free-verse101 lines

A Parting Song

by Algernon Charles Swinburne

To a friend leaving England for a year's residence in Australia.

These winds and suns of spring

That warm with breath and wing

The trembling sleep of earth, till half awake

She laughs and blushes ere her slumber break,

For all good gifts they bring

Require one better thing,

For all the loans of joy they lend us, borrow

One sharper dole of sorrow,

To sunder soon by half a world of sea

Her son from England and my friend from me.

Nor hope nor love nor fear

May speed or stay one year,

Nor song nor prayer may bid, as mine would fain,

The seasons perish and be born again,

Restoring all we lend,

Reluctant, of a friend,

The voice, the hand, the presence and the sight

That lend their life and light

To present gladness and heart-strengthening cheer,

Now lent again for one reluctant year.

So much we lend indeed,

Perforce, by force of need,

So much we must; even these things and no more

The far sea sundering and the sundered shore

A world apart from ours,

So much the imperious hours,

Exact, and spare not; but no more than these

All earth and all her seas

From thought and faith of trust and truth can borrow,

Not memory from desire, nor hope from sorrow.

Through bright and dark and bright

Returns of day and night

I bid the swift year speed and change and give

His breath of life to make the next year live

With sunnier suns for us

A life more prosperous,

And laugh with flowers more fragrant, that shall see

A merrier March for me,

A rosier-girdled race of night with day,

A goodlier April and a tenderer May.

For him the inverted year

Shall mark our seasons here

With alien alternation, and revive

This withered winter, slaying the spring alive

With darts more sharply drawn

As nearer draws the dawn

In heaven transfigured over earth transformed

And with our winters warmed

And wasted with our summers, till the beams

Rise on his face that rose on Dante's dreams.

Till fourfold morning rise

Of starshine on his eyes,

Dawn of the spheres that brand steep heaven across

At height of night with semblance of a cross

Whose grace and ghostly glory

Poured heaven on purgatory

Seeing with their flamelets risen all heaven grow glad

For love thereof it had

And lovely joy of loving; so may these

Make bright with welcome now their southern seas.

O happy stars, whose mirth

The saddest soul on earth

That ever soared and sang found strong to bless,

Lightening his life's harsh load of heaviness

With comfort sown like seed

In dream though not in deed

On sprinkled wastes of darkling thought divine,

Let all your lights now shine

With all as glorious gladness on his eyes

For whom indeed and not in dream they rise.

As those great twins of air

Hailed once with oldworld prayer

Of all folk alway faring forth by sea,

So now may these for grace and guidance be,

To guard his sail and bring

Again to brighten spring

The face we look for and the hand we lack

Still, till they light him back,

As welcome as to first discovering eyes

Their light rose ever, soon on his to rise.

As parting now he goes

From snow-time back to snows,

So back to spring from summer may next year

Restore him, and our hearts receive him here,

The best good gift that spring

Had ever grace to bring

At fortune's happiest hour of star-blest birth

Back to love's homebright earth,

To eyes with eyes that commune, hand with hand,

And the old warm bosom of all our mother-land.

Earth and sea-wind and sea

And stars and sunlight be

Alike all prosperous for him, and all hours

Have all one heart, and all that heart as ours.

All things as good as strange

Crown all the seasons' change

With changing flower and compensating fruit

From one year's ripening root;

Till next year bring us, roused at spring's recall,

A heartier flower and goodlier fruit than all.