ŒNEUS
Who shall give back
Thy face of old years
With travail made black,
Grown grey among fears
Mother of sorrow, mother of cursing, mother of tears?
MELEAGER
Though thou art as fire
Fed with fuel in vain,
My delight, my desire,
2100
Is more chaste than the rain,
More pure than the dewfall, more holy than stars are that live without stain.
ATALANTA
I would that as water
My life’s blood had thawn,
Or as winter’s wan daughter
Leaves lowland and lawn
Spring-stricken, or ever mine eyes had beheld thee made dark in thy dawn.
CHORUS
When thou dravest the men
Of the chosen of Thrace,
None turned him again
2110
Nor endured he thy face
Clothed round with the blush of the battle, with light from a terrible place.
ŒNEUS
Thou shouldst die as he dies
For whom none sheddeth tears;
Filling thine eyes
And fulfilling thine ears
With the brilliance of battle, the bloom and the beauty, the splendour of spears.
CHORUS
In the ears of the world
It is sung, it is told,
And the light thereof hurled
2120
And the noise thereof rolled
From the Acroceraunian snow to the ford of the fleece of gold.
MELEAGER
Would God ye could carry me
Forth of all these;
Heap sand and bury me
By the Chersonese
Where the thundering Bosphorus answers the thunder of Pontic seas.
ŒNEUS
Dost thou mock at our praise
And the singing begun
And the men of strange days
2130
Praising my son
In the folds of the hills of home, high places of Calydon?
MELEAGER
For the dead man no home is;
Ah, better to be
What the flower of the foam is
In fields of the sea,
That the sea-waves might be as my raiment, the gulf-stream a garment for me.
CHORUS
Who shall seek thee and bring
And restore thee thy day,
When the dove dipt her wing
2140
And the oars won their way
Where the narrowing Symplegades whitened the straits of Propontis with spray?
MELEAGER
Will ye crown me my tomb
Or exalt me my name,
Now my spirits consume,
Now my flesh is a flame?
Let the sea slake it once, and men speak of me sleeping to praise me or shame.
CHORUS
Turn back now, turn thee,
As who turns him to wake;
Though the life in thee burn thee,
2150
Couldst thou bathe it and slake
Where the sea-ridge of Helle hangs heavier, and east upon west waters break?
MELEAGER
Would the winds blow me back
Or the waves hurl me home?
Ah, to touch in the track
Where the pine learnt to roam
Cold girdles and crowns of the sea-gods, cool blossoms of water and foam!
CHORUS
The gods may release
That they made fast;
Thy soul shall have ease
2160
In thy limbs at the last;
But what shall they give thee for life, sweet life that is overpast?
MELEAGER
Not the life of men’s veins,
Not of flesh that conceives;
But the grace that remains,
The fair beauty that cleaves
To the life of the rains in the grasses, the life of the dews on the leaves.
CHORUS
Thou wert helmsman and chief;
Wilt thou turn in an hour,
Thy limbs to the leaf,
2170
Thy face to the flower,
Thy blood to the water, thy soul to the gods who divide and devour?
MELEAGER
The years are hungry,
They wail all their days;
The gods wax angry,
And weary of praise;
And who shall bridle their lips? and who shall straiten their ways?
CHORUS
The gods guard over us
With sword and with rod;
Weaving shadow to cover us,
2180
Heaping the sod,
That law may fulfil herself wholly, to darken man’s face before God.
MELEAGER
O holy head of Œneus, lo thy son
Guiltless, yet red from alien guilt, yet foul
With kinship of contaminated lives,
Lo, for their blood I die; and mine own blood
For bloodshedding of mine is mixed therewith,
That death may not discern me from my kin.
Yet with clean heart I die and faultless hand,
Not shamefully; thou therefore of thy love
2190
Salute me, and bid fare among the dead
Well, as the dead fare; for the best man dead
Fares sadly; nathless I now faring well
Pass without fear where nothing is to fear
Having thy love about me and thy goodwill,
O father, among dark places and men dead.
ŒNEUS
Child, I salute thee with sad heart and tears,
And bid thee comfort, being a perfect man
In fight, and honourable in the house of peace.
The gods give thee fair wage and dues of death,
2200
And me brief days and ways to come at thee.
MELEAGER
Pray thou thy days be long before thy death,
And full of ease and kingdom; seeing in death
There is no comfort and none aftergrowth,
Nor shall one thence look up and see day’s dawn
Nor light upon the land whither I go.
Live thou and take thy fill of days and die
When thy day comes; and make not much of death
Lest ere thy day thou reap an evil thing.
Thou too, the bitter mother and mother-plague
2210
Of this my weary body – thou too, queen,
The source and end, the sower and the scythe,
The rain that ripens and the drought that slays,
The sand that swallows and the spring that feeds,
To make me and unmake me – thou, I say,
Althæa, since my father’s ploughshare, drawn
Through fatal seedland of a female field,
Furrowed thy body, whence a wheaten ear
Strong from the sun and fragrant from the rains
I sprang and cleft the closure of thy womb,
2220
Mother, I dying with unforgetful tongue
Hail thee as holy and worship thee as just
Who art unjust and unholy; and with my knees
Would worship, but thy fire and subtlety,
Dissundering them, devour me; for these limbs
Are as light dust and crumblings from mine urn
Before the fire has touched them; and my face
As a dead leaf or dead foot’s mark on snow,
And all this body a broken barren tree
That was so strong, and all this flower of life
2230
Disbranched and desecrated miserably,
And minished all that god-like muscle and might
And lesser than a man’s: for all my veins
Fail me, and all mine ashen life burns do
wn.
I would thou hadst let me live; but gods averse,
But fortune, and the fiery feet of change,
And time, these would not, these tread out my life,
These and not thou; me too thou hast loved, and I
Thee; but this death was mixed with all my life,
Mine end with my beginning: and this law,
2240
This only, slays me, and not my mother at all.
And let no brother or sister grieve too sore,
Nor melt their hearts out on me with their tears,
Since extreme love and sorrowing overmuch
Vex the great gods, and overloving men
Slay and are slain for love’s sake; and this house
Shall bear much better children; why should these
Weep? but in patience let them live their lives
And mine pass by forgotten: thou alone,
Mother, thou sole and only, thou not these,
2250
Keep me in mind a little when I die
Because I was thy first-born; let thy soul
Pity me, pity even me gone hence and dead,
Though thou wert wroth, and though thou bear again
Much happier sons, and all men later born
Exceedingly excel me; yet do thou
Forget not, nor think shame; I was thy son.
Time was I did not shame thee; and time was
I thought to live and make thee honourable
With deeds as great as these men’s; but they live,
2260
These, and I die; and what thing should have been
Surely I know not; yet I charge thee, seeing
I am dead already, love me not the less,
Me, O my mother; I charge thee by these gods,
My father’s, and that holier breast of thine,
By these that see me dying, and that which nursed,
Love me not less, thy first-born: though grief come,
Grief only, of me, and of all these great joy,
And shall come always to thee; for thou knowest,
O mother, O breasts that bare me, for ye know,
2270
O sweet head of my mother, sacred eyes,
Ye know my soul albeit I sinned, ye know
Albeit I kneel not neither touch thy knees,
But with my lips I kneel, and with my heart
I fall about thy feet and worship thee.
And ye farewell now, all my friends; and ye,
Kinsmen, much younger and glorious more than I,
Sons of my mother’s sister; and all farewell
That were in Colchis with me, and bare down
The waves and wars that met us: and though times
2280
Change, and though now I be not anything,
Forget not me among you, what I did
In my good time; for even by all those days,
Those days and this, and your own living souls,
And by the light and luck of you that live,
And by this miserable spoil, and me
Dying, I beseech you, let my name not die.
But thou, dear, touch me with thy rose-like hands,
And fasten up mine eyelids with thy mouth,
A bitter kiss; and grasp me with thine arms,
2290
Printing with heavy lips my light waste flesh,
Made light and thin by heavy-handed fate,
And with thine holy maiden eyes drop dew,
Drop tears for dew upon me who am dead,
Me who have loved thee; seeing without sin done
I am gone down to the empty weary house
Where no flesh is nor beauty nor swift eyes
Nor sound of mouth nor might of hands and feet.
But thou, dear, hide my body with thy veil,
And with thy raiment cover foot and head,
2300
And stretch thyself upon me and touch hands
With hands and lips with lips: be pitiful
As thou art maiden perfect; let no man
Defile me to despise me, saying, This man
Died woman-wise, a woman’s offering, slain
Through female fingers in his woof of life,
Dishonourable; for thou hast honoured me.
And now for God’s sake kiss me once and twice
And let me go; for the night gathers me,
And in the night shall no man gather fruit.
ATALANTA
2310
Hail thou: but I with heavy face and feet
Turn homeward and am gone out of thine eyes.
CHORUS
Who shall contend with his lords
Or cross them or do them wrong?
Who shall bind them as with cords?
Who shall tame them as with song?
Who shall smite them as with swords?
For the hands of their kingdom are strong.
NOTES
POEMS AND BALLADS
A Ballad of Life and A Ballad of Death
Swinburne relished the most lurid accounts of Lucrezia Borgia’s cruelty and sexual adventurousness, as in Victor Hugo’s Lucrèce Borgia (1833), which he read at Eton, and Alexandre Dumas’s Crimes Célèbres (1839-1842). He would also have known of Byron’s theft of a strand of her hair and the poem by Landor which it inspired, ‘On Seeing a Hair of Lucretia Borgia’ (1825, 1846). In the early 1860s he had written part of a projected long story about Borgia; Randolph Hughes, who edited the fragment in 1942, sifts through the evidence for Swinburne’s sources for that work. The two poems open Poems and Ballads with Swinburne’s favourite femme fatale and, in addition, introduce the volume as a whole; the roses in the envoy to the first poem refer to the poems in the collection.
A central figure in the brilliant court at Ferrara, Borgia had received sophisticated verse in her praise (from Bembo and Ariosto among others). Swinburne’s two poems are ‘Italian canzoni of the exactest type’, in the words of William Rossetti, who adds that they have taken ‘the tinge which works of this class have assumed in Mr. Dante G. Rossetti’s volume of translations The Early Italian Poets [1861]’. That is, they consist of several stanzas in a rhyme scheme which is unique to each poem, include both pentameter and trimeter lines, and conclude with an envoy. Rossetti’s drawing of a woman playing a lute surrounded by three lecherous men, a work that evolved into his watercolour of Borgia, has also been adduced as an influence (cf. Virginia Surtees’ catalogue raisonné of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s paintings and drawings, catalogue numbers 47 and 48).
The rhyme ‘moon’ and ‘swoon’ (lines 5–6, ‘A Ballad of Life’) occurs in Tennyson’s ‘Fatima’ (1832), an adaptation of Sappho. For the blue eyelids (line 8, ‘A Ballad of Life’) as a sign of either fatigue or pregnancy, see Leah Marcus, Unediting the Renaissance, 1996, pp. 5–17. The phrase ‘whole soul’ (line 65, ‘A Ballad of Life’) is common in Tennyson and Browning as well as in Swinburne; it occurs twice in ‘Fatima’. ‘Sendaline’ (line 41, ‘A Ballad of Death’) is sendal, a thin rich silken material (the OED cites Swinburne alone for the form ‘sendaline’). The phrase ‘who knows not this’ (cf. line 86, ‘A Ballad of Death’) appears in Edward Young’s Night Thoughts (Night II, line 386) and Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s translation of a sonnet by Bonaggiunta Urbiciani, da Lucca, ‘Of Wisdom and Foresight’ (1861).
Poems and Ballads and Atalanta in Calydon Page 38