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Evening on the Broads

by Algernon Charles Swinburne

Over two shadowless waters, adrift as a pinnace in peril,

Hangs as in heavy suspense, charged with irresolute light,

Softly the soul of the sunset upholden awhile on the sterile

Waves and wastes of the land, half repossessed by the night.

Inland glimmer the shallows asleep and afar in the breathless

Twilight: yonder the depths darken afar and asleep.

Slowly the semblance of death out of heaven descends on the deathless

Waters: hardly the light lives on the face of the deep

Hardly, but here for awhile. All over the grey soft shallow

Hover the colours and clouds of the twilight, void of a star.

As a bird unfledged is the broad-winged night, whose winglets are callow

Yet, but soon with their plumes will she cover her brood from afar,

Cover the brood of her worlds that cumber the skies with their blossom

Thick as the darkness of leaf-shadowed spring is encumbered with flowers.

World upon world is enwound in the bountiful girth of her bosom,

Warm and lustrous with life lovely to look on as ours.

Still is the sunset adrift as a spirit in doubt that dissembles

Still with itself, being sick of division and dimmed by dismay

Nay, not so; but with love and delight beyond passion it trembles,

Fearful and fain of the night, lovely with love of the day:

Fain and fearful of rest that is like unto death, and begotten

Out of the womb of the tomb, born of the seed of the grave:

Lovely with shadows of loves that are only not wholly forgotten,

Only not wholly suppressed by the dark as a wreck by the wave.

Still there linger the loves of the morning and noon, in a vision

Blindly beheld, but in vain: ghosts that are tired, and would rest.

But the glories beloved of the night rise all too dense for division,

Deep in the depth of her breast sheltered as doves in a nest.

Fainter the beams of the loves of the daylight season enkindled

Wane, and the memories of hours that were fair with the love of them fade:

Loftier, aloft of the lights of the sunset stricken and dwindled,

Gather the signs of the love at the heart of the night new-made.

New-made night, new-born of the sunset, immeasurable, endless,

Opens the secret of love hid from of old in her heart,

In the deep sweet heart full-charged with faultless love of the friendless

Spirits of men that are eased when the wheels of the sun depart.

Still is the sunset afloat as a ship on the waters upholden

Full-sailed, wide-winged, poised softly for ever asway

Nay, not so, but at least for a little, awhile at the golden

Limit of arching air fain for an hour to delay.

Here on the bar of the sand-bank, steep yet aslope to the gleaming

Waste of the water without, waste of the water within,

Lights overhead and lights underneath seem doubtfully dreaming

Whether the day be done, whether the night may begin.

Far and afar and farther again they falter and hover,

Warm on the water and deep in the sky and pale on the cloud:

Colder again and slowly remoter, afraid to recover

Breath, yet fain to revive, as it seems, from the skirt of the shroud.

Faintly the heartbeats shorten and pause of the light in the westward

Heaven, as eastward quicken the paces of star upon star

Hurried and eager of life as a child that strains to the breast-ward

Eagerly, yearning forth of the deeps where the ways of them are,

Glad of the glory of the gift of their life and the wealth of its wonder,

Fain of the night and the sea and the sweet wan face of the earth.

Over them air grows deeper, intense with delight in them: under

Things are thrilled in their sleep as with sense of a sure new birth.

But here by the sand-bank watching, with eyes on the sea-line, stranger

Grows to me also the weight of the sea-ridge gazed on of me,

Heavily heaped up, changefully changeless, void though of danger

Void not of menace, but full of the might of the dense dull sea.

Like as the wave is before me, behind is the bank deep-drifted;

Yellow and thick as the bank is behind me in front is the wave.

As the wall of a prison imprisoning the mere is the girth of it lifted:

But the rampire of water in front is erect as the wall of a grave.

And the crests of it crumble and topple and change, but the wall is not broken:

Standing still dry-shod, I see it as higher than my head,

Moving inland alway again, reared up as in token

Still of impending wrath still in the foam of it shed.

And even in the pauses between them, dividing the rollers in sunder,

High overhead seems ever the sea-line fixed as a mark,

And the shore where I stand as a valley beholden of hills whence thunder

Cloud and torrent and storm, darkening the depths of the dark.

Up to the sea, not upon it or over it, upward from under

Seems he to gaze, whose eyes yearn after it here from the shore:

A wall of turbid water, aslope to the wide sky's wonder

Of colour and cloud, it climbs, or spreads as a slanted floor.

And the large lights change on the face of the mere like things that were living,

Winged and wonderful, beams like as birds are that pass and are free:

But the light is dense as darkness, a gift withheld in the giving,

That lies as dead on the fierce dull face of the landward sea.

Stained and stifled and soiled, made earthier than earth is and duller,

Grimly she puts back light as rejected, a thing put away:

No transparent rapture, a molten music of colour;

No translucent love taken and given of the day.

Fettered and marred and begrimed is the light's live self on her falling,

As the light of a man's life lighted the fume of a dungeon mars:

Only she knows of the wind, when her wrath gives ear to him calling;

The delight of the light she knows not, nor answers the sun or the stars.

Love she hath none to return for the luminous love of their giving:

None to reflect from the bitter and shallow response of her heart

Yearly she feeds on her dead, yet herself seems dead and not living,

Or confused as a soul heavy-laden with trouble that will not depart.

In the sound of her speech to the darkness the moan of her evil remorse is,

Haply, for strong ships gnawed by the dog-toothed sea-bank's fang

And trampled to death by the rage of the feet of her foam-lipped horses

Whose manes are yellow as plague, and as ensigns of pestilence hang,

That wave in the foul faint air of the breath of a death-stricken city;

So menacing heaves she the manes of her rollers knotted with sand,

Discoloured, opaque, suspended in sign as of strength without pity,

That shake with flameless thunder the low long length of the strand.

Here, far off in the farther extreme of the shore as it lengthens

Northward, lonely for miles, ere ever a village begin,

On the lapsing land that recedes as the growth of the strong sea strengthens

Shoreward, thrusting further and further its outworks in,

Here in Shakespeare's vision, a flower of her kin forsaken,

Lay in her golden raiment alone on the wild wave's edge,

Surely by no shore else, but here on the bank storm-shaken,

Perdita, bright as a dew-drop engilt of the sun on the sedge.

Here on a shore unbeheld of his eyes in a dream he beheld her

Outcast, fair as a fairy, the child of a far-off king:

And over the babe-flower gently the head of a pastoral elder

Bowed, compassionate, hoar as the hawthorn-blossom in spring,

And kind as harvest in autumn: a shelter of shade on the lonely

Shelterless unknown shore scourged of implacable waves:

Here, where the wind walks royal, alone in his kingdom, and only

Sounds to the sedges a wail as of triumph that conquers and craves.

All these waters and wastes are his empire of old, and awaken

From barren and stagnant slumber at only the sound of his breath:

Yet the hunger is eased not that aches in his heart, nor the goal overtaken

That his wide wings yearn for and labour as hearts that yearn after death.

All the solitude sighs and expects with a blind expectation

Somewhat unknown of its own sad heart, grown heart-sick of strife:

Till sometime its wild heart maddens, and moans, and the vast ululation

Takes wing with the clouds on the waters, and wails to be quit of its life.

For the spirit and soul of the waste is the wind, and his wings with their waving

Darken and lighten the darkness and light of it thickened or thinned;

But the heart that impels them is even as a conqueror's insatiably craving

That victory can fill not, as power cannot satiate the want of the wind.

All these moorlands and marshes are full of his might, and oppose not

Aught of defence nor of barrier, of forest or precipice piled:

But the will of the wind works ever as his that desires what he knows not,

And the wail of his want unfulfilled is as one making moan for her child.

And the cry of his triumph is even as the crying of hunger that maddens

The heart of a strong man aching in vain as the wind's heart aches

And the sadness itself of the land for its infinite solitude saddens

More for the sound than the silence athirst for the sound that slakes.

And the sunset at last and the twilight are dead: and the darkness is breathless

With fear of the wind's breath rising that seems and seems not to sleep:

But a sense of the sound of it alway, a spirit unsleeping and deathless,

Ghost or God, evermore moves on the face of the deep.