free-verse878 lines

Song for the Centenary of Walter Savage Landor

by Algernon Charles Swinburne

Born January 30th, 1775

Died September 17th, 1864

There is delight in singing, though none hear

Beside the singer: and there is delight

In praising, though the praiser sit alone

And see the praised far off him, far above.

- Landor.

Dedication.

To Mrs. Lynn Linton.

Daughter in spirit elect and consecrate

By love and reverence of the Olympian sire

Whom I too loved and worshipped, seeing so great,

And found so gracious toward my long desire

To bid that love in song before his gate

Sound, and my lute be loyal to his lyre,

To none save one it now may dedicate

Song's new burnt-offering on a century's pyre.

And though the gift be light

As ashes in men's sight,

Left by the flame of no ethereal fire,

Yet, for his worthier sake

Than words are worthless, take

This wreath of words ere yet their hour expire:

So, haply, from some heaven above,

He, seeing, may set next yours my sacrifice of love.

May 24, 1880.

Song for the Centenary of Walter Savage Landor

Five years beyond an hundred years have seen

Their winters, white as faith's and age's hue,

Melt, smiling through brief tears that broke between,

And hope's young conquering colours reared anew,

Since, on the day whose edge for kings made keen

Smote sharper once than ever storm-wind blew,

A head predestined for the girdling green

That laughs at lightning all the seasons through,

Nor frost or change can sunder

Its crown untouched of thunder

Leaf from least leaf of all its leaves that grew

Alone for brows too bold

For storm to sear of old,

Elect to shine in time's eternal view,

Rose on the verge of radiant life

Between the winds and sunbeams mingling love with strife.

The darkling day that gave its bloodred birth

To Milton's white republic undefiled

That might endure so few fleet years on earth

Bore in him likewise as divine a child;

But born not less for crowns of love and mirth,

Of palm and myrtle passionate and mild,

The leaf that girds about with gentler girth

The brow steel-bound in battle, and the wild

Soft spray that flowers above

The flower-soft hair of love;

And the white lips of wayworn winter smiled

And grew serene as spring's

When with stretched clouds like wings

Or wings like drift of snow-clouds massed and piled

The godlike giant, softening, spread

A shadow of stormy shelter round the new-born head.

And o'er it brightening bowed the wild-haired hour,

And touched his tongue with honey and with fire,

And breathed between his lips the note of power

That makes of all the winds of heaven a lyre

Whose strings are stretched from topmost peaks that tower

To softest springs of waters that suspire,

With sounds too dim to shake the lowliest flower

Breathless with hope and dauntless with desire:

And bright before his face

That Hour became a Grace,

As in the light of their Athenian quire

When the Hours before the sun

And Graces were made one,

Called by sweet Love down from the aerial gyre

By one dear name of natural joy,

To bear on her bright breast from heaven a heaven-born boy.

Ere light could kiss the little lids in sunder

Or love could lift them for the sun to smite,

His fiery birth-star as a sign of wonder

Had risen, perplexing the presageful night

With shadow and glory around her sphere and under

And portents prophesying by sound and sight;

And half the sound was song and half was thunder,

And half his life of lightning, half of light:

And in the soft clenched hand

Shone like a burning brand

A shadowy sword for swordless fields of fight,

Wrought only for such lord

As so may wield the sword

That all things ill be put to fear and flight

Even at the flash and sweep and gleam

Of one swift stroke beheld but in a shuddering dream.

Like the sun's rays that blind the night's wild beasts

The sword of song shines as the swordsman sings;

From the west wind's verge even to the arduous east's

The splendour of the shadow that it flings

Makes fire and storm in heaven above the feasts

Of men fulfilled with food of evil things;

Strikes dumb the lying and hungering lips of priests,

Smites dead the slaying and ravening hands of kings;

Turns dark the lamp's hot light,

And turns the darkness bright

As with the shadow of dawn's reverberate wings;

And far before its way

Heaven, yearning toward the day,

Shines with its thunder and round its lightning rings;

And never hand yet earlier played

With that keen sword whose hilt is cloud, and fire its blade.

As dropping flakes of honey-heavy dew

More soft than slumber's, fell the first note's sound

From strings the swift young hand strayed lightlier through

Than leaves through calm air wheeling toward the ground

Stray down the drifting wind when skies are blue

Nor yet the wings of latter winds unbound,

Ere winter loosen all the 'olian crew

With storm unleashed behind them like a hound.

As lightly rose and sank

Beside a green-flowered bank

The clear first notes his burning boyhood found

To sing her sacred praise

Who rode her city's ways

Clothed with bright hair and with high purpose crowned;

A song of soft presageful breath,

Prefiguring all his love and faith in life and death;

Who should love two things only and only praise

More than all else for ever: even the glory

Of goodly beauty in women, whence all days

Take light whereby death's self seems transitory;

And loftier love than loveliest eyes can raise,

Love that wipes off the miry stains and gory

From Time's worn feet, besmirched on bloodred ways,

And lightens with his light the night of story;

Love that lifts up from dust

Life, and makes darkness just,

And purges as with fire of purgatory

The dense disastrous air,

To burn old falsehood bare

And give the wind its ashes heaped and hoary;

Love, that with eyes of ageless youth

Sees on the breast of Freedom borne her nursling Truth.

For at his birth the sistering stars were one

That flamed upon it as one fiery star;

Freedom, whose light makes pale the mounting sun,

And Song, whose fires are quenched when Freedom's are.

Of all that love not liberty let none

Love her that fills our lips with fire from far

To mix with winds and seas in unison

And sound athwart life's tideless harbour-bar

Out where our songs fly free

Across time's bounded sea,

A boundless flight beyond the dim sun's car,

Till all the spheres of night

Chime concord round their flight

Too loud for blasts of warring change to mar,

From stars that sang for Homer's birth

To these that gave our Landor welcome back from earth

Shine, as above his cradle, on his grave,

Stars of our worship, lights of our desire!

For never man that heard the world's wind rave

To you was truer in trust of heart and lyre:

Nor Greece nor England on a brow more brave

Beheld your flame against the wind burn higher:

Nor all the gusts that blanch life's worldly wave

With surf and surge could quench its flawless fire:

No blast of all that blow

Might bid the torch burn low

That lightens on us yet as o'er his pyre,

Indomitable of storm,

That now no flaws deform

Nor thwart winds baffle ere it all aspire,

One light of godlike breath and flame,

To write on heaven with man's most glorious names his name.

10.

The very dawn was dashed with stormy dew

And freaked with fire as when God's hand would mar

Palaces reared of tyrants, and the blue

Deep heaven was kindled round her thunderous car,

That saw how swift a gathering glory grew

About him risen, ere clouds could blind or bar

A splendour strong to burn and burst them through

And mix in one sheer light things near and far.

First flew before his path

Light shafts of love and wrath,

But winged and edged as elder warriors' are;

Then rose a light that showed

Across the midsea road

From radiant Calpe to revealed Masar

The way of war and love and fate

Between the goals of fear and fortune, hope and hate.

11.

Mine own twice banished fathers' harbour-land,

Their nursing-mother France, the well-beloved,

By the arduous blast of sanguine sunrise fanned,

Flamed on him, and his burning lips were moved

As that live statue's throned on Lybian sand

When morning moves it, ere her light faith roved

From promise, and her tyrant's poisonous hand

Fed hope with Corsic honey till she proved

More deadly than despair

And falser even than fair,

Though fairer than all elder hopes removed

As landmarks by the crime

Of inundating time;

Light faith by grief too loud too long reproved:

For even as in some darkling dance

Wronged love changed hands with hate, and turned his heart from France.

12.

But past the snows and summits Pyrenean

Love stronger-winged held more prevailing flight

That o'er Tyrrhene, Iberian, and 'gean

Shores lightened with one storm of sound and light.

From earliest even to hoariest years one p'an

Rang rapture through the fluctuant roar of fight,

From Nestor's tongue in accents Achillean

On death's blind verge dominant over night

For voice as hand and hand

As voice for one fair land

Rose radiant, smote sonorous, past the height

Where darkling pines enrobe

The steel-cold Lake of Gaube,

Deep as dark death and keen as death to smite,

To where on peak or moor or plain

His heart and song and sword were one to strike for Spain.

13.

Resurgent at his lifted voice and hand

Pale in the light of war or treacherous fate

Song bade before him all their shadows stand

For whom his will unbarred their funeral grate.

The father by whose wrong revenged his land

Was given for sword and fire to desolate

Rose fire-encircled as a burning brand,

Great as the woes he wrought and bore were great.

Fair as she smiled and died,

Death's crowned and breathless bride

Smiled as one living even on craft and hate:

And pity, a star unrisen,

Scarce lit Ferrante's prison

Ere night unnatural closed the natural gate

That gave their life and love and light

To those fair eyes despoiled by fratricide of sight.

14.

Tears bright and sweet as fire and incense fell

In perfect notes of music-measured pain

On veiled sweet heads that heard not love's farewell

Sob through the song that bade them rise again;

Rise in the light of living song, to dwell

With memories crowned of memory: so the strain

Made soft as heaven the stream that girdles hell

And sweet the darkness of the breathless plain,

And with Elysian flowers

Recrowned the wreathless hours

That mused and mourned upon their works in vain;

For all their works of death

Song filled with light and breath,

And listening grief relaxed her lightening chain;

For sweet as all the wide sweet south

She found the song like honey from the lion's mouth.

15.

High from his throne in heaven Simonides,

Crowned with mild aureole of memorial tears

That the everlasting sun of all time sees

All golden, molten from the forge of years,

Smiled, as the gift was laid upon his knees

Of songs that hang like pearls in mourners' ears,

Mild as the murmuring of Hymettian bees

And honied as their harvest, that endears

The toil of flowery days;

And smiling perfect praise

Hailed his one brother mateless else of peers:

Whom we that hear not him

For length of date grown dim

Hear, and the heart grows glad of grief that hears;

And harshest heights of sorrowing hours,

Like snows of Alpine April, melt from tears to flowers.

16.

Therefore to him the shadow of death was none,

The darkness was not, nor the temporal tomb:

And multitudinous time for him was one,

Who bade before his equal seat of doom

Rise and stand up for judgment in the sun

The weavers of the world's large-historied loom,

By their own works of light or darkness done

Clothed round with light or girt about with gloom.

In speech of purer gold

Than even they spake of old

He bade the breath of Sidney's lips relume

The fire of thought and love

That made his bright life move

Through fair brief seasons of benignant bloom

To blameless music ever, strong

As death and sweet as death-annihilating song.

17.

Thought gave his wings the width of time to roam,

Love gave his thought strength equal to release

From bonds of old forgetful years, like foam

Vanished, the fame of memories that decrease;

So strongly faith had fledged for flight from home

The soul's large pinions till her strife should cease:

And through the trumpet of a child of Rome

Rang the pure music of the flutes of Greece.

As though some northern hand

Reft from the Latin land

A spoil more costly than the Colchian fleece

To clothe with golden sound

Of old joy newly found

And rapture as of penetrating peace

The naked north-wind's cloudiest clime,

And give its darkness light of the old Sicilian time.

18.

He saw the brand that fired the towers of Troy

Fade, and the darkness at 'none's prayer

Close upon her that closed upon her boy,

For all the curse of godhead that she bare;

And the Apollonian serpent gleam and toy

With scathless maiden limbs and shuddering hair;

And his love smitten in their dawn of joy

Leave Pan the pine-leaf of her change to wear;

And one in flowery coils

Caught as in fiery toils

Smite Calydon with mourning unaware;

And where her low turf shrine

Showed Modesty divine

The fairest mother's daughter far more fair

Hide on her breast the heavenly shame

That kindled once with love should kindle Troy with flame.

19.

Nor less the light of story than of song

With graver glories girt his godlike head,

Reverted alway from the temporal throng

Of lives that live not toward the living dead.

The shadows and the splendours of their throng

Made bright and dark about his board and bed

The lines of life and vision, sweet or strong

With sound of lutes or trumpets blown, that led

Forth of the ghostly gate

Opening in spite of fate

Shapes of majestic or tumultuous tread,

Divine and direful things,

These foul as priests or kings,

Those fair as heaven or love or freedom, red

With blood and green with palms and white

With raiment woven of deeds divine and words of light.

20.

The thunder-fire of Cromwell, and the ray

That keeps the place of Phocion's name serene

And clears the cloud from Kosciusko's day,

Alternate as dark hours with bright between,

Met in the heaven of his high thought, which lay

For all stars open that all eyes had seen

Rise on the night or twilight of the way

Where feet of human hopes and fears had been.

Again the sovereign word

On Milton's lips was heard

Living: again the tender three days' queen

Drew bright and gentle breath

On the sharp edge of death:

And, staged again to show of mortal scene,

Tiberius, ere his name grew dire,

Wept, stainless yet of empire, tears of blood and fire.

21.

Most ardent and most awful and most fond,

The fervour of his Apollonian eye

Yearned upon Hellas, yet enthralled in bond

Of time whose years beheld her and past by

Silent and shameful, till she rose and donned

The casque again of Pallas; for her cry

Forth of the past and future, depths beyond

This where the present and its tyrants lie,

As one great voice of twain

For him had pealed again,

Heard but of hearts high as her own was high,

High as her own and his

And pure as love's heart is,

That lives though hope at once and memory die:

And with her breath his clarion's blast

Was filled as cloud with fire or future souls with past.

22.

As a wave only obsequious to the wind

Leaps to the lifting breeze that bids it leap,

Large-hearted, and its thickening mane be thinned

By the strong god's breath moving on the deep

From utmost Atlas even to extremest Ind

That shakes the plain where no men sow nor reap,

So, moved with wrath toward men that ruled and sinned

And pity toward all tears he saw men weep,

Arose to take man's part

His loving lion heart,

Kind as the sun's that has in charge to keep

Earth and the seed thereof

Safe in his lordly love,

Strong as sheer truth and soft as very sleep;

The mightiest heart since Milton's leapt,

The gentlest since the gentlest heart of Shakespeare slept.

23.

Like the wind's own on her divided sea

His song arose on Corinth, and aloud

Recalled her Isthmian song and strife when she

Was thronged with glories as with gods in crowd

And as the wind's own spirit her breath was free

And as the heaven's own heart her soul was proud,

But freer and prouder stood no son than he

Of all she bare before her heart was bowed;

None higher than he who heard

Medea's keen last word

Transpierce her traitor, and like a rushing cloud

That sundering shows a star

Saw pass her thunderous car

And a face whiter and deadlier than a shroud

That lightened from it, and the brand

Of tender blood that falling seared his suppliant hand.

24.

More fair than all things born and slain of fate,

More glorious than all births of days and nights,

He bade the spirit of man regenerate,

Rekindling, rise and reassume the rights

That in high seasons of his old estate

Clothed him and armed with majesties and mights

Heroic, when the times and hearts were great

And in the depths of ages rose the heights

Radiant of high deeds done

And souls that matched the sun

For splendour with the lightnings of their lights

Whence even their uttered names

Burn like the strong twin flames

Of song that shakes a throne and steel that smites;

As on Thermopyl' when shone

Leonidas, on Syracuse Timoleon.

25.

Or, sweeter than the breathless buds when spring

With smiles and tears and kisses bids them breathe,

Fell with its music from his quiring string

Fragrance of pine-leaves and odorous heath

Twined round the lute whereto he sighed to sing

Of the oak that screened and showed its maid beneath,

Who seeing her bee crawl back with broken wing

Faded, a fairer flower than all her wreath,

And paler, though her oak

Stood scathless of the stroke

More sharp than edge of axe or wolfish teeth,

That mixed with mortals dead

Her own half heavenly head

And life incorporate with a sylvan sheath,

And left the wild rose and the dove

A secret place and sacred from all guests but Love.

26.

But in the sweet clear fields beyond the river

Dividing pain from peace and man from shade

He saw the wings that there no longer quiver

Sink of the hours whose parting footfalls fade

On ears which hear the rustling amaranth shiver

With sweeter sound of wind than ever made

Music on earth: departing, they deliver

The soul that shame or wrath or sorrow swayed;

And round the king of men

Clash the clear arms again,

Clear of all soil and bright as laurel braid,

That rang less high for joy

Through the gates fallen of Troy

Than here to hail the sacrificial maid,

Iphigeneia, when the ford

Fast-flowing of sorrows brought her father and their lord.

27.

And in the clear gulf of the hollow sea

He saw light glimmering through the grave green gloom

That hardly gave the sun's eye leave to see

Cymodameia; but nor tower nor tomb,

No tower on earth, no tomb of waves may be,

That may not sometime by diviner doom

Be plain and pervious to the poet; he

Bids time stand back from him and fate make room

For passage of his feet,

Strong as their own are fleet,

And yield the prey no years may reassume

Through all their clamorous track,

Nor night nor day win back

Nor give to darkness what his eyes illume

And his lips bless for ever: he

Knows what earth knows not, sings truth sung not of the sea.

28.

Before the sentence of a curule chair

More sacred than the Roman, rose and stood

To take their several doom the imperial pair

Diversely born of Venus, and in mood

Diverse as their one mother, and as fair,

Though like two stars contrasted, and as good,

Though different as dark eyes from golden hair;

One as that iron planet red like blood

That bears among the stars

Fierce witness of her Mars

In bitter fire by her sweet light subdued;

One, in the gentler skies

Sweet as her amorous eyes:

One proud of worlds and seas and darkness rude

Composed and conquered; one content

With lightnings from loved eyes of lovers lightly sent.

29.

And where Alpheus and where Ladon ran

Radiant, by many a rushy and rippling cove

More known to glance of god than wandering man,

He sang the strife of strengths divine that strove,

Unequal, one with other, for a span,

Who should be friends for ever in heaven above

And here on pastoral earth: Arcadian Pan,

And the awless lord of kings and shepherds, Love:

All the sweet strife and strange

With fervid counterchange

Till one fierce wail through many a glade and grove

Rang, and its breath made shiver

The reeds of many a river,

And the warm airs waxed wintry that it clove,

Keen-edged as ice-retempered brand;

Nor might god's hurt find healing save of godlike hand.

30.

As when the jarring gates of thunder ope

Like earthquake felt in heaven, so dire a cry,

So fearful and so fierce''Give the sword scope!''

Rang from a daughter's lips, darkening the sky

To the extreme azure of all its cloudless cope

With starless horror: nor the God's own eye

Whose doom bade smite, whose ordinance bade hope,

Might well endure to see the adulteress die,

The husband-slayer fordone

By swordstroke of her son,

Unutterable, unimaginable on high,

On earth abhorrent, fell

Beyond all scourge of hell,

Yet righteous as redemption: Love stood nigh,

Mute, sister-like, and closer clung

Than all fierce forms of threatening coil and maddening tongue.

31.

All these things heard and seen and sung of old,

He heard and saw and sang them. Once again

Might foot of man tread, eye of man behold

Things unbeholden save of ancient men,

Ways save by gods untrodden. In his hold

The staff that stayed through some 'tnean glen

The steps of the most highest, most awful-souled

And mightiest-mouthed of singers, even as then

Became a prophet's rod,

A lyre on fire of God,

Being still the staff of exile: yea, as when

The voice poured forth on us

Was even of 'schylus,

And his one word great as the crying of ten,

Crying in men's ears of wrath toward wrong,

Of love toward right immortal, sanctified with song.

32.

Him too whom none save one before him ever

Beheld, nor since hath man again beholden,

Whom Dante seeing him saw not, nor the giver

Of all gifts back to man by time withholden,

Shakespeare'him too, whom sea-like ages sever,

As waves divide men's eyes from lights upholden

To landward, from our songs that find him never,

Seeking, though memory fire and hope embolden'

Him too this one song found,

And raised at its sole sound

Up from the dust of darkling dreams and olden

Legends forlorn of breath,

Up from the deeps of death,

Ulysses: him whose name turns all songs golden,

The wise divine strong soul, whom fate

Could make no less than change and chance beheld him great.

33.

Nor stands the seer who raised him less august

Before us, nor in judgment frail and rathe,

Less constant or less loving or less just,

But fruitful-ripe and full of tender faith,

Holding all high and gentle names in trust

Of time for honour; so his quickening breath

Called from the darkness of their martyred dust

Our sweet Saints Alice and Elizabeth,

Revived and reinspired

With speech from heavenward fired

By love to say what Love the Archangel saith

Only, nor may such word

Save by such ears be heard

As hear the tongues of angels after death

Descending on them like a dove

Has taken all earthly sense of thought away but love.

34.

All sweet, all sacred, all heroic things,

All generous names and loyal, and all wise,

With all his heart in all its wayfarings

He sought, and worshipped, seeing them with his eyes

In very present glory, clothed with wings

Of words and deeds and dreams immortal, rise

Visible more than living slaves and kings,

Audible more than actual vows and lies:

These, with scorn's fieriest rod,

These and the Lord their God,

The Lord their likeness, tyrant of the skies

As they Lord Gods of earth,

These with a rage of mirth

He mocked and scourged and spat on, in such wise

That none might stand before his rod,

And these being slain the Spirit alone be lord or God.

35.

For of all souls for all time glorious none

Loved Freedom better, of all who have loved her best,

Than he who wrote that scripture of the sun

Writ as with fire and light on heaven's own crest,

Of all words heard on earth the noblest one

That ever spake for souls and left them blest:

Gladly we should rest ever, had we won

Freedom: we have lost, and very gladly rest.

O poet hero, lord

And father, we record

Deep in the burning tablets of the breast

Thankfully those divine

And living words of thine

For faith and comfort in our hearts imprest

With strokes engraven past hurt of years

And lines inured with fire of immemorial tears.

36.

But who being less than thou shall sing of thee

Words worthy of more than pity or less than scorn?

Who sing the golden garland woven of three,

Thy daughters, Graces mightier than the morn,

More godlike than the graven gods men see

Made all but all immortal, human born

And heavenly natured? With the first came He,

Led by the living hand, who left forlorn

Life by his death, and time

More by his life sublime

Than by the lives of all whom all men mourn,

And even for mourning praise

Heaven, as for all those days

These dead men's lives clothed round with glories worn

By memory till all time lie dead,

And higher than all behold the bay round Shakespeare's head.

37.

Then, fairer than the fairest Grace of ours,

Came girt with Grecian gold the second Grace,

And verier daughter of his most perfect hours

Than any of latter time or alien place

Named, or with hair inwoven of English flowers

Only, nor wearing on her statelier face

The lordlier light of Athens. All the Powers

That graced and guarded round that holiest race,

That heavenliest and most high

Time hath seen live and die,

Poured all their power upon him to retrace

The erased immortal roll

Of Love's most sovereign scroll

And Wisdom's warm from Freedom's wide embrace,

The scroll that on Aspasia's knees

Laid once made manifest the Olympian Pericles.

38.

Clothed on with tenderest weft of Tuscan air,

Came laughing like Etrurian spring the third,

With green Valdelsa's hill-flowers in her hair

Deep-drenched with May-dews, in her voice the bird

Whose voice hath night and morning in it; fair

As the ambient gold of wall-flowers that engird

The walls engirdling with a circling stair

My sweet San Gimignano: nor a word

Fell from her flowerlike mouth

Not sweet with all the south;

As though the dust shrined in Certaldo stirred

And spake, as o'er it shone

That bright Pentameron,

And his own vines again and chestnuts heard

Boccaccio: nor swift Elsa's chime

Mixed not her golden babble with Petrarca's rhyme.

39.

No lovelier laughed the garden which receives

Yet, and yet hides not from our following eyes

With soft rose-laurels and low strawberry-leaves,

Ternissa, sweet as April-coloured skies,

Bowed like a flowering reed when May's wind heaves

The reed-bed that the stream kisses and sighs,

In love that shrinks and murmurs and believes

What yet the wisest of the starriest wise

Whom Greece might ever hear

Speaks in the gentlest ear

That ever heard love's lips philosophize

With such deep-reasoning words

As blossoms use and birds,

Nor heeds Leontion lingering till they rise

Far off, in no wise over far,

Beneath a heaven all amorous of its first-born star.

40.

What sound, what storm and splendour of what fire,

Darkening the light of heaven, lightening the night,

Rings, rages, flashes round what ravening pyre

That makes time's face pale with its reflex light

And leaves on earth, who seeing might scarce respire,

A shadow of red remembrance? Right nor might

Alternating wore ever shapes more dire

Nor manifest in all men's awful sight

In form and face that wore

Heaven's light and likeness more

Than these, or held suspense men's hearts at height

More fearful, since man first

Slaked with man's blood his thirst,

Than when Rome clashed with Hannibal in fight,

Till tower on ruining tower was hurled

Where Scipio stood, and Carthage was not in the world.

41.

Nor lacked there power of purpose in his hand

Who carved their several praise in words of gold

To bare the brows of conquerors and to brand,

Made shelterless of laurels bought and sold

For price of blood or incense, dust or sand,

Triumph or terror. He that sought of old

His father Ammon in a stranger's land,

And shrank before the serpentining fold,

Stood in our seer's wide eye

No higher than man most high,

And lowest in heart when highest in hope to hold

Fast as a scripture furled

The scroll of all the world

Sealed with his signet: nor the blind and bold

First thief of empire, round whose head

Swarmed carrion flies for bees, on flesh for violets fed.1

42.

As fire that kisses, killing with a kiss,

He saw the light of death, riotous and red,

Flame round the bent brows of Semiramis

Re-risen, and mightier, from the Assyrian dead,

Kindling, as dawn a frost-bound precipice,

The steely snows of Russia, for the tread

Of feet that felt before them crawl and hiss

The snaky lines of blood violently shed.

Like living creeping things

That writhe but have no stings

To scare adulterers from the imperial bed

Bowed with its load of lust,

Or chill the ravenous gusts

That made her body a fire from heel to head;

Or change her high bright spirit and clear,

For all its mortal stains, from taint of fraud or fear.

43.

As light that blesses, hallowing with a look;

He saw the godhead in Vittoria's face

Shine soft on Buonarroti's, till he took,

Albeit himself God, a more godlike grace,

A strength more heavenly to confront and brook

All ill things coiled about his worldly race,

From the bright scripture of that present book

Wherein his tired grand eyes got power to trace

Comfort more sweet than youth,

And hope whose child was truth,

And love that brought forth sorrow for a space,

Only that she might bear

Joy: these things, written there,

Made even his soul's high heaven a heavenlier place,

Perused with eyes whose glory and glow

Had in their fires the spirit of Michael Angelo.

44.

With balms and dews of blessing he consoled

The fair fame wounded by the black priest's fang,

Giovanna's, and washed off her blithe and bold

Boy-bridegroom's blood, that seemed so long to hang

On her fair hand, even till the stain of old

Was cleansed with healing song, that after sang

Sharp truth by sweetest singers' lips untold

Of pale Beatrice, though her death-note rang

From other strings divine

Ere his rekindling line

With yet more piteous and intolerant pang

Pierced all men's hearts anew

That heard her passion through

Till fierce from throes of fiery pity sprang

Wrath, armed for chase of monstrous beasts,

Strong to lay waste the kingdom of the seed of priests.

45.

He knew the high-souled humbleness, the mirth

And majesty of meanest men born free,

That made with Luther's or with Hofer's birth

The whole world worthier of the sun to see:

The wealth of spirit among the snows, the dearth

Wherein souls festered by the servile sea

That saw the lowest of even crowned heads on earth

Thronged round with worship in Parthenope.

His hand bade Justice guide

Her child Tyrannicide,

Light winged by fire that brings the dawn to be;

And pierced with Tyrrel's dart

Again the riotous heart

That mocked at mercy's tongue and manhood's knee:

And oped the cell where kinglike death

Hung o'er her brows discrowned who bare Elizabeth.

46.

Toward Spenser or toward Bacon proud or kind

He bared the heart of Essex, twain and one,

For the base heart that soiled the starry mind

Stern, for the father in his child undone

Soft as his own toward children, stamped and signed

With their sweet image visibly set on

As by God's hand, clear as his own designed

The likeness radiant out of ages gone

That none may now destroy

Of that high Roman boy

Whom Julius and Cleopatra saw their son

True-born of sovereign seed,

Foredoomed even thence to bleed,

The stately grace of bright C'sarion,

The head unbent, the heart unbowed,

That not the shadow of death could make less clear and proud.

47.

With gracious gods he communed, honouring thus

At once by service and similitude,

Service devout and worship emulous

Of the same golden Muses once they wooed,

The names and shades adored of all of us,

The nurslings of the brave world's earlier brood,

Grown gods for us themselves: Theocritus

First, and more dear Catullus, names bedewed

With blessings bright like tears

From the old memorial years,

And loves and lovely laughters, every mood

Sweet as the drops that fell

Of their own 'nomel

From living lips to cheer the multitude

That feeds on words divine, and grows

More worthy, seeing their world reblossom like a rose.

48.

Peace, the soft seal of long life's closing story,

The silent music that no strange note jars,

Crowned not with gentler hand the years that glory

Crowned, but could hide not all the spiritual scars

Time writes on the inward strengths of warriors hoary

With much long warfare, and with gradual bars

Blindly pent in: but these, being transitory,

Broke, and the power came back that passion mars:

And at the lovely last

Above all anguish past

Before his own the sightless eyes like stars

Arose that watched arise

Like stars in other skies

Above the strife of ships and hurtling cars

The Dioscurian songs divine

That lighten all the world with lightning of their line.

49.

He sang the last of Homer, having sung

The last of his Ulysses. Bright and wide

For him time's dark strait ways, like clouds that clung

About the day-star, doubtful to divide,

Waxed in his spiritual eyeshot, and his tongue

Spake as his soul bore witness, that descried,

Like those twin towering lights in darkness hung,

Homer, and grey Laertes at his side

Kingly as kings are none

Beneath a later sun,

And the sweet maiden ministering in pride

To sovereign and to sage

In their more sweet old age:

These things he sang, himself as old, and died.

And if death be not, if life be,

As Homer and as Milton are in heaven is he.

50.

Poet whose large-eyed loyalty of love

Was pure toward all high poets, all their kind

And all bright words and all sweet works thereof;

Strong like the sun, and like the sunlight kind;

Heart that no fear but every grief might move

Wherewith men's hearts were bound of powers that bind;

The purest soul that ever proof could prove

From taint of tortuous or of envious mind;

Whose eyes elate and clear

Nor shame nor ever fear

But only pity or glorious wrath could blind;

Name set for love apart,

Held lifelong in my heart,

Face like a father's toward my face inclined;

No gilts like thine are mine to give,

Who by thine own words only bid thee hail, and live.