free-verse280 lines

In The Bay

by Algernon Charles Swinburne

Beyond the hollow sunset, ere a star

Take heart in heaven from eastward, while the west,

Fulfilled of watery resonance and rest,

Is as a port with clouds for harbour bar

To fold the fleet in of the winds from far

That stir no plume now of the bland sea's breast:

Above the soft sweep of the breathless bay

Southwestward, far past flight of night and day,

Lower than the sunken sunset sinks, and higher

Than dawn can freak the front of heaven with fire,

My thought with eyes and wings made wide makes way

To find the place of souls that I desire.

III

If any place for any soul there be,

Disrobed and disentrammelled; if the might,

The fire and force that filled with ardent light

The souls whose shadow is half the light we see,

Survive and be suppressed not of the night;

This hour should show what all day hid from me.

Night knows not, neither is it shown to day,

By sunlight nor by starlight is it shown,

Nor to the full moon's eye nor footfall known,

Their world's untrodden and unkindled way.

Nor is the breath nor music of it blown

With sounds of winter or with winds of May.

But here, where light and darkness reconciled

Held earth between them as a weanling child

Between the balanced hands of death and birth,

Even as they held the new-born shape of earth

When first life trembled in her limbs and smiled,

Here hope might think to find what hope were worth.

Past Hades, past Elysium, past the long

Slow smooth strong lapse of Lethe'past the toil

Wherein all souls are taken as a spoil,

The Stygian web of waters'if your song

Be quenched not, O our brethren, but be strong

As ere ye too shook off our temporal coil;

VII

If yet these twain survive your worldly breath,

Joy trampling sorrow, life devouring death,

If perfect life possess your life all through

And like your words your souls be deathless too,

To-night, of all whom night encompasseth,

My soul would commune with one soul of you.

VIII

Above the sunset might I see thine eyes

That were above the sundawn in our skies,

Son of the songs of morning,'thine that were

First lights to lighten that rekindling air

Wherethrough men saw the front of England rise

And heard thine loudest of the lyre-notes there'

If yet thy fire have not one spark the less,

O Titan, born of her a Titaness,

Across the sunrise and the sunset's mark

Send of thy lyre one sound, thy fire one spark,

To change this face of our unworthiness,

Across this hour dividing light from dark.

To change this face of our chill time, that hears

No song like thine of all that crowd its ears,

Of all its lights that lighten all day long

Sees none like thy most fleet and fiery sphere's

Outlightening Sirius'in its twilight throng

No thunder and no sunrise like thy song.

Hath not the sea-wind swept the sea-line bare

To pave with stainless fire through stainless air

A passage for thine heavenlier feet to tread

Ungrieved of earthly floor-work? hath it spread

No covering splendid as the sun-god's hair

To veil or to reveal thy lordlier head?

XII

Hath not the sunset strewn across the sea

A way majestical enough for thee?

What hour save this should be thine hour'and mine,

If thou have care of any less divine

Than thine own soul; if thou take thought of me,

Marlowe, as all my soul takes thought of thine?

XIII

Before the morn's face as before the sun

The morning star and evening star are one

For all men's lands as England. O, if night

Hang hard upon us,'ere our day take flight,

Shed thou some comfort from thy day long done

On us pale children of the latter light!

XIV

For surely, brother and master and lord and king,

Where'er thy footfall and thy face make spring

In all souls' eyes that meet thee wheresoe'er,

And have thy soul for sunshine and sweet air'

Some late love of thine old live land should cling,

Some living love of England, round thee there.

Here from her shore across her sunniest sea

My soul makes question of the sun for thee,

And waves and beams make answer. When thy feet

Made her ways flowerier and their flowers more sweet

With childlike passage of a god to be,

Like spray these waves cast off her foemen's fleet.

XVI

Like foam they flung it from her, and like weed

Its wrecks were washed from scornful shoal to shoal,

From rock to rock reverberate; and the whole

Sea laughed and lightened with a deathless deed

That sowed our enemies in her field for seed

And made her shores fit harbourage for thy soul.

XVII

Then in her green south fields, a poor man's child,

Thou hadst thy short sweet fill of half-blown joy,

That ripens all of us for time to cloy

With full-blown pain and passion; ere the wild

World caught thee by the fiery heart, and smiled

To make so swift end of the godlike boy.

XVIII

For thou, if ever godlike foot there trod

These fields of ours, wert surely like a god.

Who knows what splendour of strange dreams was shed

With sacred shadow and glimmer of gold and red

From hallowed windows, over stone and sod,

On thine unbowed bright insubmissive head?

XIX

The shadow stayed not, but the splendour stays,

Our brother, till the last of English days.

No day nor night on English earth shall be

For ever, spring nor summer, Junes nor Mays,

But somewhat as a sound or gleam of thee

Shall come on us like morning from the sea.

Like sunrise never wholly risen, nor yet

Quenched; or like sunset never wholly set,

A light to lighten as from living eyes

The cold unlit close lids of one that lies

Dead, or a ray returned from death's far skies

To fire us living lest our lives forget.

XXI

For in that heaven what light of lights may be,

What splendour of what stars, what spheres of flame

Sounding, that none may number nor may name,

We know not, even thy brethren; yea, not we

Whose eyes desire the light that lightened thee,

Whose ways and thine are one way and the same.

XXII

But if the riddles that in sleep we read,

And trust them not, be flattering truth indeed,

As he that rose our mightiest called them,'he,

Much higher than thou as thou much higher than we'

There, might we say, all flower of all our seed,

All singing souls are as one sounding sea.

XXIII

All those that here were of thy kind and kin,

Beside thee and below thee, full of love,

Full-souled for song,'and one alone above

Whose only light folds all your glories in'

With all birds' notes from nightingale to dove

Fill the world whither we too fain would win.

XXIV

The world that sees in heaven the sovereign light

Of sunlike Shakespeare, and the fiery night

Whose stars were watched of Webster; and beneath,

The twin-souled brethren of the single wreath,

Grown in kings' gardens, plucked from pastoral heath,

Wrought with all flowers for all men's heart's delight.

XXV

And that fixed fervour, iron-red like Mars,

In the mid moving tide of tenderer stars,

That burned on loves and deeds the darkest done,

Athwart the incestuous prisoner's bride-house bars;

And thine, most highest of all their fires but one,

Our morning star, sole risen before the sun.

XXVI

And one light risen since theirs to run such race

Thou hast seen, O Phosphor, from thy pride of place.

Thou hast seen Shelley, him that was to thee

As light to fire or dawn to lightning; me,

Me likewise, O our brother, shalt thou see,

And I behold thee, face to glorious face?

XXVII

You twain the same swift year of manhood swept

Down the steep darkness, and our father wept.

And from the gleam of Apollonian tears

A holier aureole rounds your memories, kept

Most fervent-fresh of all the singing spheres,

And April-coloured through all months and years.

XXVIII

You twain fate spared not half your fiery span;

The longer date fulfils the lesser man.

Ye from beyond the dark dividing date

Stand smiling, crowned as gods with foot on fate.

For stronger was your blessing than his ban,

And earliest whom he struck, he struck too late.

XXIX

Yet love and loathing, faith and unfaith yet

Bind less to greater souls in unison,

And one desire that makes three spirits as one

Takes great and small as in one spiritual net

Woven out of hope toward what shall yet be done

Ere hate or love remember or forget.

XXX

Woven out of faith and hope and love too great

To bear the bonds of life and death and fate:

Woven out of love and hope and faith too dear

To take the print of doubt and change and fear:

And interwoven with lines of wrath and hate

Blood-red with soils of many a sanguine year.

XXXI

Who cannot hate, can love not; if he grieve,

His tears are barren as the unfruitful rain

That rears no harvest from the green sea's plain,

And as thorns crackling this man's laugh is vain.

Nor can belief touch, kindle, smite, reprieve

His heart who has not heart to disbelieve.

XXXII

But you, most perfect in your hate and love,

Our great twin-spirited brethren; you that stand

Head by head glittering, hand made fast in hand,

And underfoot the fang-drawn worm that strove

To wound you living; from so far above,

Look love, not scorn, on ours that was your land.

XXXIII

For love we lack, and help and heat and light

To clothe us and to comfort us with might.

What help is ours to take or give? but ye'

O, more than sunrise to the blind cold sea,

That wailed aloud with all her waves all night,

Much more, being much more glorious, should you be.

XXXIV

As fire to frost, as ease to toil, as dew

To flowerless fields, as sleep to slackening pain,

As hope to souls long weaned from hope again

Returning, or as blood revived anew

To dry-drawn limbs and every pulseless vein,

Even so toward us should no man be but you.

XXXV

One rose before the sunrise was, and one

Before the sunset, lovelier than the sun.

And now the heaven is dark and bright and loud

With wind and starry drift and moon and cloud,

And night's cry rings in straining sheet and shroud,

What help is ours if hope like yours be none?

XXXVI

O well-beloved, our brethren, if ye be,

Then are we not forsaken. This kind earth

Made fragrant once for all time with your birth,

And bright for all men with your love, and worth

The clasp and kiss and wedlock of the sea,

Were not your mother if not your brethren we.

XXXVII

Because the days were dark with gods and kings

And in time's hand the old hours of time as rods,

When force and fear set hope and faith at odds,

Ye failed not nor abased your plume-plucked wings;

And we that front not more disastrous things,

How should we fail in face of kings and gods?

XXXVIII

For now the deep dense plumes of night are thinned

Surely with winnowing of the glimmering wind

Whose feet we fledged with morning; and the breath

Begins in heaven that sings the dark to death.

And all the night wherein men groaned and sinned

Sickens at heart to hear what sundawn saith.

XXXIX

O first-born sons of hope and fairest, ye

Whose prows first clove the thought-unsounded sea

Whence all the dark dead centuries rose to bar

The spirit of man lest truth should make him free,

The sunrise and the sunset, seeing one star,

Take heart as we to know you that ye are.

Ye rise not and ye set not; we that say

Ye rise and set like hopes that set and rise

Look yet but seaward from a land-locked bay;

But where at last the sea's line is the sky's

And truth and hope one sunlight in your eyes,

No sunrise and no sunset marks their day.