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

by Algernon Charles Swinburne

  He is my Spectre.”

  Now by the light of these extracts let any student examine the great figure at p. 13, where “he beheld his own Shadow — and entered into it.” Clothed in the colours of pain, crowned with the rays of suffering, it stands between world and world in a great anguish of transformation and change: Passion included by Incarnation. Erect on a globe of opaque shadow, backed by a sphere of aching light that opens flower-wise into beams of shifting colour and bitter radiance as of fire, it appeals with a doubtful tortured face and straining limbs to the flat black wall and roof of heaven. All over the head is a darkness not of transitory cloud or night that will some time melt into day; recalling that great verse: “Neither could the bright flames of the stars endure to lighten that horrible night.”

  “As when a man dreams he reflects not that his body sleeps,

  Else he would wake; so seemed he entering his Shadow; but

  With him the Spirits of the Seven Angels of the Presence

  Entering, they gave him still perceptions of his Sleeping Body

  Which now arose and walked with them in Eden, as an Eighth

  Image, Divine tho’ darkened, and tho’ walking as one walks

  In Sleep; and the Seven comforted and supported him.”

  The whole passage is full of a deep and dim beauty which grows clearer and takes form of feature to those only who bring with them eyes to see and patience to desire it. Take next this piece of cosmography, worth comparing with Dante’s vision of the worlds: —

  “The nature of infinity is this; That everything has its

  Own vortex: and when once a traveller thro’ Eternity

  Has passed that vortex, he perceives it roll backward behind

  His path into a globe itself enfolding, like a sun

  Or like a moon or like a universe of starry majesty,

  While he keeps onward in his wondrous journey thro’ the earth,

  Or like a human form, a friend with whom he lived benevolent:

  As the eye of man views both the east and west encompassing

  Its vortex, and the north and south, with all their starry host;

  Also the rising and setting moon he views surrounding

  His cornfields and his valleys of five hundred acres square;

  Thus is the earth one infinite plane, and not as apparent

  To the weak traveller confined beneath the moony shade;

  Thus is the heaven a vortex passed already, and the earth

  A vortex not yet passed by the traveller thro’ Eternity.”

  One curious piece of symbolism may be extracted from the myth, as the one reference to anything actual: —

  “Then Milton knew that the Three Heavens of Beulah were beheld

  By him on earth in his bright pilgrimage of sixty years

  In those three Females whom his Wives, and those three whom his Daughters

  Had represented and contained, that they might be resumed

  By giving up of Selfhood.”

  But of Milton’s flight, of the cruelties of Ulro, of his journey above the Mundane Shell, which “is a vast concave earth, an immense hardened shadow of all things upon our vegetated earth, enlarged into dimension and deformed into indefinite space,” we will take no more account here; nor of the strife with Urizen, “one giving life, the other giving death, to his adversary;” hardly even of the temptation by the sons and daughters of Rahab and Tirzah, when

  “The twofold Form Hermaphroditic, and the Double-sexed,

  The Female-male and the Male-female, self-dividing stood

  Before him in their beauty and in cruelties of holiness.”

  (Compare the beautiful song “To Tirzah,” in the Songs of Experience.) This Tirzah, daughter of Rahab the holy, is “Natural Religion” (Theism as opposed to Pantheism), which would fain have the spiritual Jerusalem offered in sacrifice to it.

  “Let her be offered up to holiness: Tirzah numbers her:

  She numbers with her fingers every fibre ere it grow:

  Where is the Lamb of God? where is the promise of his coming?

  Her shadowy sisters form the bones, even the bones of Horeb

  Around the marrow; and the orbed scull around the brain;

  She ties the knot of nervous fibres into a white brain;

  She ties the knot of bloody veins into a red-hot heart;

  She ties the knot of milky seed into two lovely heavens,

  Two yet but one; each in the other sweet reflected; these

  Are our Three Heavens beneath the shades of Beulah, land of rest.”

  Here and henceforward the clamour and glitter of the poem become more and more confused; nevertheless every page is set about with jewels; as here, in a more comprehensible form than usual: —

  “God sent his two servants Whitfield and Wesley; were they prophets?

  Or were they idiots and madmen? ‘Show us Miracles’?

  Can you have greater Miracles than these? Men who devote

  Their life’s whole comfort to entire scorn, injury, and death?”

  Take also these scraps of explanation mercifully vouchsafed us: —

  “Bowlahoola is named Law by Mortals: Tharmas founded it

  Because of Satan: * * * *

  But Golgonooza is named Art and Manufacture by mortal men.

  In Bowlahoola Los’s Anvils stand and his Furnaces rage.

  Bowlahoola thro’ all its porches feels, tho’ too fast founded

  Its pillars and porticoes to tremble at the force

  Of mortal or immortal arm; * * *

  The Bellows are the Animal Lungs; the Hammers the Animal Heart;

  The Furnaces the Stomach for digestion;”

  (Here we must condense instead of transcribing. While thousands labour at this work of the Senses in the halls of Time, thousands “play on instruments stringed or fluted” to lull the labourers and drown the painful sound of the toiling members, and bring forgetfulness of this slavery to the flesh: a myth of animal life not without beauty, and to Blake one of great attraction.)

  “Los is by mortals named Time, Enitharmon is named Space;

  But they depict him bald and aged who is in eternal youth

  All-powerful, and his locks flourish like the brows of morning;

  He is the Spirit of Prophecy, the ever-apparent Elias.

  Time is the mercy of Eternity; without Time’s swiftness

  Which is the swiftest of all things, all were eternal torment.”

  At least this last magnificent passage should in common charity and sense have been cited in the biography, if only to explain the often-quoted words Los and Enitharmon. Neither blindness to such splendour of symbol, nor deafness to such music of thought, can excuse the omission of what is so wholly necessary for the comprehension of extracts already given, and given (as far as one can see) with no available purpose whatever.

  The remainder of the first book of the Milton is a vision of Nature and prophecy of the gathering of the harvest of Time and treading of the winepress of War; in which harvest and vintage work all living things have their share for good or evil.

  “How red the sons and daughters of Luvah! here they tread the grapes,

  Laughing and shouting, drunk with odours; many fall o’erwearied,

  Drowned in the wine is many a youth and maiden; those around

  Lay them on skins of Tigers and of the spotted Leopard and the wild Ass

  Till they revive, or bury them in cool grots, making lamentation.

  This Winepress is called War on Earth; it is the printing-press

  Of Los, there he lays his words in order above the mortal brain

  As cogs are formed in a wheel to turn the cogs of the adverse wheel.”

  All kind of insects, of roots and seeds and creeping things— “all the armies of disease visible or invisible” — are there;

  “The slow slug; the grasshopper that sings and laughs and drinks

  (Winter comes, he folds his slender bones without a murmur);”
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  “They throw off their gorgeous raiment; they rejoice with loud jubilee

  Around the winepresses of Luvah, naked and drunk with wine.

  There is the nettle that stings with soft down; and there

  The indignant thistle whose bitterness is bred in his milk;

  Who feeds on contempt of his neighbour; there all the idle weeds

  That creep around the obscure places show their various limbs

  Naked in all their beauty, dancing round the winepresses.

  But in the winepresses the human grapes sing not nor dance,

  They howl and writhe in shoals of torment, in fierce flames consuming;”

  tortured for the cruel joy and deadly sport of Luvah’s sons and daughters;

  “They dance around the dying and they drink the howl and groan;

  They catch the shrieks in cups of gold, they hand them one to another;

  These are the sports of love, and these the sweet delights of amorous play;

  Tears of the grape, the death-sweat of the cluster; the last sigh

  Of the mild youth who listens to the luring songs of Luvah.”

  Take also this from the speech of Time to his reapers.

  “You must bind the sheaves not by nations or families,

  You shall bind them in three classes; according to their classes

  So shall you bind them, separating what has been mixed

  Since men began to be woven into nations. * *

  * * * The Elect is one class; you

  Shall bind them separate; they cannot believe in eternal life

  Except by miracle and a new birth. The other two classes,

  The Reprobate who never cease to believe, and the Redeemed

  Who live in doubts and fears, perpetually tormented by the Elect,

  These you shall bind in a twin bundle for the consummation.”

  The constellations that rise in immortal order, that keep their course upon mountain and valley, with sound of harp and song, “with cups and measures filled with foaming wine;” that fill the streams with light of many visions and leave in luminous traces upon the extreme sea the peace of their passage; these too are sons of Los, and labour in the vintage. The gorgeous flies on meadow or brook, that weave in mazes of music and motion the delight of artful dances, and sound instruments of song as they touch and cross and recede; the trees shaken by the wind into sound of heavy thunder till they become preachers and prophets to men; these are the sons of Los, these the visions of eternity; and we see but as it were the hem of their garments.

  A noble passage follows, in which are resumed the labours of the sons of time in fashioning men and the stations of men. They make for doubts and fears cabinets of ivory and gold; when two spectres “like lamps quivering” between life and death stand ready for the blind malignity of combat, they are taken and moulded instead into shapes fit for love, clothed with soft raiment by softer hands, drawn after lines of sweet and perfect form. Some “in the optic nerve” give to the poor infinite wealth of insight, power to know and enjoy the invisible heaven, and to the rich scorn and ignorance and thick darkness. Others build minutes and hours and days;

  “And every moment has a couch of gold for soft repose

  (A moment equals a pulsation of the artery)

  And every minute has an azure tent with silken veils,

  And every hour has a bright golden gate carved with skill,

  And every day and night has walls of brass and gates of adamant

  Shining like precious stones and ornamented with appropriate signs,

  And every month a silver-paved terrace builded high,

  And every year invulnerable barriers with high towers,

  And every age is moated deep, with bridges of silver and gold,

  And every Seven Ages are encircled with a flaming fire.”

  There is much more of the same mythic sort concerning the duration of time, the offices of the nerves (e.g., in the optic nerve sleep was transformed to death by Satan the father of sin and death, even as we have seen sensual death re-transformed by Mercy into sleep), and such-like huge matters; full, one need not now repeat, of subtle splendour and fanciful intensity. But enough now of this over-careful dredging in such weedy waters; where nevertheless, at risk of breaking our net, we may at every dip fish up some pearl.

  At the opening of the second book the pearls lie close and pure. From this (without explanation or reference) has been taken the lovely and mutilated extract at p. 197 of the Life. Thus it stands in Blake’s text: —

  “Thou hearest the nightingale begin the song of spring;

  The lark, sitting upon his earthy bed, just as the morn

  Appears, listens silent; then, springing from the waving corn-field, loud

  He leads the choir of day: trill — trill — trill — trill —

  Mounting upon the wings of light into the great expanse,

  Re-echoing against the lovely blue and shining heavenly shell

  His little throat labours with inspiration; every feather

  On throat, and breast, and wing, vibrate with the effluence divine.

  All nature listens to him silent; and the awful Sun

  Stands still upon the mountains, looking on this little bird

  With eyes of soft humility, and wonder, love, and awe.

  Then loud, from their green covert, all the birds began their song, —

  The thrush, the linnet and the goldfinch, robin and the wren,

  Awake the Sun from his sweet reverie upon the mountains;

  The nightingale again essays his song, and through the day

  And through the night warbles luxuriant; every bird of song

  Attending his loud harmony with admiration and love.

  (This is a vision of the lamentation of Beulah over Ololon.)

  Thou perceivest the flowers put forth their precious odours,

  And none can tell how from so small a centre come such sweets,

  Forgetting that within that centre eternity expands

  Its ever-during doors that Og and Anak fiercely guard.

  First ere the morning breaks joy opens in the flowery bosoms,

  Joy even to tears, which the sun rising dries; first the wild thyme

  And meadow-sweet downy and soft waving among the reeds,

  Light springing on the air, lead the sweet dance; they wake

  The honeysuckle sleeping on the oak, the flaunting beauty

  Revels along upon the wind; the white-thorn, lovely May,

  Opens her many lovely eyes; listening, the rose still sleeps,

  None dare to wake her: soon she bursts her crimson-curtained bed

  And comes forth in the majesty of beauty; every flower,

  The pink, the jessamine, the wallflower, the carnation,

  The jonquil, the mild lily, opes her heavens; every tree

  And flower and herb soon fill the air with an innumerable dance,

  Yet all in order sweet and lovely; men are sick with love.

  Such is a vision of the lamentation of Beulah over Ololon.”

  This Beulah is “a place where contrarieties are equally true;” “it is a pleasant lovely shadow where no dispute can come because of those who sleep:” made to shelter, before they “pass away in winter,” the temporary emanations “which trembled exceedingly neither could they live, because the life of man was too exceeding unbounded.” Of the incarnation and descent of Ololon, of the wars and prophecies of Milton, and of all the other Felpham visions here put on record, we shall say no more in this place; but all these things are written in the Second Book. The illustrative work is also noble and worth study in all ways. One page for example is covered by a design among the grandest of Blake’s. Two figures lie half embraced, as in a deadly sleep without dawn of dream or shadow of rest, along a bare slant ledge of rock washed against by wintry water. Over these two stoops an eagle balanced on the heavy-laden air, with stretching throat
and sharpened wings, opening beak, and eyes full of a fierce perplexity of pity. All round the greenish and black slope of moist sea-cliff the weary tidal ripple plashes and laps, thrusting up as it were faint tongues and listless fingers tipped with foam. On an earlier page, part of the text of which we have given, crowd and glitter all shapes and images of insect or reptile life, sprinkling between line and margin keen points of jewel-coloured light and soft flashes as of starry or scaly brilliance.

  The same year 1804 saw the huge advent of Jerusalem. Of that terrible “emanation,” hitherto the main cornerstone of offence to all students of Blake, what can be said within any decent limit? or where shall any traveller find a rest for feet or eyes in that noisy and misty land? It were a mere frenzy of discipleship that would undertake by force of words to make straight these crooked ways or compel things incoherent to cohere. Supra hanc petram — and such a rock it is to begin any church-building upon! Many of the unwary have stumbled over it and broken their wits. Seriously, one cannot imagine that people will ever read through this vast poem with pleasure enough to warrant them in having patience with it.

  Several things, true in the main of all the prophetic books, are especially true and memorable with regard to those written or designed during the “three years’ slumber” at Felpham. They are the results of intense and active solitude working upon the capricious nerves and tremulous brain of a man naturally the most excitable and receptive of men. They are to be read by the light of his earlier work in the same line; still more perhaps by the light of those invaluable ten letters printed in Vol. II. of the Life, for which one can hardly give thanks enough. The incredible fever of spirit under the sting and stress of which he thought and laboured all his life through, has left marks of its hot and restless presence as clearly on this short correspondence as on the voluminous rolls of prophecy. The merit or demerit of the work done is never in any degree the conscious or deliberate result of a purpose. Possessed to the inmost nerve and core by a certain faith, consumed by the desire to obey his instinct of right by preaching that faith, utterly regardless of all matters lying outside of his own inspiration, he wrote and engraved as it was given him to do, and no otherwise. As to matter and argument, the enormous Jerusalem is simply a fervent apocalyptic discourse on the old subjects — love without law and against law, virtue that stagnates into poisonous dead matter by moral isolation, sin that must exist for the sake of being forgiven, forgiveness that must always keep up with sin — must even maintain sin that it may have something to keep up with and to live for. Without forgiveness of sins, the one thing necessary, we lapse each man into separate self-righteousness and a cruel worship of natural morality and religious law. For nature, oddly enough as it seems at first sight, is assumed by this mystical code to be the cruellest and narrowest of absolute moralists. Only by worship of imaginative impulse, the grace of the Lamb of God, which admits infinite indulgence in sin and infinite forgiveness of sin — only by some such faith as this shall the world be renewed and redeemed. This may be taken as the rough result, broadly set down, of the portentous book of revelation. Never, one may suppose, did any Oriental heretic drive his deductions further or set forth his conclusions in obscurer form. Never certainly did a man fall to his work with keener faith and devotion. Sin itself is not so evil — but the remembrance and punishment of sin! “Injury the Lord heals; but vengeance cannot be healed.” Next or equal in hatefulness to the division of qualities into evil and good (see above, Marriage of Heaven and Hell) is the separation of sexes into male and female: hence jealous love and personal desire, that set itself against the mystical frankness of fraternity: hence too (contradictory as it may seem till one thinks it out) the hermaphroditic emblem is always used as a symbol seemingly of duplicity and division, perplexity and restraint. The two sexes should not combine and contend; they must finally amalgamate and be annihilated. All this is of course more or less symbolic, and not to be taken in literal coarseness or folly of meaning. The whole stage is elemental, the scheme one of patriarchal vapour, and the mythologic actors mere Titans outlined in cloud. Reserving this always, we shall not be far out in interpreting Blake’s dim creed somewhat as above. One distinction it is here possible to make, and desirable to keep in mind: Blake at one time speaks of Nature as the source of moral law, “the harlot virgin-mother,” “Rahab,” “the daughter of Babylon,” origin of religious restrictions and the worship of abstinence; mother of “the harlot modesty,” and spring of all hypocrisies and prohibitions; to whom the religious and moral of this world would fain offer up in sacrifice the spiritual Jerusalem, the virgin espoused, named among men Liberty, forbidding nothing and enjoying all, but therefore clean and not unclean: by whom comes indulgence, after whom follows redemption. At another time this same prophet will plead for freedom on behalf of “natural” energies, and set up the claims of nature to energetic enjoyment and gratification of all desires, against the moral law and government of the creative and restrictive Deity— “Urizen, mistaken Demon of Heaven.” With a like looseness of phrase he uses and transposes the words “God” and “Satan,” even to an excess of laxity and consequent perplexity; not, it may be suspected, without a grain of innocent if malign pleasure at the chance of inflicting on men of conventional tempers bewilderment and offence. But as to this question of the term “Nature” the case seems to lie thus: when, as throughout the Marriage of Heaven and Hell, he uses it in the simple sense of human or physical condition as opposed to some artificial state of soul or belief, he takes it as the contrary of conventional ideas and habits (of religion and morality as vulgarly conceived or practised); but when, as throughout the Milton and Jerusalem, he speaks of nature as opposed to inspiration, it must be taken as the contrary of that higher and subtler religious faith which he is bent on inculcating, and which itself is the only perfect opposite and efficient antagonist to the conventional faith and (to use another of his quasi-technical terms) the “deistical virtue” which he is bent on denying. Blake, one should always remember, was not infidel but heretic; his belief was peculiar enough, but it was not unbelief; it was farther from that than most men’s. To him, though for quite personal reasons and in a quite especial sense, much of what is called inspired writing was as sacred and infallible as to any priest of any church. Only before reading he inverted the book.