgar A. Poe?

  It was Lady Aholibah Levison, daughter of old Lord St. Giles,

  Who inspired those delectable strains, and rewarded her bard with her smiles.

  There are tasters who’ve sipped of Castalia, who don’t look on my brew as the brew:

  There are fools who can’t think why the names of my heroines of title should always be Hebrew.

  ’Twas my comrade, Sir Alister Knox, said, “Noo, dinna ye fash wi’

  Apollo, mon;

  Gang to Jewry for wives and for concubines, lad — look at David and

  Solomon.

  And it gives an erotico-scriptural twang,” said that high-born young man, “ — tickles

  The lug” (he meant ear) “of the reader — to throw in a touch of the

  Canticles.”

  So I versified half of The Preacher — it took me a week, working slowly.

  Bah!

  You don’t half know the sex, Bill — they like it. And what if her name was Aholibah?

  I recited her charms, in conjunction with those of a girl at the café,

  In a poem I published in collaboration with Templeton (Taffy).

  There are prudes in a world full of envy — and some of them thought it too strong

  To compare an earl’s daughter by name with a girl at a French restaurant.

  I regarded her, though, with the chivalrous eyes of a knight-errant on quest;

  I may say I don’t know that I ever felt prouder, old friend, of a conquest.

  And when I’ve been made happy, I never have cared a brass farthing who knew it; I

  Thank my stars I’m as free from mock-modesty, friend, as from vulgar fatuity.

  I can’t say if my spirit retains — for the subject appears to me misty — any tie

  To such associations as Poesy weaves round the records of Christianity.

  There are bards — I may be one myself — who delight in their skill to unlock a lip’s

  Rosy secrets by kisses and whispers of texts from the charming Apocalypse.

  It was thus that I won, by such biblical pills of poetical manna,

  From two elders — Sir Seth and Lord Isaac — the liking of Lady Susanna.

  But I left her — a woman to me is no more than a match, sir, at tennis is —

  When I heard she’d gone off with my valet, and burnt my rhymed version of Genesis.

  You may see by my shortness of speech that my time’s almost up: I perceive

  That my new-fangled brevity strikes you: but don’t — though the public will — grieve.

  As it’s sometimes my whim to be vulgar, it’s sometimes my whim to be brief;

  As when once I observed, after Heine, that “she was a harlot, and I” (which is true) “was a thief.”

  (Though you hardly should cite this particular line, by the way, as an instance of absolute brevity:

  I’m aware, man, of that; so you needn’t disgrace yourself, sir, by such grossly mistimed and impertinent levity.)

  I don’t like to break off, any more than you wish me to stop: but my fate is

  Not to vent half a million such rhymes without blockheads exclaiming —

  JAM SATIS.

  Specimen from the speaker’s original poems.

  Come into the orchard, Anne,

  For the dark owl, Night, has fled,

  And Phosphor slumbers, as well as he can

  With a daffodil sky for a bed:

  And the musk of the roses perplexes a man,

  And the pimpernel muddles his head.

  SONNET FOR A PICTURE

  That nose is out of drawing. With a gasp,

  She pants upon the passionate lips that ache

  With the red drain of her own mouth, and make

  A monochord of colour. Like an asp,

  One lithe lock wriggles in his rutilant grasp.

  Her bosom is an oven of myrrh, to bake

  Love’s white warm shewbread to a browner cake.

  The lock his fingers clench has burst its hasp.

  The legs are absolutely abominable.

  Ah! what keen overgust of wild-eyed woes

  Flags in that bosom, flushes in that nose?

  Nay! Death sets riddles for desire to spell,

  Responsive. What red hem earth’s passion sews,

  But may be ravenously unripped in hell?

  NEPHELIDIA

  From the depth of the dreamy decline of the dawn through a notable nimbus of nebulous noonshine,

  Pallid and pink as the palm of the flag-flower that flickers with fear of the flies as they float,

  Are they looks of our lovers that lustrously lean from a marvel of mystic miraculous moonshine,

  These that we feel in the blood of our blushes that thicken and threaten with throbs through the throat?

  Thicken and thrill as a theatre thronged at appeal of an actor’s appalled agitation,

  Fainter with fear of the fires of the future than pale with the promise of pride in the past;

  Flu
shed with the famishing fullness of fever that reddens with radiance of rathe recreation,

  Gaunt as the ghastliest of glimpses that gleam through the gloom of the gloaming when ghosts go aghast?

  Nay, for the nick of the tick of the time is a tremulous touch on the temples of terror,

  Strained as the sinews yet strenuous with strife of the dead who is dumb as the dust-heaps of death:

  Surely no soul is it, sweet as the spasm of erotic emotional exquisite error,

  Bathed in the balms of beatified bliss, beatific itself by beatitude’s breath.

  Surely no spirit or sense of a soul that was soft to the spirit and soul of our senses

  Sweetens the stress of suspiring suspicion that sobs in the semblance and sound of a sigh;

  Only this oracle opens Olympian, in mystical moods and triangular tenses —

  “Life is the lust of a lamp for the light that is dark till the dawn of the day when we die.”

  Mild is the mirk and monotonous music of memory, melodiously mute as it may be,

  While the hope in the heart of a hero is bruised by the breach of men’s rapiers, resigned to the rod;

  Made meek as a mother whose bosom-beats bound with the bliss-bringing bulk of a balm-breathing baby,

  As they grope through the grave-yard of creeds, under skies growing green at a groan for the grimness of God.

  Blank is the book of his bounty beholden of old, and its binding is blacker than bluer:

  Out of blue into black is the scheme of the skies, and their dews are the wine of the bloodshed of things;

  Till the darkling desire of delight shall be free as a fawn that is freed from the fangs that pursue her,

  Till the heart-beats of hell shall be hushed by a hymn from the hunt that has harried the kennel of kings.

  DISGUST

  A DRAMATIC MONOLOGUE.

  A woman and her husband, having been converted from free thought to Calvinism, and being utterly miserable in consequence, resolve to end themselves by poison. The man dies, but the woman is rescued by application of the stomach-pump.

  I.

  PILLS? talk to me of your pills? Well, that, I must say, is cool.

  Can’t bring my old man round? he was always a stubborn old fool.

  If I hadn’t taken precautions — a warning to all that wive —