With frost and moonshine hoary,
Thrust up the new growths of their green-leaved gloom,
Red buds of ballad blossom, where the dew
Blushed as with bloodlike passion, and its hue
Was as the life and love of hearts on flame,
And fire from forth of each live chalice came:
Young sprays of elder song,
Stem straight and petal strong, 50
Bright foliage with dark frondage overlaid,
And light the lovelier for its lordlier shade;
And morn and even made loud in woodland lone
With cheer of clarions blown,
And through the tournay’s clash and clarion’s cheer
Laugh to laugh echoing, tear washed off by tear.
Then eastward far past northland lea and lawn
Beneath a heavier light [Ant. 2.
Of stormier day and night
Began the music of the heaven of dawn; 60
Bright sound of battle along the Grecian waves,
Loud light of thunder above the Median graves,
New strife, new song on Æschylean seas,
Canaris risen above Themistocles;
Old glory of warrior ghosts
Shed fresh on filial hosts,
With dewfall redder than the dews of day,
And earth-born lightnings out of bloodbright spray;
Then through the flushed grey gloom on shadowy sheaves
Low flights of falling leaves; 70
And choirs of birds transfiguring as they throng
All the world’s twilight and the soul’s to song.
Voices more dimly deep [Ep. 2.
Than the inmost heart of sleep,
And tenderer than the rose-mouthed morning’s lips;
And midmost of them heard
The viewless water’s word,
The sea’s breath in the wind’s wing and the ship’s,
That bids one swell and sound and smite 79
And rend that other in sunder as with fangs by night.
But ah! the glory of shadow and mingling ray, [Str. 3.
The story of morn and even
Whose tale was writ in heaven
And had for scroll the night, for scribe the day!
For scribe the prophet of the morning, far
Exalted over twilight and her star;
For scroll beneath his Apollonian hand
The dim twin wastes of sea and glimmering land.
Hark, on the hill-wind, clear
For all men’s hearts to hear 90
Sound like a stream at nightfall from the steep
That all time’s depths might answer, deep to deep,
With trumpet-measures of triumphal wail
From windy vale to vale,
The crying of one for love that strayed and sinned
Whose brain took madness of the mountain wind.
Between the birds of brighter and duskier wing, [Ant. 3.
What mightier-moulded forms
Girt with red clouds and storms
Mix their strong hearts with theirs that soar and sing? 100
Before the storm-blast blown of death’s dark horn
The marriage moonlight withers, that the morn
For two made one may find three made by death
One ruin at the blasting of its breath:
Clothed with heart’s flame renewed
And strange new maidenhood,
Faith lightens on the lips that bloomed for hire
Pure as the lightning of love’s first-born fire:
Wide-eyed and patient ever, till the curse
Find where to fall and pierce, 110
Keen expiation whets with edge more dread
A father’s wrong to smite a father’s head.
Borgia, supreme from birth [Ep. 3.
As loveliest born on earth
Since earth bore ever women that were fair;
Scarce known of her own house
If daughter or sister or spouse;
Who holds men’s hearts yet helpless with her hair;
The direst of divine things made,
Bows down her amorous aureole half suffused with shade. 120
As red the fire-scathed royal northland bloom, [Str. 4.
That left our story a name
Dyed through with blood and flame
Ere her life shrivelled from a fierier doom
Than theirs her priests bade pass from earth in fire
To slake the thirst of God their Lord’s desire:
As keen the blast of love-enkindled fate
That burst the Paduan tyrant’s guarded gate:
As sad the softer moan
Made one with music’s own 130
For one whose feet made music as they fell
On ways by loveless love made hot from hell:
But higher than these and all the song thereof
The perfect heart of love,
The heart by fraud and hate once crucified,
That, dying, gave thanks, and in thanksgiving died.
Above the windy walls that rule the Rhine [Ant. 4.
A noise of eagles’ wings
And wintry war-time rings,
With roar of ravage trampling corn and vine 140
And storm of wrathful wassail dashed with song,
And under these the watch of wreakless wrong,
With fire of eyes anhungered; and above
These, the light of the stricken eyes of love,
The faint sweet eyes that follow
The wind-outwinging swallow,
And face athirst with young wan yearning mouth
Turned after toward the unseen all-golden south,
Hopeless to see the birds back ere life wane,
Or the leaves born again; 150
And still the might and music mastering fate
Of life more strong than death and love than hate.
In spectral strength biform [Ep. 4.
Stand the twin sons of storm
Transfigured by transmission of one hand
That gives the new-born time
Their semblance more sublime
Than once it lightened over each man’s land;
There Freedom’s winged and wide-mouthed hound, 159
And here our high Dictator, in his son discrowned.
What strong-limbed shapes of kindred throng round these [Str. 5.
Before, between, behind,
Sons born of one man’s mind,
Fed at his hands and fostered round his knees?
Fear takes the spirit in thraldom at his nod,
And pity makes it as the spirit of God,
As his own soul that from her throne above
Sheds on all souls of men her showers of love,
On all earth’s evil and pain
Pours mercy forth as rain 170
And comfort as the dewfall on dry land;
And feeds with pity from a faultless hand
All by their own fault stricken, all cast out
By all men’s scorn or doubt,
Or with their own hands wounded, or by fate
Brought into bondage of men’s fear or hate.
In violence of strange visions north and south
Confronted, east and west, [Ant. 5.
With frozen or fiery breast,
Eyes fixed or fevered, pale or bloodred mouth, 180
Kept watch about his dawn-enkindled dreams;
But ere high noon a light of nearer beams
Made his young heaven of manhood more benign,
And love made soft his lips with spiritual wine,
And left them fired, and fed
With sacramental bread,
And sweet with honey of tenderer words than tears
To feed men’s hopes and fortify men’s fears,
And strong to silence with benignant breath
The lips that doom to death, 190
And swift with speech like fire in fiery lands
To melt the steel’s edge in the headsman’s hands.
Higher than they rose of old, [Ep. 5.
New builded now, behold,
The live great likeness of Our Lady’s towers;
And round them like a dove
Wounded, and sick with love,
One fair ghost moving, crowned with fateful flowers,
Watched yet with eyes of bloodred lust 199
And eyes of love’s heart broken and unbroken trust.
But sadder always under shadowier skies, [Str. 6.
More pale and sad and clear
Waxed always, drawn more near,
The face of Duty lit with Love’s own eyes;
Till the awful hands that culled in rosier hours
From fairy-footed fields of wild old flowers
And sorcerous woods of Rhineland, green and hoary,
Young children’s chaplets of enchanted story,
The great kind hands that showed
Exile its homeward road, 210
And, as man’s helper made his foeman God,
Of pity and mercy wrought themselves a rod,
And opened for Napoleon’s wandering kin
France, and bade enter in,
And threw for all the doors of refuge wide,
Took to them lightning in the thunder-tide.
For storm on earth above had risen from under,
Out of the hollow of hell, [Ant. 6.
Such storm as never fell
From darkest deeps of heaven distract with thunder;
A cloud of cursing, past all shape of thought, 221
More foul than foulest dreams, and overfraught
With all obscene things and obscure of birth
That ever made infection of man’s earth;
Having all hell for cloak
Wrapped round it as a smoke
And in its womb such offspring so defiled
As earth bare never for her loathliest child,
Rose, brooded, reddened, broke, and with its breath
Put France to poisonous death; 230
Yea, far as heaven’s red labouring eye could glance,
France was not, save in men cast forth of France.
Then, — while the plague-sore grew [Ep. 6.
Two darkling decades through,
And rankled in the festering flesh of time, —
Where darkness binds and frees
The wildest of wild seas
In fierce mutations of the unslumbering clime,
There, sleepless too, o’er shuddering wrong
One hand appointed shook the reddening scourge of song. 240
And through the lightnings of the apparent word
Dividing shame’s dense night [Str. 7.
Sounds lovelier than the light
And light more sweet than song from night’s own bird
Mixed each their hearts with other, till the gloom
Was glorious as with all the stars in bloom,
Sonorous as with all the spheres in chime
Heard far through flowering heaven: the sea, sublime
Once only with its own
Old winds’ and waters’ tone, 250
Sad only or glad with its own glory, and crowned
With its own light, and thrilled with its own sound,
Learnt now their song, more sweet than heaven’s may be,
Who pass away by sea;
The song that takes of old love’s land farewell,
With pulse of plangent water like a knell.
And louder ever and louder and yet more loud
Till night be shamed of morn [Ant. 7.
Rings the Black Huntsman’s horn
Through darkening deeps beneath the covering cloud, 260
Till all the wild beasts of the darkness hear;
Till the Czar quake, till Austria cower for fear,
Till the king breathe not, till the priest wax pale,
Till spies and slayers on seats of judgment quail,
Till mitre and cowl bow down
And crumble as a crown,
Till Cæsar driven to lair and hounded Pope
Reel breathless and drop heartless out of hope,
And one the uncleanest kinless beast of all
Lower than his fortune fall; 270
The wolfish waif of casual empire, born
To turn all hate and horror cold with scorn.
Yea, even at night’s full noon [Ep. 7.
Light’s birth-song brake in tune,
Spake, witnessing that with us one must be,
God; naming so by name
That priests have brought to shame
The strength whose scourge sounds on the smitten sea;
The mystery manifold of might
Which bids the wind give back to night the things of night. 280
Even God, the unknown of all time; force or thought, [Str. 8.
Nature or fate or will,
Clothed round with good and ill,
Veiled and revealed of all things and of nought,
Hooded and helmed with mystery, girt and shod
With light and darkness, unapparent God.
Him the high prophet o’er his wild work bent
Found indivisible ever and immanent
At hidden heart of truth,
In forms of age and youth 290
Transformed and transient ever; masked and crowned,
From all bonds loosened and with all bonds bound,
Diverse and one with all things; love and hate,
Earth, and the starry state
Of heaven immeasurable, and years that flee
As clouds and winds and rays across the sea.
But higher than stars and deeper than the waves
Of day and night and morrow [Ant. 8.
That roll for all time, sorrow
Keeps ageless watch over perpetual graves. 300
From dawn to morning of the soul in flower,
Through toils and dreams and visions, to that hour
When all the deeps were opened, and one doom
Took two sweet lives to embrace them and entomb,
The strong song plies its wing
That makes the darkness ring
And the deep light reverberate sound as deep;
Song soft as flowers or grass more soft than sleep,
Song bright as heaven above the mounting bird,
Song like a God’s tears heard 310
Falling, fulfilled of life and death and light,
And all the stars and all the shadow of night.
Till, when its flight hath past [Ep. 8.
Time’s loftiest mark and last,
The goal where good kills evil with a kiss,
And Darkness in God’s sight
Grows as his brother Light,
And heaven and hell one heart whence all the abyss
Throbs with love’s music; from his trance
Love waking leads it home to her who stayed in France. 320
But now from all the world-old winds of the air [Str. 9.
One blast of record rings
As from time’s hidden springs
With roar of rushing wings and fires that bear
Toward north and south sonorous, east and west,
Forth of the dark wherein its records rest,
The story told of the ages, writ nor sung
By man’s hand ever nor by mortal tongue
Till, godlike with desire,
One tongue of man took fire, 330
One hand laid hold upon the lightning, one
Rose up to bear time witness what the sun
Had seen, and what the moon and stars of night
Beholding lost not light:
From dawn to dusk what ways man wandering trod
Even through the twilight of the gods to God.
From dawn of man and woman twain and one [Ant. 9.
When the earliest dews impearled
The front of all the world
>
Ringed with aurorean aureole of the sun, 340
To days that saw Christ’s tears and hallowing breath
Put life for love’s sake in the lips of death,
And years as waves whose brine was fire, whose foam
Blood, and the ravage of Neronian Rome;
And the eastern crescent’s horn
Mightier awhile than morn;
And knights whose lives were flights of eagles’ wings,
And lives like snakes’ lives of engendering kings;
And all the ravin of all the swords that reap
Lives cast as sheaves on heap 350
From all the billowing harvest-fields of fight;
And sounds of love-songs lovelier than the light.
The grim dim thrones of the east [Ep. 9.
Set for death’s riotous feast
Round the bright board where darkling centuries wait,
And servile slaughter, mute,
Feeds power with fresh red fruit,
Glitter and groan with mortal food of fate;
And throne and cup and lamp’s bright breath
Bear witness to their lord of only night and death. 360
Dead freedom by live empire lies defiled, [Str. 10.
And murder at his feet
Plies lust with wine and meat,
With offering of an old man and a child,
With holy body and blood, inexpiable
Communion in the sacrament of hell,
Till, reeking from their monstrous eucharist,
The lips wax cold that murdered where they kissed,
And empire in mid feast
Fall as a slaughtered beast 370
Headless, and ease men’s hungering hearts of fear
Lest God were none in heaven, to see nor hear,
And purge his own pollution with the flood
Poured of his black base blood
So first found healing, poisonous as it poured;
And on the clouds the archangel cleanse his sword.
As at the word unutterable that made [Ant. 10.
Of day and night division,
From vision on to vision, 379
From dream to dream, from darkness into shade,
From sunshine into sunlight, moves and lives
The steersman’s eye, the helming hand that gives
Life to the wheels and wings that whirl along
The immeasurable impulse of the sphere of song
Through all the eternal years,
Beyond all stars and spheres,
Beyond the washing of the waves of time,
Beyond all heights where no thought else may climb,
Delphi Complete Poetical Works of Algernon Charles Swinburne (Illustrated) (Delphi Poets Series) Page 81
