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

by Algernon Charles Swinburne

  “When he had so spoken, I beheld the Angel who stretched out his arms embracing the flame of fire, and he was consumed, and arose as Elijah.

  “Note. This Angel, who is now become a Devil, is my particular friend: we often read the Bible together in its infernal or diabolical sense, which the world shall have if they behave well.

  “I have also the Bible of Hell, which the world shall have, whether they will or no.”

  Under this title at least the world was never favoured with it; but we may presumably taste some savour of that Bible in these pages. After this the book is wound up in a lyric rapture, not without some flutter and tumour of style, but full of clear high music and flame-like aspiration. Epilogue and prologue are both nearer in manner to the dubious hybrid language of the succeeding books of prophecy than to the choice and noble prose in which the rest of this book is written. The overture must be read by the light of its meaning; of the mysterious universal mother and her son, the latest birth of the world, we have already taken account. The date of 1790 must here be kept in mind, that all may remember what appearances of change were abroad, what manner of light and tempest was visible upon earth, when the hopes of such men as Blake made their stormy way into speech or song.

  “A SONG OF LIBERTY.

  1. The Eternal Female groan’d! it was heard over all the Earth.

  2. Albion’s coast is sick silent; the American meadows faint!

  3. Shadows of Prophecy shiver along by the lakes and the rivers, and mutter across the ocean. France, rend down thy dungeon;

  4. Golden Spain, burst the barriers of old Rome;

  5. Cast thy keys, O Rome, into the deep down falling, even to eternity down falling;

  6. And weep.

  7. In her trembling hands she took the new-born terror howling:

  8. On those infinite mountains of light now barred out by the Atlantic sea, the new-born fire stood before the starry King!

  9. Flag’d with grey-browed snows and thunderous visages the jealous wings waved over the deep.

  10. The speary hand burned aloft, unbuckled was the shield, forth went the hand of jealousy among the flaming hair, and hurled the new-born wonder thro’ the starry night.

  11. The fire, the fire is falling!

  12. Look up! look up! O citizen of London, enlarge thy countenance: O Jew, leave counting gold! return to thy oil and wine; O African! black African! (go, winged thought, widen his forehead.)

  13. The fiery limbs, the flaming hair, shot like the sinking sun into the western sea.

  14. Waked from his eternal sleep, the hoary element roaring fled away.

  15. Down rushed, beating his wings in vain, the jealous King; his grey-browed councillors, thunderous warriors, curled veterans, among helms and shields, and chariots, horses, elephants; banners, castles, slings and rocks;

  16. Falling, rushing, ruining! buried in the ruins, on Urthona’s dens;

  17. All night beneath the ruins, then their sullen flames faded emerge round the gloomy King.

  18. With thunder and fire, leading his starry hosts thro’ the waste wilderness, he promulgates his ten commands, glancing his beamy eyelids over the deep in dark dismay;

  19. Where the son of fire in his eastern cloud, while the morning plumes her golden breast,

  20. Spurning the clouds written with curses, stamps the stony law to dust, loosing the eternal horses from the dens of night, crying, Empire is no more! and now the lion and the wolf shall cease.

  CHORUS.

  Let the Priests of the Raven of dawn no longer in deadly black with hoarse note curse the sons of joy; Nor his accepted brethren, whom, tyrant, he calls free, lay the bound or build the roof; Nor pale religious letchery call that virginity that wishes but acts not;

  For everything that lives is Holy.”

  And so, as with fire and thunder— “thunder of thought, and flames of fierce desire” — is this Marriage of Heaven and Hell at length happily consummated; the prophet, as a fervent paranymph, standing by to invoke upon the wedded pair his most unclerical benediction. Those who are not bidden to the bridegroom’s supper may as well keep away, lest worse befall them, not having a wedding garment. For us there remains little to say, now that the torches are out, the nuts scattered, the songs silent, and the saffron faded from the veil. We will wish them a quiet life, and an heir who may combine the merits and capacities of either parent. It were pleasant enough, but too superfluous, to dwell upon the beauty of this nuptial hymn; to bid men remark what eloquence, what subtlety, what ardour of wisdom, what splendour of thought, is here; how far it outruns, not in daring alone but in sufficiency, all sayings of minor mystics who were not also poets; how much of lofty love and of noble faith underlies and animates these rapid and fervent words; what greatness of spirit and of speech there was in the man who, living as Blake lived, could write as Blake has written. Those who cannot see what is implied may remain unable to tolerate what is expressed; and those who can read aright need no index of ours.

  The decorations of this great work, though less large and complete than those of the subsequent prophecies, are full of noble and subtle beauty. Over every page faint fibres and flickering threads of colour weave a net of intricate design. Skies cloven with flame and thunder, half-blasted trees round which huddled forms of women or men cower and cling, strange beasts and splendid flowers, alternate with the engraved text; and throughout all the sunbeams of heaven and fires of hell shed fiercer or softer light. In minute splendour and general effect the pages of Blake’s next work fall short of these; though in the Visions of the Daughters of Albion the separate designs are fuller and more composed. This poem, written in a sort of regular though quasi-lyrical blank verse, is more direct and lucid in purpose than most of these books; but the style is already laxer, veers more swiftly from point to point, stands weaker on its feet, and speaks with more of a hurried and hysterical tone. With “formidable moral questions,” as the biographer has observed, it does assuredly deal; and in a way somewhat formidable. This, we are told, “the exemplary man had good right to do.” Exemplary or not, he in common with all men had undoubtedly such a right; and was not slow to use it. Nowhere else has the prophet so fully and vehemently set forth his doctrine of indulgence; too Albigensian or antinomian this time to be given out again in more decorous form. Of pure mythology there is happily little; of pure allegory even less. “The eye sees more than the heart knows;” these words are given on the title-page by way of motto or key-note. Above this inscription a single design fills the page; in it the title is written with characters of pale fire upon cloud and rainbow; the figure of the typical woman, held fast to earth but by one foot, seems to soar and yearn upwards with straining limbs that flutter like shaken flame: appealing in vain to the mournful and merciless Creator, whose sad fierce face looks out beyond and over her, swathed and cradled in bloodlike fire and drifted rain. In the prologue we get a design expressive of plain and pure pleasure; a woman gathers a child from the heart of a blossom as it breaks, and the sky is full of the golden stains and widening roses of a sundawn. But elsewhere, from the frontispiece to the end, nothing meets us but emblems of restraint and error; figures rent by the beaks of eagles though lying but on mere cloud, chained to no solid rock by the fetters only of their own faiths or fancies; leafless trunks that rot where they fell; cold ripples of barren sea that break among caves of bondage. The perfect woman, Oothoon, is one with the spirit of the great western world; born for rebellion and freedom, but half a slave yet, and half a harlot. “Bromion,” the violent Titan, subject himself to ignorance and sorrow, has defiled her; “Theotormon,” her lover, emblem of man held in bondage to creed or law, will not become one with her because of her shame; and she, who gathered in time of innocence the natural flower of delight, calls now for his eagles to rend her polluted flesh with cruel talons of remorse and ravenous beaks of shame: enjoys his infliction, accepts her agony, and reflects his severe smile in the mirrors of her purged spirit. But he

  �
�sits wearing the threshold hard

  With secret tears; beneath him sound like waves on a desert shore

  The voice of slaves beneath the sun, and children bought with money.”

  From her long melodious lamentation we give one continuous excerpt here. Sweet, and lucid as Thel, it is more subtle and more strong; the allusions to American servitude and English aspiration, which elsewhere distract and distort the sense and scheme of the poem, are here well cleared away.

  “I cry Arise, O Theotormon; for the village dog

  Barks at the breaking day; the nightingale has done lamenting;

  The lark does rustle in the green corn, and the eagle returns

  From nightly prey and lifts his golden beak to the pure east;

  Shaking the dust from his immortal pinions, to awake

  The sun that sleeps too long. Arise my Theotormon, I am pure

  Because the night is gone that closed me in its deadly black.

  They told me that the night and day were all that I could see;

  They told me that I had five senses to enclose me up,

  And they enclosed my infinite beam into a narrow circle,

  And sank my heart into the abyss, a red round globe hotburning

  Till all from life I was obliterated and erased.

  Instead of morn arises a bright shadow like an eye

  In the eastern cloud; instead of night a sickly charnel-house.

  But Theotormon hears me not: to him the night and morn

  Are both alike; a night of sighs, a morning of fresh tears.

  And none but Bromion can hear my lamentations.

  With what sense is it that the chicken shuns the ravenous hawk?

  With what sense does the tame pigeon measure out the expanse?

  With what sense does the bee form cells? have not the mouse and frog

  Eyes and ears and sense of touch? yet are their habitations

  And their pursuits as different as their forms and as their joy.

  Ask the wild ass why he refuses burdens, and the meek camel

  Why he loves man: is it because of eye, ear, mouth or skin,

  Or breathing nostrils? no: for these the wolf and tiger have.

  Ask the blind worm the secrets of the grave and why her spires

  Love to curl around the bones of death: and ask the ravenous snake

  Where she gets poison; and the winged eagle why he loves the sun;

  And then tell me the thoughts of man, that have been hid of old.

  Silent I hover all the night, and all day could be silent,

  If Theotormon once would turn his loved eyes upon me;

  How can I be defiled when I reflect thy image pure?

  Sweetest the fruit that the worm feeds on, and the soul prey’d on by woe;

  The new-washed lamb tinged with the village smoke, and the bright swan

  By the red earth of our immortal river; I bathe my wings

  And I am white and pure to hover round Theotormon’s breast.

  Then Theotormon broke his silence, and he answered;

  Tell me what is the night or day to one overflowed with woe?

  Tell me what is a thought? and of what substance is it made?

  Tell me what is joy? and in what gardens do joys grow?

  And in what rivers swim the sorrows? and upon what mountains

  Wave shadows of discontent? and in what houses dwell the wretched

  Drunken with woe forgotten, and shut up from cold despair?

  Tell me where dwell the thoughts forgotten till thou call them forth?

  Tell me where dwell the joys of old? and where the ancient loves?

  And when will they renew again and the night of oblivion be past?

  That I might traverse times and spaces far remote and bring

  Comfort into a present sorrow and a night of pain!

  Where goest thou, O thought? to what remote land is thy flight?

  If thou returnest to the present moment of affliction

  Wilt thou bring comforts on thy wings and dews and honey and balm

  Or poison from the desert wilds, from the eyes of the envier?”

  After this Bromion, with less musical lamentation, asks whether for all things there be not one law established? “Thou knowest that the ancient trees seen by thine eyes have fruit; but knowest thou that trees and fruits flourish upon the earth to gratify senses unknown, in worlds over another kind of seas?” Are there other wars, other sorrows, and other joys than those of external life? But the one law surely does exist “for the lion and the ox,” for weak and strong, wise and foolish, gentle and fierce; and for all who rebel against it there are prepared from everlasting the fires and the chains of hell. So speaks the violent slave of heaven; and after a day and a night Oothoon lifts up her voice in sad rebellious answer and appeal.

  “O Urizen, Creator of men! mistaken Demon of heaven!

  Thy joys are tears: thy labour vain, to form man to thine image;

  How can one joy absorb another? are not different joys

  Holy, eternal, infinite? and each joy is a Love.

  Does not the great mouth laugh at a gift? and the narrow eyelids mock

  At the labour that is above payment? and wilt thou take the ape

  For thy counsellor, or the dog for a schoolmaster to thy children?

  ********

  Does the whale worship at thy footsteps as the hungry dog?

  Or does he scent the mountain prey, because his nostrils wide

  Draw in the ocean? does his eye discern the flying cloud

  As the raven’s eye? or does he measure the expanse like the vulture?

  Does the still spider view the cliffs where eagles hide their young?

  Or does the fly rejoice because the harvest is brought in?

  Does not the eagle scorn the earth and despise the treasures beneath?

  But the mole knoweth what is there, and the worm shall tell it thee.”

  Perhaps there is no loftier note of music and of thought struck anywhere throughout these prophecies. For the rest, we must tread carefully over the treacherous hot ashes strewn about the latter end of this book: which indeed speaks plainly enough for once, and with high equal eloquence; but to no generally acceptable effect. The one matter of marriage laws is still beaten upon, still hammered at with all the might of an insurgent prophet: to whom it is intolerable that for the sake of mere words and mere confusions of thought “she who burns with youth and knows no fixed lot” should be “bound by spells of law to one she loathes,” should “drag the chain of life in weary lust,” and “bear the wintry rage of a harsh terror driven to madness, bound to hold a rod over her shrinking shoulders all the day, and all the night to turn the wheel of false desire;” intolerable that she should be driven by “longings that wake her womb” to bring forth not men but some monstrous “abhorred birth of cherubs,” imperfect, artificial, abortive; counterfeits of holiness and mockeries of purity; things of barren or perverse nature, creatures inhuman or diseased, that live as a pestilence lives and pass away as a meteor passes; “till the child dwell with one he hates, and do the deed he loathes, and the impure scourge force his seed into its unripe birth ere yet his eyelids can behold the arrows of the day:” the day whose blinding beams had surely somewhat affected the prophet’s own eyesight, and left his eyelids lined with strange colours of fugitive red and green that fades into black. However, all these things shall be made plain by death; for “over the porch is written Take thy bliss, O man! and sweet shall be thy taste, and sweet thy infant joys renew.” On the one hand is innocence, on the other modesty; infancy is “fearless, lustful, happy;” who taught it modesty, “subtle modesty, child of night and sleep?” Once taught to dissemble, to call pure things impure, to “catch virgin joy, and brand it with the name of whore and sell it in the night;” once corrupted and misled, “religious dreams and holy vespers light thy smoky fires: once were thy fires lighted by the eyes of honest morn.” Not pleasure but hypocrisy is the unclean thin
g; Oothoon is no harlot, but “a virgin filled with virgin fancies, open to joy and to delight wherever it appears; if in the morning sun I find it, there my eyes are fixed in happy copulation:” and so forth — further than we need follow.

  “Is it because acts are not lovely that thou seekest solitude

  Where the horrible darkness is impressed with reflections of desire? —

  Father of Jealousy, be thou accursed from the earth!

  Why hast thou taught my Theotormon this accursed thing?

  Till beauty fades from off my shoulders, darkened and cast out,

  A solitary shadow wailing on the margin of non-entity;”

  as in a later prophecy Ahania, cast out by the jealous God, being the type or embodiment of this sacred natural love “free as the mountain wind.”

  “Can that be love which drinks another as a sponge drinks water?

  That clouds with jealousy his nights, with weepings all the days?

  ********

  Such is self-love, that envies all; a creeping skeleton

  With lamp-like eyes watching around the frozen marriage-bed.”

  But instead of the dark-grey “web of age” spun around man by self-love, love spreads nets to catch for him all wandering and foreign pleasures, pale as mild silver or ruddy as flaming gold; beholds them without grudging drink deep of various delight, “red as the rosy morning, lustful as the first-born beam.” No single law for all things alike; the sun will not shine in the miser’s secret chamber, nor the brightest cloud drop fruitful rain on his stone threshold; for one thing night is good and for another thing day: nothing is good and nothing evil to all at once.

  “‘The sea-fowl takes the wintry blast for a covering to her limbs,

  And the wild snake the pestilence, to adorn him with gems and gold;