SONGS BEFORE SUNRISE

By Algernon Charles Swinburne

19 17

LONDON: WILLIAM HEINEMANN

p. ivFirst published (Ellis), 1871. New impressions (Chatto) 1874, ’77, ’80, ’83, ’88, ’92, ’99, 1903, ’08, ’11, ’15. Also Florence Press Edition, 1909

The Golden Pine Edition (Heinemann), 1917

Included in Collected Poems (Chatto), 1904 (twice), ’09, ’10, ’12. (Heinemann), 1917

London: William Heinemann, 1917

p. vDEDICATION

TO JOSEPH MAZZINI

Take, since you bade it should bear, These, of the seed of your sowing, Blossom or berry or weed. Sweet though they be not, or fair, That the dew of your word kept growing, Sweet at least was the seed.

Men bring you love-offerings of tears, And sorrow the kiss that assuages, And slaves the hate-offering of wrongs, And time the thanksgiving of years, And years the thanksgiving of ages; I bring you my handful of songs.

If a perfume be left, if a bloom, Let it live till Italia be risen, To be strewn in the dust of her car When her voice shall awake from the tomb England, and France from her prison, Sisters, a star by a star.

p. viI bring you the sword of a song, The sword of my spirit’s desire, Feeble; but laid at your feet, That which was weak shall be strong, That which was cold shall take fire, That which was bitter be sweet.

It was wrought not with hands to smite, Nor hewn after swordsmiths’ fashion, Nor tempered on anvil of steel; But with visions and dreams of the night, But with hope, and the patience of passion, And the signet of love for a seal.

Be it witness, till one more strong, Till a loftier lyre, till a rarer Lute praise her better than I, Be it witness before you, my song, That I knew her, the world’s banner-bearer, Who shall cry the republican cry.

Yea, even she as at first, Yea, she alone and none other, Shall cast down, shall build up, shall bring home; Slake earth’s hunger and thirst, Lighten, and lead as a mother; First name of the world’s names, Rome.

p. viiCONTENTS

SONGS BEFORE SUNRISE

Prelude

3

The Eve of Revolution

10

A watch in the Night

27

Super Flumina Babylonis

34

The halt before Rome

40

Mentana: First Anniversary

52

Blessed among Women

56

The Litany of Nations

64

Hertha

72

Before a crucifix

81

Tenebræ

88

Hymn of man

93

The pilgrims

105

Armand Barbès

109

Quia Multum Amavit

111

Genesis

117

To Walt Whitman in America

120

Christmas Antiphones

126

A New Year’s Message

137

Mater Dolorosa

140

Mater Triumphalis

144

A Marching Song

151

Siena

160

Cor Cordium

171

In San Lorenzo

172

Tiresias

173

The Song of the Standard

187

On the Downs

191

Messidor

197

Ode on the Insurrection in Candia

200

“Non Dolet”

209

Eurydice

210

An Appeal

211

Perinde ac Cadaver

215

Monotones

219

The Oblation

221

A Year’s Burden

222

Epilogue

226

Notes

237

p. 3PRELUDE

Between the green bud and the red Youth sat and sang by Time, and shed From eyes and tresses flowers and tears, From heart and spirit hopes and fears, Upon the hollow stream whose bed Is channelled by the foamless years; And with the white the gold-haired head Mixed running locks, and in Time’s ears Youth’s dreams hung singing, and Time’s truth Was half not harsh in the ears of Youth.

Between the bud and the blown flower Youth talked with joy and grief an hour, With footless joy and wingless grief And twin-born faith and disbelief Who share the seasons to devour; And long ere these made up their sheaf Felt the winds round him shake and shower The rose-red and the blood-red leaf, Delight whose germ grew never grain, And passion dyed in its own pain.

Then he stood up, and trod to dust Fear and desire, mistrust and trust, And dreams of bitter sleep and sweet, And bound for sandals on his feet p. 4Knowledge and patience of what must And what things may be, in the heat And cold of years that rot and rust And alter; and his spirit’s meat Was freedom, and his staff was wrought Of strength, and his cloak woven of thought.

For what has he whose will sees clear To do with doubt and faith and fear, Swift hopes and slow despondencies? His heart is equal with the sea’s And with the sea-wind’s, and his ear Is level to the speech of these, And his soul communes and takes cheer With the actual earth’s equalities, Air, light, and night, hills, winds, and streams, And seeks not strength from strengthless dreams.

His soul is even with the sun Whose spirit and whose eye are one, Who seeks not stars by day, nor light And heavy heat of day by night. Him can no God cast down, whom none Can lift in hope beyond the height Of fate and nature and things done By the calm rule of might and right That bids men be and bear and do, And die beneath blind skies or blue.

To him the lights of even and morn Speak no vain things of love or scorn, Fancies and passions miscreate By man in things dispassionate. p. 5Nor holds he fellowship forlorn With souls that pray and hope and hate, And doubt they had better not been born, And fain would lure or scare off fate And charm their doomsman from their doom And make fear dig its own false tomb.

He builds not half of doubts and half Of dreams his own soul’s cenotaph, Whence hopes and fears with helpless eyes, Wrapt loose in cast-off cerecloths, rise And dance and wring their hands and laugh, And weep thin tears and sigh light sighs, And without living lips would quaff The living spring in man that lies, And drain his soul of faith and strength It might have lived on a life’s length.

He hath given himself and hath not sold To God for heaven or man for gold, Or grief for comfort that it gives, Or joy for grief’s restoratives. He hath given himself to time, whose fold Shuts in the mortal flock that lives On its plain pasture’s heat and cold And the equal year’s alternatives. Earth, heaven, and time, death, life, and he, Endure while they shall be to be.

“Yet between death and life are hours To flush with love and hide in flowers; What profit save in these?” men cry: “Ah, see, between soft earth and sky, p. 6What only good things here are ours!” They say, “what better wouldst thou try, What sweeter sing of? or what powers Serve, that will give thee ere thou die More joy to sing and be less sad, More heart to play and grow more glad?”

Play then and sing; we too have played, We likewise, in that subtle shade. We too have twisted through our hair Such tendrils as the wild Loves wear, And heard what mirth the Mænads made, Till the wind blew our garlands bare And left their roses disarrayed, And smote the summer with strange air, And disengirdled and discrowned The limbs and locks that vine-wreaths bound.

We too have tracked by star-proof trees The tempest of the Thyiades Scare the loud night on hills that hid The blood-feasts of the Bassarid, Heard their song’s iron cadences Fright the wolf hungering from the kid, Outroar the lion-throated seas, Outchide the north-wind if it chid, And hush the torrent-tongued ravines With thunders of their tambourines.

But the fierce flute whose notes acclaim Dim goddesses of fiery fame, Cymbal and clamorous kettledrum, Timbrels and tabrets, all are dumb p. 7That turned the high chill air to flame; The singing tongues of fire are numb That called on Cotys by her name Edonian, till they felt her come And maddened, and her mystic face Lightened along the streams of Thrace.

For Pleasure slumberless and pale, And Passion with rejected veil, Pass, and the tempest-footed throng Of hours that follow them with song Till their feet flag and voices fail, And lips that were so loud so long Learn silence, or a wearier wail; So keen is change, and time so strong, To weave the robes of life and rend And weave again till life have end.

But weak is change, but strengthless time, To take the light from heaven, or climb The hills of heaven with wasting feet. Songs they can stop that earth found meet, But the stars keep their ageless rhyme; Flowers they can slay that spring thought sweet, But the stars keep their spring sublime; Passions and pleasures can defeat, Actions and agonies control, And life and death, but not the soul.

Because man’s soul is man’s God still, What wind soever waft his will Across the waves of day and night To port or shipwreck, left or right, p. 8By shores and shoals of good and ill; And still its flame at mainmast height Through the rent air that foam-flakes fill Sustains the indomitable light Whence only man hath strength to steer Or helm to handle without fear.

Save his own soul’s light overhead, None leads him, and none ever led, Across birth’s hidden harbour-bar, Past youth where shoreward shallows are, Through age that drives on toward the red Vast void of sunset hailed from far, To the equal waters of the dead; Save his own soul he hath no star, And sinks, except his own soul guide, Helmless in middle turn of tide.

No blast of air or fire of sun Puts out the light whereby we run With girded loins our lamplit race, And each from each takes heart of grace And spirit till his turn be done, And light of face from each man’s face In whom the light of trust is one; Since only souls that keep their place By their own light, and watch things roll, And stand, have light for any soul.

A little time we gain from time To set our seasons in some chime, For harsh or sweet or loud or low, With seasons played out long ago p. 9And souls that in their time and prime Took part with summer or with snow, Lived abject lives out or sublime, And had their chance of seed to sow For service or disservice done To those days daed and this their son.

A little time that we may fill Or with such good works or such ill As loose the bonds or make them strong Wherein all manhood suffers wrong. By rose-hung river and light-foot rill There are who rest not; who think long Till they discern as from a hill At the sun’s hour of morning song, Known of souls only, and those souls free, The sacred spaces of the sea.

p. 10THE EVE OF REVOLUTION

1

The trumpets of the four winds of the world From the ends of the earth blow battle; the night heaves, With breasts palpitating and wings refurled, With passion of couched limbs, as one who grieves Sleeping, and in her sleep she sees uncurled Dreams serpent-shapen, such as sickness weaves, Down the wild wind of vision caught and whirled, Dead leaves of sleep, thicker than autumn leaves, Shadows of storm-shaped things, Flights of dim tribes of kings, The reaping men that reap men for their sheaves, And, without grain to yield, Their scythe-swept harvest-field Thronged thick with men pursuing and fugitives, Dead foliage of the tree of sleep, Leaves blood-coloured and golden, blown from deep to deep.

2

I hear the midnight on the mountains cry With many tongues of thunders, and I hear Sound and resound the hollow shield of sky With trumpet-throated winds that charge and cheer, p. 11And through the roar of the hours that fighting fly, Through flight and fight and all the fluctuant fear, A sound sublimer than the heavens are high, A voice more instant than the winds are clear, Say to my spirit, “Take Thy trumpet too, and make A rallying music in the void night’s ear, Till the storm lose its track, And all the night go back; Till, as through sleep false life knows true life near, Thou know the morning through the night, And through the thunder silence, and through darkness light.”

3

I set the trumpet to my lips and blow. The height of night is shaken, the skies break, The winds and stars and waters come and go By fits of breath and light and sound, that wake As out of sleep, and perish as the show Built up of sleep, when all her strengths forsake The sense-compelling spirit; the depths glow, The heights flash, and the roots and summits shake Of earth in all her mountains, And the inner foamless fountains And wellsprings of her fast-bound forces quake; Yea, the whole air of life Is set on fire of strife, Till change unmake things made and love remake; Reason and love, whose names are one, Seeing reason is the sunlight shed from love the sun.

p. 124

The night is broken eastward; is it day, Or but the watchfires trembling here and there, Like hopes on memory’s devastated way, In moonless wastes of planet-stricken air? O many-childed mother great and grey, O multitudinous bosom, and breasts that bare Our fathers’ generations, whereat lay The weanling peoples and the tribes that were, Whose new-born mouths long dead Those ninefold nipples fed, Dim face with deathless eyes and withered hair, Fostress of obscure lands, Whose multiplying hands Wove the world’s web with divers races fair And cast it waif-wise on the stream, The waters of the centuries, where thou sat’st to dream;

5

O many-minded mother and visionary, Asia, that sawest their westering waters sweep With all the ships and spoils of time to carry And all the fears and hopes of life to keep, Thy vesture wrought of ages legendary Hides usward thine impenetrable sleep, And thy veiled head, night’s oldest tributary, We know not if it speak or smile or weep. But where for us began The first live light of man p. 13And first-born fire of deeds to burn and leap, The first war fair as peace To shine and lighten Greece, And the first freedom moved upon the deep, God’s breath upon the face of time Moving, a present spirit, seen of men sublime;

6

There where our east looks always to thy west, Our mornings to thine evenings, Greece to thee, These lights that catch the mountains crest by crest, Are they of stars or beacons that we see? Taygetus takes here the winds abreast, And there the sun resumes Thermopylæ; The light is Athens where those remnants rest, And Salamis the sea-wall of that sea. The grass men tread upon Is very Marathon, The leaves are of that time-unstricken tree That storm nor sun can fret Nor wind, since she that set Made it her sign to men whose shield was she; Here, as dead time his deathless things, Eurotas and Cephisus keep their sleepless springs.

7

O hills of Crete, are these things dead? O waves, O many-mouthed streams, are these springs dry? Earth, dost thou feed and hide now none but slaves? Heaven, hast thou heard of men that would not die? p. 14Is the land thick with only such men’s graves As were ashamed to look upon the sky? Ye dead, whose name outfaces and outbraves Death, is the seed of such as you gone by? Sea, have thy ports not heard Some Marathonian word Rise up to landward and to Godward fly? No thunder, that the skies Sent not upon us, rise With fire and earthquake and a cleaving cry? Nay, light is here, and shall be light, Though all the face of the hour be overborne with night.

8

I set the trumpet to my lips and blow. The night is broken northward; the pale plains And footless fields of sun-forgotten snow Feel through their creviced lips and iron veins Such quick breath labour and such clean blood flow As summer-stricken spring feels in her pains When dying May bears June, too young to know The fruit that waxes from the flower that wanes; Strange tyrannies and vast, Tribes frost-bound to their past, Lands that are loud all through their length with chains, Wastes where the wind’s wings break, Displumed by daylong ache And anguish of blind snows and rack-blown rains, And ice that seals the White Sea’s lips, Whose monstrous weights crush flat the sides of shrieking ships;

p. 159

Horrible sights and sounds of the unreached pole, And shrill fierce climes of inconsolable air, Shining below the beamless aureole That hangs about the north-wind’s hurtling hair, A comet-lighted lamp, sublime and sole Dawn of the dayless heaven where suns despair; Earth, skies, and waters, smitten into soul, Feel the hard veil that iron centuries wear Rent as with hands in sunder, Such hands as make the thunder And clothe with form all substance and strip bare; Shapes, shadows, sounds and lights Of their dead days and nights Take soul of life too keen for death to bear; Life, conscience, forethought, will, desire, Flood men’s inanimate eyes and dry-drawn hearts with fire.

10

Light, light, and light! to break and melt in sunder All clouds and chains that in one bondage bind Eyes, hands, and spirits, forged by fear and wonder And sleek fierce fraud with hidden knife behind; There goes no fire from heaven before their thunder, Nor are the links not malleable that wind Round the snared limbs and souls that ache thereunder; The hands are mighty, were the head not blind. Priest is the staff of king, And chains and clouds one thing, And fettered flesh with devastated mind. Open thy soul to see, Slave, and thy feet are free; Thy bonds and thy beliefs are one in kind, p. 16And of thy fears thine irons wrought Hang weights upon thee fashioned out of thine own thought.

11

O soul, O God, O glory of liberty, To night and day their lightning and their light! With heat of heart thou kindlest the quick sea, And the dead earth takes spirit from thy sight; The natural body of things is warm with thee, And the world’s weakness parcel of thy might; Thou seest us feeble and forceless, fit to be Slaves of the years that drive us left and right, Drowned under hours like waves Wherethrough we row like slaves; But if thy finger touch us, these take flight. If but one sovereign word Of thy live lips be heard, What man shall stop us, and what God shall smite? Do thou but look in our dead eyes, They are stars that light each other till thy sundawn rise.

12

Thou art the eye of this blind body of man, The tongue of this dumb people; shalt thou not See, shalt thou speak not for them? Time is wan And hope is weak with waiting, and swift thought Hath lost the wings at heel wherewith he ran, And on the red pit’s edge sits down distraught To talk with death of days republican And dreams and fights long since dreamt out and fought; p. 17Of the last hope that drew To that red edge anew The firewhite faith of Poland without spot; Of the blind Russian might, And fire that is not light; Of the green Rhineland where thy spirit wrought; But though time, hope, and memory tire, Canst thou wax dark as they do, thou whose light is fire?

13

I set the trumpet to my lips and blow. The night is broken westward; the wide sea That makes immortal motion to and fro From world’s end unto world’s end, and shall be When nought now grafted of men’s hands shall grow And as the weed in last year’s waves are we Or spray the sea-wind shook a year ago From its sharp tresses down the storm to lee, The moving god that hides Time in its timeless tides Wherein time dead seems live eternity, That breaks and makes again Much mightier things than men, Doth it not hear change coming, or not see? Are the deeps deaf and dead and blind, To catch no light or sound from landward of mankind?

14

O thou, clothed round with raiment of white waves, Thy brave brows lightening through the grey wet air, Thou, lulled with sea-sounds of a thousand caves, And lit with sea-shine to thine inland lair, p. 18Whose freedom clothed the naked souls of slaves And stripped the muffled souls of tyrants bare, O, by the centuries of thy glorious graves, By the live light of the earth that was thy care, Live, thou must not be dead, Live; let thine armèd head Lift itself up to sunward and the fair Daylight of time and man, Thine head republican, With the same splendour on thine helmless hair That in his eyes kept up a light Who on thy glory gazed away their sacred sight;

15

Who loved and looked their sense to death on thee; Who taught thy lips imperishable things, And in thine ears outsang thy singing sea; Who made thy foot firm on the necks of kings And thy soul somewhile steadfast—woe are we It was but for a while, and all the strings Were broken of thy spirit; yet had he Set to such tunes and clothed it with such wings It seemed for his sole sake Impossible to break, And woundless of the worm that waits and stings, The golden-headed worm Made headless for a term, The king-snake whose life kindles with the spring’s, To breathe his soul upon her bloom, And while she marks not turn her temple to her tomb.

p. 1916