Delphi Complete Poetical Works of Algernon Charles Swinburne (Illustrated) (Delphi Poets Series)
Page 165
Lightly could leave in the light wind’s care
Were all thoughts dead of the dead life there.
But if some note of its old glad sound
In your ear should ring as a dream’s rebound,
As a song, that sleep in his ear keeps yet,
Tho’ the senses and soul rewaking forget.
To none so fitly the sprays I send
Could come as at hail of the hand of a friend.
1878.
SAIREY GAMP’S ROUNDEL
A BABY’S thumb, the little duck’s,
Is fitter food than crust or crumb,
In baby’s mouth when baby sucks
A baby’s thumb.
It gives delight to all and some
Who wish the child the best of lucks
That ever to a child may come.
Its mien is pleasanter than Puck’s,
Its air triumphant, placid, dumb,
Benignant, bland, when baby sucks
A baby’s thumb.
Note. — In sending this roundel to his sister Isabel, on the 19th of February, 1883, Swinburne accompanied it with a note, of which only a fragment is preserved: —
“MY DEAREST ABBA,
“The preceding burst of lyric song, in Sairey’s very
best handwriting, was composed by that lady a day or two
ago while dredging, and wrote down faithful before break-
fast; which she do hope it may give satigefaction to Mrs.
Harris — whose’Eavenly dispogicion is well-beknown — and
her family circle.”
TO A LEEDS POET
(J. W. INCHBOLD)
IF far beyond the shadow of the sleep
A place there be for souls without a stain;
Where peace is perfect and delight more deep
Than seas or skies that change and shine again,
There, none of all unsullied souls that live
May hold a surer station, none may lend
More light to Hope or Memory’s lamp, nor give
More joys than Thine to those that called
Thee Friend.
SONNET: HIGH THOUGHT AND HALLOWED LOVE, BY FAITH MADE
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 first-born 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.
AEOLUS
LORD of days and nights that hear thy word of
wintry warning,
Wind, whose feet are set on ways that none
may tread,
Change the nest wherein thy wings are fledged
for flight by morning,
Change the harbour whence at dawn thy sails
are spread.
Not the dawn, ere yet the imprisoning night has
half released her,
More desires the sun’s full face of cheer, than
we,
Well as yet we love the strength of the iron-
tongued north-easter,
Yearn for wind to meet us as we front the sea.
All thy ways are good, O wind, and all the world
should fester,
Were thy fourfold godhead quenched, or
stilled thy strife:
Yet the waves and we desire too long the deep
south-wester,
Whence the waters quicken shoreward,
clothed with life.
Yet the field not made for ploughing save of
keels nor harrowing
Save of storm-winds lies unbrightened by thy
breath:
Banded broad with ruddy samphire glow the
seabanks narrowing
Westward, while the sea gleams chill and still
as death.
Sharp and strange from inland sounds thy bit-
ter note of battle,
Blown between grim skies and waters sullen-
souled,
Till the baffled seas bear back, rocks roar and
shingles rattle,
Vexed and angered and anhungered and
acold.
Change thy note, and give the waves their will,
and all the measure,
Full and perfect, of the music of their might,
Let it fill the bays with thunderous notes and
throbs of pleasure,
Shake the shores with passion, sound at once
and smite.
Sweet are even the mild low notes of wind and
sea, but sweeter
Sounds the song whose choral wrath or raging.
rhyme
Bids the shelving shoals keep tune with storm’s
imperious metre,
Bids the rocks and reefs respond in rapturous
chime.
Sweet the lisp and lulling whisper and luxurious
laughter,
Soft as love or sleep, of waves whereon the sun
Dreams, and dreams not of the darkling hours
before nor after,
Winged with cloud whose wrath shall bid
lore’s day be done.
Yet shall darkness bring the awakening sea a
lordlier lover,
Clothed with strength more amorous and
more strenuous will,
Whence her heart of hearts shall kindle and her
soul recover
Sense of love too keen to lie for love’s sake
still.
Let thy strong south-western music sound, and
bid the billows
Brighten, proud and glad to feel thy scourge
and kiss
Sting and soothe and sway them, bowed as aspens
bend or willows,
Yet resurgent still in breathless rage of bliss.
All to-day the slow sleek ripples hardly bear up
shoreward,
Charged with sighs more light than laughter,
faint and fair,
Like a woodland lake’s weak wavelets lightly
lingering forward,
Soft and listless as the slumber-stricken air.
Be the sunshine bared or veiled, the sky superb
or shrouded,
Still the waters, lax and languid, chafed and
foiled,
Keen and thwarted, pale and patient, clothed
with fire or clouded,
Vex their heart in vain, or sleep like serpents
coiled.
Thee they look for, blind and baffled, wan with
wrath and weary,
Blown for ever back by winds that rock the
bird:
Winds that seamews breast subdue the sea, and
bid the dreary
Waves be weak as hearts made sick with hope
deferred.
Let thy clarion sound from westward, let the
south bear token
How the glories of thy godhead sound and
shine:
Bid the land rejoice to see the land-wind’s broad
wings broken,
Bid the sea take comfort, bid the world be
thine.
Half the world abhors thee beating back the sea,
and blackening
Heaven with fierce and woful change of fluc-
tuant form:
All the world acclai
ms the shifting sail again,
and slackening
Cloud by cloud the close-reefed cordage of
the storm.
Sweeter fields and brighter woods and lordlier
hills than waken
Here at sunrise never hailed the sun and thee:
Turn thee then, and give them comfort, shed
like rain and shaken
Far a foam that laughs and leaps along the
sea.
TO JAMES McNEIL WHISTLER
FLY away, butterfly, back to Japan,
Tempt not a pinch at the hand of a man,
And strive not to sting ere you die away.
So pert and so painted, so proud and so pretty,
To brush the bright down from your wings were
a pity —
Fly away, butterfly, fly away!
1888.
THE BALLADE OF TRUTHFUL
CHARLES
CHARLES STUART, the crownless king whose
hand
Sways Erin’s sceptre, — so they sing,
The bards of holy Liarland —
Can give his tongue such scope and swing,
So smooth of speech, so sure of sting,
That all who feel its touch must dread it:
But now we hear it witnessing —
“I meant to cheat you when I said it.”
Base England felt his vocal brand
Bum on her blushless brow, and cling
Like fire: though grave and calm and bland.
His voice could touch so deep a string,
That souls more pure than flowers in spring
Were moved to follow where he led; it
Rang out so true: we hear it ring —
“I meant to cheat you when I said it.”
Convinced, appalled, confused, unmanned,
We see, splashed black with mud they fling,
Parnells and Pigotts lie or stand;
We see their faith, how pure a thing,
Their cause, how past all challenging;
We read their creed, as Gladsniff read it
And worshipped. Then a word takes wing —
“I meant to cheat you when I said it.”
PRINCE of pure patriots, “blameless king,”
Is this conducive to your credit?
No shift, no plea but this to bring?
“I meant to cheat you when I said it.”
NEW YEAR’S EVE, 1889
The date of the funeral of Robert Browning
ALL the west, whereon the sunset sealed the dead
year’s glorious grave
Fast with seals of light and fire and cloud
that light and fire illume,
Glows at heart and kindles earth and heaven
with joyous blush and bloom
Warm and wide as life, and glad of death which
only slays to save.
As a tide-reconquered sea-rock lies aflush with
the influent wave,
Lies the light aflush with darkness, lapped
about with lustrous gloom,
Even as life with death, and time with fame,
and memory with the tomb
Where a dead man hath for vassals Fame the
serf and Time the slave.
Far from earth as heaven, the steadfast light
withdrawn, superb, suspense,
Burns in dumb divine expansion of illimitable
flower:
Moonrise whets the shadows’ edges keen as noon-
tide: hence and thence
Glows the presence from us passing, shines
and passes not the power.
Souls arise whose word remembered is as spirit
within the sense:
All the hours are theirs of all the seasons:
death has but his hour.
THE CENTENARY OF SHELLEY
Now a hundred years agone among us came
Down from some diviner sphere of purer flame,
Clothed in flesh to suffer, maimed of wings to
soar,
One whom hate once hailed as now love hails
by name,
Chosen of love as chosen of hatred. Now no
more
Ear of man may hear or heart of man deplore
Aught of dissonance or doubt that mars the
strain
Raised at last of love where love sat mute of
yore.
Fame is less than love, and loss is more than
gain,
When the sweetest souls and strongest, fallen in
fight,
Slain and stricken as it seemed in base men’s
sight,
Rise and lighten on the graves of foeman slain,
Clothed about with love of all men as with light,
Suns that set not, stars that know not day from
night
1892.
THE CONCERT OF EUROPE
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.
March 1st, 1897.
MEMORIAL ODE ON THE
DEATH OF LECONTE DE LISLE
On the first of June 1885, the greatest poet of the nine- teenth century was borne to his rest amid the lamentations and the applause of his countrymen, and of all to whom either the example of a noble life or the triumph of a genius inaccessible and unapproachable seemed worthy of honour and regard. Many earnest and cordial and admirable words of tribute and thanksgiving and farewell were uttered over the hearse of Victor Hugo; none more memorable than those in which a great poet became the spokesman of all his kind in honour of the greatest of them all. Short and simple as was the speech of M. Leconte de Lisle, none of the longer and more elaborate orations was more genuinely eloquent, more seriously valuable, than the admirably terse and apt expression of gratitude and reverence with which he bade “farewell and hail” in the name of all surviving poets to their beloved and beneficent master. Nor could a fitter and a worthier spokesman have been imagined or desired by the most exacting or die most ambitious devotion or design. — A.C.S.
I
BESIDE the lordliest grave in all the world,
A singer crowned with golden years and fame
Spake words more sweet than wreaths of incense
curled,
That bade an elder yet and mightier name
Hail, for whose love the wings of time were
furled,
And death that heard it died of deadlier
shame.
Our father and lord of all the sons of song,
Hugo, supreme on earth, had risen above
Earth, as the sun soars noonward: grief and
wrong
Had yielded up their part in him to love;
And one man’s word came forth upon the throng
Brief as the brooding music of the dove.
And he now too, the praiser as the praised,
Being silent, speaks for ever. He, whose word
Reverberate made the gloom whereon he gazed
Radiant with sound whose song in his we
heard,
Stands far from us as they whose souls he raised
Again, and darkness carolled like a bird.
II
Golden eastern waters rocked the cradle where
he slept
Songless, crowned with bays to be of sovereign
song,
Breathed upon with balm and calm of bounteous
seas th
at kept
Secret all the blessing of his birthright, strong,
Soft, severe, and sweet as dawn when first it
laughed and leapt
Forth of heaven, and clove the clouds that
wrought it wrong.
Calm and proud and patient even as light that
bides its hour
All night long till night wax weary, shone
the soul
Crowned and girt with light, sublime in peace
and sure in power,
Sunlike, over tidal years and changes; whole,
Full, serene, superb as time that kindles fruit
from flower,
Lord alike of waves that rest and waves that
roll.
Sunlight round the soft Virgilian meads where
sunbeams sleep
Lulled not overlong a spirit of strength to
strive
Right against the winds that stormier times
heard strain and sweep
Round the rocks whereon man crucified alive
Man, and bade the soul of manhood cower and
chant and weep,
Strong in vain to soar and seek, to delve and
dive.
III
Time and change and death made music as of
life and strife and doom
When his lyric spell bade ope the graves of
ages dead as dust
Cain, a shadow like a sunrise clad in fire whose
light was gloom,
Towered above the deepening deluge, crying
on justice held unjust,
Whence his giant sons should find the world
their throne become their tomb,
And a wider world of waters hide the strong-
holds of their trust
Soiled with desert sand and lit with fire of wrath
from heaven, the seer
Spake for Naboth slain the sentence of the
judgment of the Lord:
Age on ruining age and year as rolling thunder
crashed on year
Down the measures of the mighty song that
glittered like a sword:
Truth and legend strange and fierce as truth or
dreams of faith and fear
Made their lightnings one to crown it, flashed