Delphi Complete Poetical Works of Algernon Charles Swinburne (Illustrated) (Delphi Poets Series)
Page 148
Where the scalps were masked with dung more deep than mire,
Saw not, where the filth was foulest, and the night
Darkest, depths whose fiends could match the Muscovite.
Set beside this truth, his deadliest vision seems
Pale and pure and painless as a virgin’s dreams.
Maidens dead beneath the clasping lash, and wives
Rent with deadlier pangs than death — for shame survives,
Naked, mad, starved, scourged, spurned, frozen, fallen, deflowered,
Souls and bodies as by fangs of beasts devoured,
Sounds that hell would hear not, sights no thought could shape,
Limbs that feel as flame the ravenous grasp of rape,
Filth of raging crime and shame that crime enjoys,
Age made one with youth in torture, girls with boys,
These, and worse if aught be worse than these things are,
Prove thee regent, Russia — praise thy mercy, Czar.
II
Sons of man, men born of women, may we dare
Say they sin who dare be slain and dare not spare?
They who take their lives in hand and smile on death,
Holding life as less than sleep’s most fitful breath,
So their life perchance or death may serve and speed
Faith and hope, that die if dream become not deed?
Nought is death and nought is life and nought is fate
Save for souls that love has clothed with fire of hate.
These behold them, weigh them, prove them, find them nought,
Save by light of hope and fire of burning thought.
What though sun be less than storm where these aspire,
Dawn than lightning, song than thunder, light than fire?
Help is none in heaven: hope sees no gentler star:
Earth is hell, and hell bows down before the Czar.
All its monstrous, murderous, lecherous births acclaim
Him whose empire lives to match its fiery fame.
Nay, perchance at sight or sense of deeds here done,
Here where men may lift up eyes to greet the sun,
Hell recoils heart-stricken: horror worse than hell
Darkens earth and sickens heaven; life knows the spell,
Shudders, quails, and sinks — or, filled with fierier breath,
Rises red in arms devised of darkling death.
Pity mad with passion, anguish mad with shame,
Call aloud on justice by her darker name;
Love grows hate for love’s sake; life takes death for guide.
Night hath none but one red star — Tyrannicide.
III
“God or man, be swift; hope sickens with delay:
Smite, and send him howling down his father’s way!
Fall, O fire of heaven, and smite as fire from hell
Halls wherein men’s torturers, crowned and cowering, dwell!
These that crouch and shrink and shudder, girt with power —
These that reign, and dare not trust one trembling hour —
These omnipotent, whom terror curbs and drives —
These whose life reflects in fear their victims’ lives —
These whose breath sheds poison worse than plague’s thick breath —
These whose reign is ruin, these whose word is death,
These whose will turns heaven to hell, and day to night,
These, if God’s hand smite not, how shall man’s not smite?”
So from hearts by horror withered as by fire
Surge the strains of unappeasable desire;
Sounds that bid the darkness lighten, lit for death;
Bid the lips whose breath was doom yield up their breath;
Down the way of Czars, awhile in vain deferred,
Bid the Second Alexander light the Third.
How for shame shall men rebuke them? how may we
Blame, whose fathers died, and slew, to leave us free?
We, though all the world cry out upon them, know,
Were our strife as theirs, we could not strike but so;
Could not cower, and could not kiss the hands that smite;
Could not meet them armed in sunlit battle’s light.
Dark as fear and red as hate though morning rise,
Life it is that conquers; death it is that dies.
FOR GREECE AND CRETE
Storm and shame and fraud and darkness fill the nations full with night:
Hope and fear whose eyes yearn eastward have but fire and sword in sight:
One alone, whose name is one with glory, sees and seeks the light.
Hellas, mother of the spirit, sole supreme in war and peace,
Land of light, whose word remembered bids all fear and sorrow cease,
Lives again, while freedom lightens eastward yet for sons of
Greece.
Greece, where only men whose manhood was as godhead ever trod,
Bears the blind world witness yet of light wherewith her feet are shod:
Freedom, armed of Greece was always very man and very God.
Now the winds of old that filled her sails with triumph, when the fleet
Bound for death from Asia fled before them stricken, wake to greet
Ships full-winged again for freedom toward the sacred shores of
Crete.
There was God born man, the song that spake of old time said: and there
Man, made even as God by trust that shows him nought too dire to dare,
Now may light again the beacon lit when those we worship were.
Sharp the concert wrought of discord shrills the tune of shame and death,
Turk by Christian fenced and fostered, Mecca backed by Nazareth:
All the powerless powers, tongue-valiant, breathe but greed’s or terror’s breath.
Though the tide that feels the west wind lift it wave by widening wave
Wax not yet to height and fullness of the storm that smites to save,
None shall bid the flood back seaward till no bar be left to brave.
DELPHIC HYMN TO APOLLO
(B.C. 280)
DONE INTO ENGLISH
I
Thee, the son of God most high,
Famed for harping song, will I
Proclaim, and the deathless oracular word
From the snow-topped rock that we gaze on heard,
Counsels of thy glorious giving
Manifest for all men living,
How thou madest the tripod of prophecy thine
Which the wrath of the dragon kept guard on, a shrine
Voiceless till thy shafts could smite
All his live coiled glittering might.
II
Ye that hold of right alone
All deep woods on Helicon,
Fair daughters of thunder-girt God, with your bright
White arms uplift as to lighten the light,
Come to chant your brother’s praise,
Gold-haired Phoebus, loud in lays,
Even his, who afar up the twin-topped seat
Of the rock Parnassian whereon we meet
Risen with glorious Delphic maids
Seeks the soft spring-sweetened shades
Castalian, fain of the Delphian peak
Prophetic, sublime as the feet that seek.
Glorious Athens, highest of state,
Come, with praise and prayer elate,
O thou that art queen of the plain unscarred
That the warrior Tritonid hath alway in guard,
Where on many a sacred shrine
Young bulls’ thigh-bones burn and shine
As the god that is fire overtakes them, and fast
The smoke of Arabia to heavenward is cast,
Scattering wide its balm: and shrill
Now with nimble notes that thrill
The flute strikes up for the song, and the harp of gold
Strikes up to the song sweet answer: and a
ll behold,
All, aswarm as bees, give ear,
Who by birth hold Athens dear.
A NEW CENTURY
An age too great for thought of ours to scan,
A wave upon the sleepless sea of time
That sinks and sleeps for ever, ere the chime
Pass that salutes with blessing, not with ban,
The dark year dead, the bright year born for man,
Dies: all its days that watched man cower and climb,
Frail as the foam, and as the sun sublime,
Sleep sound as they that slept ere these began.
Our mother earth, whose ages none may tell,
Puts on no change: time bids not her wax pale
Or kindle, quenched or quickened, when the knell
Sounds, and we cry across the veering gale
Farewell — and midnight answers us, Farewell;
Hail — and the heaven of morning answers, Hail.
AN EVENING AT VICHY
SEPTEMBER 1896
WRITTEN ON THE NEWS OF THE DEATH OF LORD LEIGHTON
A light has passed that never shall pass away,
A sun has set whose rays are unquelled of night.
The loyal grace, the courtesy bright as day,
The strong sweet radiant spirit of life and light
That shone and smiled and lightened on all men’s sight,
The kindly life whose tune was the tune of May,
For us now dark, for love and for fame is bright.
Nay, not for us that live as the fen-fires live,
As stars that shoot and shudder with life and die,
Can death make dark that lustre of life, or give
The grievous gift of trust in oblivion’s lie.
Days dear and far death touches, and draws them nigh,
And bids the grief that broods on their graves forgive
The day that seems to mock them as clouds that fly.
If life be life more faithful than shines on sleep
When dreams take wing and lighten and fade like flame,
Then haply death may be not a death so deep
That all things past are past for it wholly — fame,
Love, loving-kindness, seasons that went and came,
And left their light on life as a seal to keep
Winged memory fast and heedful of time’s dead claim.
Death gives back life and light to the sunless years
Whose suns long sunken set not for ever. Time,
Blind, fierce, and deaf as tempest, relents, and hears
And sees how bright the days and how sweet their chime
Rang, shone, and passed in music that matched the clime
Wherein we met rejoicing — a joy that cheers
Sorrow, to see the night as the dawn sublime.
The days that were outlighten the days that are,
And eyes now darkened shine as the stars we see
And hear not sing, impassionate star to star,
As once we heard the music that haply he
Hears, high in heaven if ever a voice may be
The same in heaven, the same as on earth, afar
From pain and earth as heaven from the heaving sea.
A woman’s voice, divine as a bird’s by dawn
Kindled and stirred to sunward, arose and held
Our souls that heard, from earth as from sleep withdrawn,
And filled with light as stars, and as stars compelled
To move by might of music, elate while quelled,
Subdued by rapture, lit as a mountain lawn
By morning whence all heaven in the sunrise welled.
And her the shadow of death as a robe clasped round
Then: and as morning’s music she passed away.
And he then with us, warrior and wanderer, crowned
With fame that shone from eastern on western day,
More strong, more kind, than praise or than grief might say,
Has passed now forth of shadow by sunlight bound,
Of night shot through with light that is frail as May.
May dies, and light grows darkness, and life grows death:
Hope fades and shrinks and falls as a changing leaf:
Remembrance, touched and kindled by love’s live breath,
Shines, and subdues the shadow of time called grief,
The shade whose length of life is as life’s date brief,
With joy that broods on the sunlight past, and saith
That thought and love hold sorrow and change in fief.
Sweet, glad, bright spirit, kind as the sun seems kind
When earth and sea rejoice in his gentler spell,
Thy face that was we see not; bereft and blind,
We see but yet, rejoicing to see, and dwell
Awhile in days that heard not the death-day’s knell,
A light so bright that scarcely may sorrow find
One old sweet word that hails thee and mourns — Farewell.
TO GEORGE FREDERICK WATTS
ON THE EIGHTIETH ANNIVERSARY OF HIS BIRTH, FEBRUARY 23, 1897
High thought and hallowed love, by faith made one,
Begat and bare the sweet strong-hearted child,
Art, nursed of Nature; earth and sea and sun
Saw Nature then more godlike as she smiled.
Life smiled on death, and death on life: the Soul
Between them shone, and soared above their strife,
And left on Time’s unclosed and starry scroll
A sign that quickened death to deathless life.
Peace rose like Hope, a patient queen, and bade
Hell’s firstborn, Faith, abjure her creed and die;
And Love, by life and death made sad and glad,
Gave Conscience ease, and watched Good Will pass by.
All these make music now of one man’s name,
Whose life and age are one with love and fame.
ON THE DEATH OF MRS. LYNN LINTON
Kind, wise, and true as truth’s own heart,
A soul that here
Chose and held fast the better part
And cast out fear,
Has left us ere we dreamed of death
For life so strong,
Clear as the sundawn’s light and breath,
And sweet as song.
We see no more what here awhile
Shed light on men:
Has Landor seen that brave bright smile
Alive again?
If death and life and love be one
And hope no lie
And night no stronger than the sun,
These cannot die.
The father-spirit whence her soul
Took strength, and gave
Back love, is perfect yet and whole,
As hope might crave.
His word is living light and fire:
And hers shall live
By grace of all good gifts the sire
Gave power to give.
The sire and daughter, twain and one
In quest and goal,
Stand face to face beyond the sun,
And soul to soul.
Not we, who loved them well, may dream
What joy sublime
Is theirs, if dawn through darkness gleam,
And life through time.
Time seems but here the mask of death,
That falls and shows
A void where hope may draw not breath:
Night only knows.
Love knows not: all that love may keep
Glad memory gives:
The spirit of the days that sleep
Still wakes and lives.
But not the spirit’s self, though song
Would lend it speech,
May touch the goal that hope might long
In vain to reach.
How dear that high true heart, how sweet
Those keen kind eyes,
Love knows, who knows how fiery fleet
Is life that flies.
If life there be that flies not, fair
The life must be
That thrills her sovereign spirit there
And sets it free.
IN MEMORY OF AURELIO SAFFI
Beloved above all nations, land adored,
Sovereign in spirit and charm, by song and sword,
Sovereign whose life is love, whose name is light,
Italia, queen that hast the sun for lord,
Bride that hast heaven for bridegroom, how should night
Veil or withhold from faith’s and memory’s sight
A man beloved and crowned of thee and fame,
Hide for an hour his name’s memorial might?
Thy sons may never speak or hear the name
Saffi, and feel not love’s regenerate flame
Thrill all the quickening heart with faith and pride
In one whose life makes death and life the same.
They die indeed whose souls before them died:
Not he, for whom death flung life’s portal wide,
Who stands where Dante’s soul in vision came,
In Dante’s presence, by Mazzini’s side.
March 26, 1896.
CARNOT
Death, winged with fire of hate from deathless hell
Wherein the souls of anarchs hiss and die,
With stroke as dire has cloven a heart as high
As twice beyond the wide sea’s westward swell
The living lust of death had power to quell
Through ministry of murderous hands whereby
Dark fate bade Lincoln’s head and Garfield’s lie
Low even as his who bids his France farewell.
France, now no heart that would not weep with thee
Loved ever faith or freedom. From thy hand
The staff of state is broken: hope, unmanned
With anguish, doubts if freedom’s self be free.