Transcribed from the 1887 Chatto & Windus edition by DavidPrice,
A TRAGEDY
BY
ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE
London
CHATTO & WINDUS, PICCADILLY
1887
[The right of translation isreserved]
PRINTEDBY
SPOTTISWOODE AND CO., NEW-STREETSQUARE
LONDON
TO ALICE SWINBURNE.
The love that comesand goes like wind or fire
Hath words and wings wherewith to speak and flee.
But love more deep than passion’s deep desire,
Clear and inviolable as the unsounded sea,
What wings of words may serve to set it free,
To lift and lead it homeward? Time and death
Are less than love: or man’s live spirit saith
False, when he deems his life is more than breath.
No words may utter love; no sovereign song
Speak all it would for love’s sake. Yetwould I
Fain cast in moulded rhymes that do me wrong
Some little part of all my love: but why
Should weak and wingless words be fain to fly?
For us the years that live not are not dead:
Past days and present in our hearts are wed:
My song can say no more than love hath said.
Love needs nor song nor speech to say whatlove
Would speak or sing, were speech and song notweak
To bear the sense-belated soul above
And bid the lips of silence breathe and speak.
Nor power nor will has love to find or seek
Words indiscoverable, ampler strains of song
Than ever hailed him fair or shewed him strong:
And less than these should do him worse than wrong.
We who remember not a day wherein
We have not loved each other,—who can see
No time, since time bade first our days begin,
Within the sweep of memory’s wings, when we
Have known not what each other’s love mustbe,—
We are well content to know it, and rest on this,
And call not words to witness that it is.
To love aloud is oft to love amiss.
But if the gracious witness borne of words
Take not from speechless love the secret grace
That binds it round with silence, and engirds
Its heart with memories fair as heaven’s ownface,
Let love take courage for a little space
To speak and be rebuked not of the soul,
Whose utterance, ere the unwitting speech be whole,
Rebukes itself, and craves again control.
A ninefold garland wrought of song-flowersnine
Wound each with each in chance-inwoven accord
Here at your feet I lay as on a shrine
Whereof the holiest love that lives is lord.
With faint strange hues their leaves are freaked andscored:
The fable-flowering land wherein they grew
Hath dreams for stars, and grey romance for dew:
Perchance no flower thence plucked may flower anew.
No part have these wan legends in the sun
Whose glory lightens Greece and gleams on Rome.
Their elders live: but these—their day is done,
Their records written of the wind in foam
Fly down the wind, and darkness takes them home.
What Homer saw, what Virgil dreamed, was truth,
And dies not,