Read Ebook: Poems & Ballads (Second Series) Swinburne's Poems Volume III by Swinburne Algernon Charles

Font size: 10 px 15 px 20 px 25 px 30 px 35 px

Background color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Text color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Apply/Save settings

Ebook has 621 lines and 36358 words, and 13 pages

The Epitaph in form of a Ballad 152

From Victor Hugo 154

Nocturne 155

Th?ophile Gautier 157

Ode 158

In Obitom Theophili Poetae 160

Ad Catullum 161

Dedication, 1878 162

POEMS AND BALLADS

SECOND SERIES

INSCRIBED

RICHARD F. BURTON

IN REDEMPTION OF AN OLD PLEDGE AND IN RECOGNITION OF A FRIENDSHIP WHICH I MUST ALWAYS COUNT AMONG THE HIGHEST HONOURS OF MY LIFE

THE LAST ORACLE

Age on age thy mouth was mute, thy face was hidden, And the lips and eyes that loved thee blind and dumb; Song forsook their tongues that held thy name forbidden, Light their eyes that saw the strange God's kingdom come. Fire for light and hell for heaven and psalms for paeans Filled the clearest eyes and lips most sweet of song, When for chant of Greeks the wail of Galileans Made the whole world moan with hymns of wrath and wrong. Yea, not yet we see thee, father, as they saw thee, They that worshipped when the world was theirs and thine, They whose words had power by thine own power to draw thee Down from heaven till earth seemed more than heaven divine. For the shades are about us that hover When darkness is half withdrawn And the skirts of the dead night cover The face of the live new dawn. For the past is not utterly past Though the word on its lips be the last, And the time be gone by with its creed When men were as beasts that bleed, As sheep or as swine that wallow, In the shambles of faith and of fear. O father of all of us, Paian, Apollo, Destroyer and healer, hear!

Yet it may be, lord and father, could we know it, We that love thee for our darkness shall have light More than ever prophet hailed of old or poet Standing crowned and robed and sovereign in thy sight. To the likeness of one God their dreams enthralled thee, Who wast greater than all Gods that waned and grew; Son of God the shining son of Time they called thee, Who wast older, O our father, than they knew. For no thought of man made Gods to love or honour Ere the song within the silent soul began, Nor might earth in dream or deed take heaven upon her Till the word was clothed with speech by lips of man. And the word and the life wast thou, The spirit of man and the breath; And before thee the Gods that bow Take life at thine hands and death. For these are as ghosts that wane, That are gone in an age or twain; Harsh, merciful, passionate, pure, They perish, but thou shalt endure; Be their flight with the swan or the swallow, They pass as the flight of a year. O father of all of us, Paian, Apollo, Destroyer and healer, hear!

Thou the word, the light, the life, the breath, the glory, Strong to help and heal, to lighten and to slay, Thine is all the song of man, the world's whole story; Not of morning and of evening is thy day. Old and younger Gods are buried or begotten From uprising to downsetting of thy sun, Risen from eastward, fallen to westward and forgotten, And their springs are many, but their end is one. Divers births of godheads find one death appointed, As the soul whence each was born makes room for each; God by God goes out, discrowned and disanointed, But the soul stands fast that gave them shape and speech. Is the sun yet cast out of heaven? Is the song yet cast out of man? Life that had song for its leaven To quicken the blood that ran Through the veins of the songless years More bitter and cold than tears, Heaven that had thee for its one Light, life, word, witness, O sun, Are they soundless and sightless and hollow, Without eye, without speech, without ear? O father of all of us, Paian, Apollo, Destroyer and healer, hear!

Time arose and smote thee silent at his warning, Change and darkness fell on men that fell from thee; Dark thou satest, veiled with light, behind the morning, Till the soul of man should lift up eyes and see. Till the blind mute soul get speech again and eyesight, Man may worship not the light of life within; In his sight the stars whose fires grow dark in thy sight Shine as sunbeams on the night of death and sin. Time again is risen with mightier word of warning, Change hath blown again a blast of louder breath; Clothed with clouds and stars and dreams that melt in morning, Lo, the Gods that ruled by grace of sin and death! They are conquered, they break, they are stricken, Whose might made the whole world pale; They are dust that shall rise not or quicken Though the world for their death's sake wail. As a hound on a wild beast's trace, So time has their godhead in chase; As wolves when the hunt makes head, They are scattered, they fly, they are fled; They are fled beyond hail, beyond hollo, And the cry of the chase, and the cheer. O father of all of us, Paian, Apollo, Destroyer and healer, hear!

IN THE BAY

Beyond the hollow sunset, ere a star Take heart in heaven from eastward, while the west, Fulfilled of watery resonance and rest, Is as a port with clouds for harbour bar To fold the fleet in of the winds from far That stir no plume now of the bland sea's breast:

Above the soft sweep of the breathless bay Southwestward, far past flight of night and day, Lower than the sunken sunset sinks, and higher Than dawn can freak the front of heaven with fire, My thought with eyes and wings made wide makes way To find the place of souls that I desire.

If any place for any soul there be, Disrobed and disentrammelled; if the might, The fire and force that filled with ardent light The souls whose shadow is half the light we see, Survive and be suppressed not of the night; This hour should show what all day hid from me.

But here, where light and darkness reconciled Hold earth between them as a weanling child Between the balanced hands of death and birth, Even as they held the new-born shape of earth When first life trembled in her limbs and smiled, Here hope might think to find what hope were worth.

Past Hades, past Elysium, past the long Slow smooth strong lapse of Lethe--past the toil Wherein all souls are taken as a spoil, The Stygian web of waters--if your song Be quenched not, O our brethren, but be strong As ere ye too shook off our temporal coil;

If yet these twain survive your worldly breath, Joy trampling sorrow, life devouring death, If perfect life possess your life all through And like your words your souls be deathless too, To-night, of all whom night encompasseth, My soul would commune with one soul of you.

Above the sunset might I see thine eyes That were above the sundawn in our skies, Son of the songs of morning,--thine that were First lights to lighten that rekindling air Wherethrough men saw the front of England rise And heard thine loudest of the lyre-notes there--

If yet thy fire have not one spark the less, O Titan, born of her a Titaness, Across the sunrise and the sunset's mark Send of thy lyre one sound, thy fire one spark, To change this face of our unworthiness, Across this hour dividing light from dark.

To change this face of our chill time, that hears No song like thine of all that crowd its ears, Of all its lights that lighten all day long Sees none like thy most fleet and fiery sphere's Outlightening Sirius--in its twilight throng No thunder and no sunrise like thy song.

Hath not the sea-wind swept the sea-line bare To pave with stainless fire through stainless air A passage for thine heavenlier feet to tread Ungrieved of earthly floor-work? hath it spread No covering splendid as the sun-god's hair To veil or to reveal thy lordlier head?

Hath not the sunset strewn across the sea A way majestical enough for thee? What hour save this should be thine hour--and mine, If thou have care of any less divine Than thine own soul; if thou take thought of me, Marlowe, as all my soul takes thought of thine?

Before the moon's face as before the sun The morning star and evening star are one For all men's lands as England. O, if night Hang hard upon us,--ere our day take flight, Shed thou some comfort from thy day long done On us pale children of the latter light!

For surely, brother and master and lord and king, Where'er thy footfall and thy face make spring In all souls' eyes that meet thee wheresoe'er, And have thy soul for sunshine and sweet air-- Some late love of thine old live land should cling, Some living love of England, round thee there.

Here from her shore across her sunniest sea My soul makes question of the sun for thee, And waves and beams make answer. When thy feet Made her ways flowerier and their flowers more sweet With childlike passage of a god to be, Like spray these waves cast off her foemen's fleet.

Like foam they flung it from her, and like weed Its wrecks were washed from scornful shoal to shoal, From rock to rock reverberate; and the whole Sea laughed and lightened with a deathless deed That sowed our enemies in her field for seed And made her shores fit harbourage for thy soul.

Then in her green south fields, a poor man's child, Thou hadst thy short sweet fill of half-blown joy, That ripens all of us for time to cloy With full-blown pain and passion; ere the wild World caught thee by the fiery heart, and smiled To make so swift end of the godlike boy.

For thou, if ever godlike foot there trod These fields of ours, wert surely like a god. Who knows what splendour of strange dreams was shed With sacred shadow and glimmer of gold and red From hallowed windows, over stone and sod, On thine unbowed bright insubmissive head?

The shadow stayed not, but the splendour stays, Our brother, till the last of English days. No day nor night on English earth shall be For ever, spring nor summer, Junes nor Mays, But somewhat as a sound or gleam of thee Shall come on us like morning from the sea.

Like sunrise never wholly risen, nor yet Quenched; or like sunset never wholly set, A light to lighten as from living eyes The cold unlit close lids of one that lies Dead, or a ray returned from death's far skies To fire us living lest our lives forget.

For in that heaven what light of lights may be, What splendour of what stars, what spheres of flame Sounding, that none may number nor may name, We know not, even thy brethren; yea, not we Whose eyes desire the light that lightened thee, Whose ways and thine are one way and the same.

But if the riddles that in sleep we read, And trust them not, be flattering truth indeed, As he that rose our mightiest called them,--he, Much higher than thou as thou much higher than we-- There, might we say, all flower of all our seed, All singing souls are as one sounding sea.

All those that here were of thy kind and kin, Beside thee and below thee, full of love, Full-souled for song,--and one alone above Whose only light folds all your glories in-- With all birds' notes from nightingale to dove Fill the world whither we too fain would win.

The world that sees in heaven the sovereign light Of sunlike Shakespeare, and the fiery night Whose stars were watched of Webster; and beneath, The twin-souled brethren of the single wreath, Grown in kings' gardens, plucked from pastoral heath, Wrought with all flowers for all men's heart's delight.

And that fixed fervour, iron-red like Mars, In the mid moving tide of tenderer stars, That burned on loves and deeds the darkest done, Athwart the incestuous prisoner's bride-house bars; And thine, most highest of all their fires but one, Our morning star, sole risen before the sun.

And one light risen since theirs to run such race Thou hast seen, O Phosphor, from thy pride of place. Thou hast seen Shelley, him that was to thee As light to fire or dawn to lightning; me, Me likewise, O our brother, shalt thou see, And I behold thee, face to glorious face?

You twain the same swift year of manhood swept Down the steep darkness, and our father wept. And from the gleam of Apollonian tears A holier aureole rounds your memories, kept Most fervent-fresh of all the singing spheres, And April-coloured through all months and years.

You twain fate spared not half your fiery span; The longer date fulfils the lesser man. Ye from beyond the dark dividing date Stand smiling, crowned as gods with foot on fate. For stronger was your blessing than his ban, And earliest whom he struck, he struck too late.

Share on: WhatsApp @Hash Facebook Tweet