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| Algernon Charles Swinburne
"Not a child: I call myself a boy,"
Says my king, with accent stern yet mild;
Now nine years have brought him change of joy--
"Not a child."A little marsh-plant, yellow-green,
And prick'd at lip with tender red.
Tread close, and either way you tread,
Some faint black water jets between
Lest you should bruise the curious head.A little soul scarce fledged for earth
Takes wing with heaven again for goal,
Even while we hailed as fresh from birth
A little soul.A temple whose transepts are measured by miles,
Whose chancel has morning for priest,
Whose floor-work the foot of no spoiler defiles,
Whose musical silence no music beguiles,
No festivals limit its feast.A young man with a very good past.
[Fr., Un jeune homme d'un bien beau passe.]Ah, thy beautiful hair! so was it once braided for me, for me;
Now for death is it crowned, only for death, lover and lord of thee.All gifts but one the jealous God may keep
From our soul's longing, one he cannot--sleep.
This, though he grudge all other grace to prayer,
This grace his closed hand cannot choose but spare.And hands that wist not though they dug a grave,
Undid the hasps of gold, and drank, and gave,
And he drank after, a deep glad kingly draught:
And all their life changed in them, for they quaffed
Death; if it be death so to drink, and fare
As men who change and are what these twain were.And the best and the worst of this is
That neither is most to blame,
If you have forgotten my kisses
And I have forgotten your name.Between the two seas the sea-bird's wing makes halt,
Wind-weary; while with lifting head he waits
For breath to reinspire him from the gates
That open still toward sunrise on the vault
High-domed of morning.But from sharp words and wits men pluck no fruit;
And gathering thorns they shake the tree at root;
For words divide and rend,
But silence is most noble till the end.Cold autumn, wan with wrath of wind and rain,
Saw pass a soul sweet as the sovereign tune
That death smote silent when he smote again.Death, if thou wilt, fain would I plead with thee:
Canst thou not spare, of all our hopes have built,
One shelter where our spirits fain would be
Death, if thou wilt?For thee, O now a silent soul, my brother,
Take at my hands this garland and farewell.
Thin is the leaf, and chill the wintry smell,
And chill the solemn earth, a fatal mother.For winter's rains and ruins are over,
And all the season of snows and sins;
The days dividing lover and lover,
The light that loses, the night that wins;
And time remembered is grief forgotten,
And frosts are slain and flowers begotten,
And in green underwood and cover
Blossom by blossom the spring begins.From too much love of living,
From hope and fear set free,
We thank with brief thanksgiving
Whatever gods may be
That no life lives forever;
That dead men rise up never;
That even the weariest river
Winds somewhere safe to sea.Heart's ease of pansy, pleasure or thought,
Which would the picture give us of these?
Surely the heart that conceived it sought
Heart's ease.I shall remember while the light lives yet
And in the night time I shall not forget.I that have love and no more
Give you but love of you, sweet;
He that hath more, let him give;
He that hath wings, let him soar;
Mine is the heart at your feet
Here, that must love you to live.I will go back to the great sweet mother,
Mother and lover of men, the sea.If love were what the rose is,
And I were like the leaf,
Our lives would grow together
In sad or singing weather.In fierce March weather
White waves break tether,
And whirled together
At either hand,
Like weeds uplifted,
The tree-trunks rifted
In spars are drifted,
Like foam or sand.In hawthorne-time the heart grows light.In the world of dreams, I have chosen my part.
To sleep for a season and hear no word
Of true love's truth or of light love's art,
Only the song of a secret bird.Love laid his sleepless head
On a thorny rose bed:
And his eyes with tears were red,
And pale his lips as the dead.Love lies bleeding in the bed whereover
Roses lean with smiling mouths or pleading:
Earth lies laughing where the sun's dart clove her:
Love lies bleeding.Love, as is told by the seers of old,
Comes as a butterfly tipped with gold,
Flutters and flies in sunlit skies,
Weaving round hearts that were one time cold.Make barren our lives.Nay, then, what flames are these that leap and swell
As 'twere to show, where earth's foundations crack,
The secrets of the sepulchres of hell
On Dante's track?No blast of air or fire of sun
Puts out the light whereby we run
With girdled loins our lamplit race,
And each from each takes heart of grace
And spirit till his turn be done.Not with dreams, but with blood and with iron
Shall a nation be moulded to last.O Love, O great god Love, what have I done,
That thou shouldst hunger so after my death?
My heart is harmless as my life's first day:
Seek out some false fair woman, and plague her
Till her tears even as my tears fill her bed.O tender time that love thinks long to see,
Sweet foot of Spring that with her footfall sows
Late snow-like flowery leavings of the snows,
Be not too long irresolute to be;
O mother-month, where have they hidden thee?Prince, give praise to our French ladies
For the sweet sound their speaking carries;
'Twixt Rome and Cadiz many a maid is,
But no good girl's lip out of Paris.Sark, fairer than aught in the world that the lit skies cover,
Laughs inly behind her cliffs, and the seafarers mark
As a shrine where the sunlight serves, though the blown clouds hover, Sark.The year of the rose is brief;
From the first blade blown to the sheaf,
From the thin green leaf to the gold,
It has time to be sweet and grow old,
To triumph and leave not a leaf.There are few delights in any life so high and rare as the subtle and strong delight of sovereign art and poetry; there are none more pure and more sublime. To have read the greatest works of any great poet, to have beheld or heard the greatest works of any great painter or musician, is a possession added to the best things of life.There is no such thing as a dumb poet or a handless painter. The essence of an artist is that he should be articulate.They say sin touches not a man so near
As shame a woman; yet he too should be
Part of the penance, being more deep than she
Set in the sin.This
I ever held worse that all certitude,
To know not what the worst ahead might be.This flower that smells of honey and the sea,
White laurustine, seems in my hand to be
A white star made of memory long ago
Lit in the heaven of dear times dead to me.Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilean;
The world has grown gray from thy breath;
We have drunken from things Lethean,
And fed on the fullness of death.Though our works
Find righteous or unrighteous judgment, this
At least is ours, to make them righteous.Time stoops to no man's lure.Time, thy name is sorrow, says the stricken
Heart of life, laid waste with wasting flame
Ere the change of things and thoughts requicken,
Time, thy name.To have read the greatest works of any great poet, to have beheld or heard the greatest works of any great painter or musician, is a possession added to the best things in life. Villon, our sad bad glad mad brother's name.What shall be done for sorrow
With love whose race is run?
Where help is none to borrow,
What shall be done?When fate has allowed to any man more than one great gift, accident or necessity seems usually to contrive that one shall encumber and impede the other.While three men hold together,/The kingdoms are less by three.White rose in red rose-garden
Is not so white;
Snowdrops, that plead for pardon
And pine for fright
Because the hard East blows
Over their maiden vows,
Grow not as this face grows from pale to bright. |
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