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

by Algernon Charles Swinburne

  “I walked abroad on a sunny day;

  I wooed the soft snow with me to play.

  She played and she melted in all her prime;

  And the winter called it a dreadful crime.”

  Against the “winter” of ascetic law and moral prescription Blake never slackens in his fiery animosity; never did a bright hot wind of March make such war upon the cruel inertness of February. In his obscure way he was always hurrying into the van of some forlorn hope of ethics. Even Shelley, who as we said was no less ready to serve in the same camp all his life long, never shot keener or hotter shafts of lyrical speech into the enemy’s impregnable ground. Both poets seem to have tried about alike, and with equally questionable results, at a regular blockade of the steep central fortress of “Urizen;” both after a little personal practice fell back, not quite unscarred, upon light skirmishing and the irregular work of chance guerilla campaigns. Moral custom, “that twice-battered god of Palestine” round which all Philistia rallies (specially strong in her British brigade), seemed to suffer little from all their slings and arrows. Being mere artists, they were perhaps at root too innocent to do as much harm as they desired, or to desire as much harm as they might have done. Blake indeed never proposed to push matters quite to such a verge as the other was content to stand on during his Laon and Cythna period; from that inconceivable edge of theory or sensation he would probably have drawn back with some haste. But such sudden cries of melodious revolt as this were not rare on his part.

  “Abstinence sows sand all over

  The ruddy limbs and flaming hair,

  But desire gratified

  Plants fruits of life and beauty there.”

  Assuredly he never made a more supremely noble and enjoyable effect of verse than that; the cadence of the first two lines is something hardly to be matched anywhere: the verse (to resume our old simile for a moment) turns over and falls in with the sudden weight and luminous motion of a strong long roller coming in with the wind. So again, lying sad and sick under his marriage myrtle, even in a full rain of fragrant and brilliant blossoms that fall round him to waste, he must needs ask and answer the fatal final question.

  “Why should I be bound to thee,

  O my lovely myrtle-tree?

  Love, free love, cannot be bound

  To any tree that grows on ground.”

  Mixed with this fervour of desire for more perfect freedom, there appears at times an excess of pity (like Chaucer’s in his early poems) for the women and men living under the law, trammelled in soul or body. For example, the poem called Infant Sorrow, in the Songs of Experience, ran at first to a greater length and through stranger places than it now overflows into; and is worth giving here in its original form as extracted by cautious picking and sifting from a heap of tumbled readings.

  I.

  “My mother groaned, my father wept;

  Into the dangerous world I leapt,

  Helpless, naked, piping loud,

  Like a fiend hid in a cloud.

  II.

  Struggling in my father’s hands,

  Striving against my swaddling bands,

  Bound and weary, I thought best

  To sulk upon my mother’s breast.

  III.

  When I saw that rage was vain

  And to sulk would nothing gain,

  Twining many a trick and wile

  I began to soothe and smile.

  IV.

  And I grew day after day,

  Till upon the ground I lay;

  And I grew night after night,

  Seeking only for delight.

  V.

  And I saw before me shine

  Clusters of the wandering vine;

  And many a lovely flower and tree

  Stretched their blossoms out to me.

  VI.

  But many a priest with holy look,

  In their hands a holy book,

  Pronouncèd curses on his head

  Who the fruit or blossoms shed.

  VII.

  I beheld the priests by night;

  They embraced the blossoms bright;

  I beheld the priests by day;

  Underneath the vines they lay.

  VIII.

  Like to serpents in the night,

  They embraced my blossoms bright;

  Like to holy men by day,

  Underneath my vines they lay.

  IX.

  So I smote them, and their gore

  Stained the roots my myrtle bore;

  But the time of youth is fled,

  And grey hairs are on my head.”

  Now not even the spilt blood of those who forbid and betray shall quicken the dried root or flush the faded leaf of love; the myrtle being past all comfort of soft rain or helpful sun. So in the Rose-Tree (vol. ii. p. 60), when for the sake of a barren material fidelity to his “rose” of marriage, he has passed over the offered flower “such as May never bore,” the rose herself “turns away with jealousy,” and gives him thorns for thanks: nothing left of it for hand or lip but collapsed blossom and implacable edges of brier. Blake might have kept in mind the end of his actual wild vine (vol. i. p. 100 of the Life), which ran all to leaf and never brought a grape worth eating, for fault of pruning-hooks and vine-dressers.

  In all this there is a certain unmistakeable innocence which accounts for the practical modesty and peaceable forbearance of the man’s way of living. The material shape of his speculations never goes beyond a sort of boyish defiant complaint, a half-humorous revolt of the will. Inconstancy with him is not rooted in satiety, but in the freshness of pure pleasure; he would never cast off the old to put on the new. The chain once broken, against which between sleeping and waking he chafes and wrestles, he would lie for most hours of the day with content enough in the old shade of wedded rose or myrtle tree. Nor in leaping or reaching after the new flower would he wilfully bruise or break the least bud of the old. His desire is towards the freedom of the dawn of things — not towards the “dark secret hour” that walks under coverings of cloud.

  “Are not the joys of morning sweeter

  Than the joys of night?”

  The sinless likeness of his seeming “sins” — mere fancies as it appears they mostly were, mere soft light aspirations of theory without body or flesh on them — has something of the innocent immodesty of a birds’ or babies’ paradise — of a fools’ paradise, too, translated into the practice and language of the untheoretic world. Shelley’s “Epipsychidion” scarcely preaches a more bodiless evangel of bodily liberty. That famous and exquisitely written passage beginning, “True love in this differs from gold and clay,” delivers in more daringly definite words the exact message of Blake’s belief.

  Nowhere has the note of pity been more strongly and sweetly struck than in those lovely opening verses of the “Garden of Love,” which must here be read once again: —

  “I laid me down upon a bank

  Where Love lay sleeping:

  I heard among the rushes dank

  Weeping, weeping.

  Then I went to the heath and the wild,

  To the thistles and thorns of the waste;

  And they told me how they were beguiled,

  Driven out, and compelled to be chaste.”

  The sharp and subtle change of metre here and at the end of the poem has an audacity of beauty and a justice of impulse proper only to the leaders of lyrical verse: unfit alike for definition and for imitation, if any copyist were to try his hand at it. The next song we transcribe from the “Ideas” is lighter in tone than usual, and admirable for humorous imagination; a light of laughter shines and sounds through the words.

  THE WILL AND THE WAY.

  “I asked a thief to steal me a peach;

  He turned up his eyes;

  I asked a lithe lady to lie her down

  Holy and meek, she cries.

  As soon as I went

  An angel came;

  He winked at the thief

  A
nd smiled at the dame;

  And without one word spoke

  Had a peach from the tree;

  And ‘twixt earnest and joke

  Enjoyed the lady.”

  A much better and more solid version of the same fancy than the one given in the “Selections” under the head of “Love’s Secret;” which is rather weakly and lax in manner. Our present poem has on the other hand an exquisite “lithe” grace of limb and suppleness of step, suiting deliciously with the “light high laugh” in its tone: while for sweet and rapid daring, for angelically puerile impudence as it were, it may be matched against any song of its fantastic sort.

  Less complete in a small way, but worth taking some care of, is this carol of a fairy, emblem of a man’s light hard tyranny of will, calling upon the birds in the harness of Venus and the shafts in the hand of her son for help in setting up the kingdom of established and legal love: but caught himself in the very setting of his net.

  THE MARRIAGE RING.

  “‘Come hither, my sparrows,

  My little arrows.

  If a tear or a smile

  Will a man beguile,

  If an amorous delay

  Clouds a sunshiny day,

  If the step of a foot

  Smites the heart to its root,

  ’Tis the marriage ring

  Makes each fairy a king.’

  So a fairy sang.

  From the leaves I sprang;

  He leaped from his spray

  To flee away:

  But in my hat caught,

  He soon shall be taught,

  Let him laugh, let him cry,

  He’s my butterfly:

  For I’ve pulled out the sting

  Of the marriage ring.”

  It is not so easy to turn wasps to butterflies in the world of average things; but, as far as verses go, there are few of more supple sweetness than some of these. They recall the light lapse of measure found in the beautiful older germs of nursery rhyme; and the seeming retributive triumph of married lovers over unmarried, of wedlock over courtship, could not well be more gracefully translated than in the “Fairy’s” call to his winged and feathered “arrows” — the lover’s swift birds of prey, not without beak and claw. “If they do for a minute or so darken our days, dupe our fancies, prevail upon our nerves and blood, once well married we are kings of them at least.” Pull out that sting of jealous reflective egotism, and your tamed “fairy” — the love that is in a man once set right — has no point or poison left it, but only rapid grace of wing and natural charm of colour.

  Throughout the “Ideas” one or two other favourite points of faith and feeling are incessantly thrown out in new fugitive forms; such as the last (rejected) stanza of “Cupid,” which, though the song may well dispense with it and even gain by such a loss in the qualities of shape or sound, must be saved if only as a specimen of the persistent way in which Blake assumed the Greek and Roman habits of mind or art to be typical of “war” and restraint; an iron frame of mind good to fight in and not good for love to grow under.

  “’Twas the Greek love of war

  That turned Love into a boy

  And woman into a statue of stone;

  And away fled every joy.”

  More frequent and more delightful is the recurrence of such loving views of love as that taken in the last lines of “William Bond;” a poem full of strange and soft hints, of mist that allures and music that lulls; typical in the main of the embodied struggle between selfish and sacrificial passion, between the immediate impulse that brings at least the direct profit of delight, and the law of religious or rational submission that reaps mere loss and late regret after a life of blind prudence and sorrowful forbearance — the “black cloud” of sickness, malady of spirit and body inflicted by the church-keeping “angels of Providence” who have driven away the loving train of spirits that live by innate impulse: not the bulk of Caliban but the soul of Angelo being the deadliest direct enemy of Ariel. “Providence” divine or human, prepense moral or spiritual “foresight,” was a thing in the excellence of which our prophet of divine instinct and inspired flesh could not consistently believe. His evangel could dispense with that, in favour of such faith in good things as came naturally to him.

  “I thought Love lived in the hot sunshine,

  But oh, he lives in the moony light;

  I thought to find Love in the heat of day,

  But sweet Love is the comforter of night.

  “Seek Love in the pity of others’ woe,

  In the gentle relief of another’s care;

  In the darkness of night and the winter’s snow,

  In the naked and outcast, seek Love there.”

  The infinite and most tender beauty of such words is but one among many evidences how thoroughly and delicately the lawless fervour and passionate liberty of desire were tempered in Blake by an exquisite goodness, of sense rather than of thought, which as it were made the pain or pleasure, the well-being or the suffering, of another press naturally and sharply on his own nerves of feeling. Deeply as his thought and fancy had struck into strange paths and veins of spiritual life, he had never found or felt out any way to the debateable land where simple and tender pleasures become complex and cruel, and the roses gathered are redder at root than in leaf.

  Another poem, slight of texture and dim of feature, but full of a cloudy beauty, is The Angel: a new allegory of love, blindly rejected or blindly accepted as a thing of course; foiled and made profitless in either case: then lost, with all the sorrow it brings and all the comfort it gives: and the ways are barred against it by armed mistrust and jealousy, and its place knows it no more: but this immunity from the joys and sorrows of love is bought at the bitter price of untimely age. (I offer these somewhat verbose and wiredrawn attempts at commentary, only where the poem seems at once to require analysis and to admit such as I give; how difficult it is to make such notes clear and full, yet not to stumble into confusion or slide into prolixity, those can estimate who will try their hand at such work.)

  Frequent slips and hitches of grammar, it may be added, are common to Blake’s rough studies and finished writings, and are therefore not always things to be weeded out. Little learning and much reading of old books made him more really inaccurate than were their writers, whose apparent liberties he might perhaps have pleaded in defence of his own hardly defensible licences.

  None of these poems are worthier, for the delight they give, of the selected praise and most thankful study than The Two Songs and The Golden Net: a pair of perfect things, their feet taken in the deep places of thought, and their heads made lovely with the open light of lyric speech. Between the former of these and The Human Abstract there is a certain difference: here, the moral point of the poem is, that innocence is wholly ignorant, and sees no deeper than the shell of form; experience is mainly malignant, and sees the root of evil and seed of pain under the leaf of good and blossom of pleasant things: there, the vision is the poet’s own, and deals with that evil neither actually nor seemingly inherent in the system or scheme of created nature, but watered into life by the error and fed into luxuriance by the act of “the human brain” alone; two widely unlike themes for verse. As to execution, here doubtless there is more of that swift fresh quality peculiar to Blake’s simpler style; but the Abstract again has more weight of verse and magnificence of symbol.

  Akin to The Golden Net is the form and manner of Broken Love; which, whatever taste may lie in the actual kernel of it, is visibly one of the poet’s noblest studies of language. The grandeur of the growing metre and heat of passionate pulses felt through the throbbing body of its verse can escape no ear. In our notes on Jerusalem we shall have, like the “devil” of The Two Songs, to look at it from the inverse side and pass upon it a more laborious and less thankworthy comment.

  Of the longest and gravest poem in the “Ideas of Good and Evil” we are bound to take some careful account. This is The Everlasting Gospel, a semi-dramatic exposition of
faith on the writer’s part; full of subtleties and paradoxes which might well straighten the stiffest hairs of orthodoxy and bewilder the sharpest brain of speculation. Blake has here stated once for all the why and the how of his Christian faith; for Christian he averred that it was, and we may let his word pass for it. Readers must be recommended for the present to look at these things as much as possible from what we will call their artistic or poetic side, and bring no pulpit logic to get chopped or minced on the altar of this prophet’s vision. His worst heresy, they may be assured, “will not bite.” In effect one may hope (or fear, as the case may be) that there is much less of heresy underlying these daring forms of speech than seems to overlay their outer skirt: schism or division of body rather than of spirit from less wilful and outspoken forms of faith.

  Let the student of this “Gospel” of inverted belief and intensified paradox lay hold of and cling fast to the clue given by the “Vision of the Last Judgment.” There for one thing the prophet has laid down this rule: “Moral virtues do not exist; they are allegories and dissimulations.” For “moral allegory” we are therefore not to look here; we are in the house of pure vision, outside of which allegory halts blindly across the shifting sand of moral qualities, her right hand leaning on the staff of virtue, her left hand propped on the crutch of vice. Conscious unimpulsive “virtue,” measured by the praise or judged by the laws of men, was to Blake always Pharisaic: a legal God none other than a magnified and divine Pharisee. Thus far have other (even European) mystics often enough pushed their inference; but this time the mystic was a poet; and therefore always, where it was possible, prone to prefer tangible form and given to beat out into human shape even the most indefinite features of his vision. Assuming Christ as the direct and absolute divine type (divine in the essential not in the clerical sense — divine to the spiritual not the technical reason) he was therefore obliged to set to work and strip that type of the incongruous garment of “moral virtues” cast over it by the law of religious form: to prove, as he elsewhere said, that Christ “was all virtue,” not by the possession of these “allegoric” qualities called human virtues or abstinence from those others called human sins or vices: such abstinence or such possession cannot conceivably suffice for the final type of goodness or absolute incarnation of a thing unalterably divine. Virtues are no more predicable of the perfect virtue than vices of the perfect vice. As the supreme sin cannot be said to commit human faults, so neither can the supreme holiness obey the principles of human sanctity. “Deistical virtue” is as the embroidery on the ephod of Caiaphas or the stain left upon the water by the purified hands of Pilate. It is the property of “the heathen schools”; a bitted and bridled virtue, led by the nose and tied by the neck; made of men’s hands and subject to men’s laws. Can you make a God worth worship out of that? To say that God is wise, chaste, humble, philanthropic, gentle, or just; in one word, that he is “good” after the human sense; is to lower your image of God not less than if you had predicated of him the exactly reverse qualities, by reason of which these exist, even as they by reason of these. How much of all this Blake had fished up out of his studies of Behmen, Swedenborg, or such others, his present critic has not the means of deciding; but is assured of one thing; that where others dealt by inductive rule and law, Blake dealt by assumptive preaching and intuition; that he found form of his own for the body of thought, and body of his own for the spirit of speculation, supplied by others; playing Prometheus to their Epimetheus, doing poet’s or evangelist’s work where they did philosophic business; not fumbling in the box of Pandora for things flown or fugitive, but bringing from extreme heaven the immediate fire in the hollow of his reed or pen.