free-verse250 lines

Tristram of Lyonesse - I - Prelude: Tristram and Iseult

by Algernon Charles Swinburne

Love, that is first and last of all things made,

The light that has the living world for shade,

The spirit that for temporal veil has on

The souls of all men woven in unison,

One fiery raiment with all lives inwrought

And lights of sunny and starry deed and thought,

And alway through new act and passion new

Shines the divine same body and beauty through,

The body spiritual of fire and light

That is to worldly noon as noon to night;

Love, that is flesh upon the spirit of man

And spirit within the flesh whence breath began;

Love, that keeps all the choir of lives in chime;

Love, that is blood within the veins of time;

That wrought the whole world without stroke of hand,

Shaping the breadth of sea, the length of land,

And with the pulse and motion of his breath

Through the great heart of the earth strikes life and death,

The sweet twain chords that make the sweet tune live

Through day and night of things alternative,

Through silence and through sound of stress and strife,

And ebb and flow of dying death and life;

Love, that sounds loud or light in all men's ears,

Whence all men's eyes take fire from sparks of tears,

That binds on all men's feet or chains or wings;

Love, that is root and fruit of terrene things;

Love, that the whole world's waters shall not drown,

The whole world's fiery forces not burn down;

Love, that what time his own hands guard his head

The whole world's wrath and strength shall not strike dead;

Love, that if once his own hands make his grave

The whole world's pity and sorrow shall not save;

Love, that for very life shall not be sold,

Nor bought nor bound with iron nor with gold;

So strong that heaven, could love bid heaven farewell,

Would turn to fruitless and unflowering hell;

So sweet that hell, to hell could love be given,

Would turn to splendid and sonorous heaven;

Love that is fire within thee and light above,

And lives by grace of nothing but of love;

Through many and lovely thoughts and much desire

Led these twain to the life of tears and fire;

Through many and lovely days and much delight

Led these twain to the lifeless life of night.

Yea, but what then? albeit all this were thus,

And soul smote soul and left it ruinous,

And love led love as eyeless men lead men,

Through chance by chance to deathward'Ah, what then?

Hath love not likewise led them further yet,

Out through the years where memories rise and set,

Some large as suns, some moon-like warm and pale,

Some starry-sighted, some through clouds that sail

Seen as red flame through spectral float of fume,

Each with the blush of its own special bloom

On the fair face of its own coloured light,

Distinguishable in all the host of night,

Divisible from all the radiant rest

And separable in splendour? Hath the best

Light of love's all, of all that burn and move,

A better heaven than heaven is? Hath not love

Made for all these their sweet particular air

To shine in, their own beams and names to bear,

Their ways to wander and their wards to keep,

Till story and song and glory and all things sleep?

Hath he not plucked from death of lovers dead

Their musical soft memories, and kept red

The rose of their remembrance in men's eyes,

The sunsets of their stories in his skies,

The blush of their dead blood in lips that speak

Of their dead lives, and in the listener's cheek

That trembles with the kindling pity lit

In gracious hearts for some sweet fever-fit,

A fiery pity enkindled of pure thought

By tales that make their honey out of nought,

The faithless faith that lives without belief

Its light life through, the griefless ghost of grief?

Yea, as warm night refashions the sere blood

In storm-struck petal or in sun-struck bud,

With tender hours and tempering dew to cure

The hunger and thirst of day's distemperature

And ravin of the dry discolouring hours,

Hath he not bid relume their flameless flowers

With summer fire and heat of lamping song,

And bid the short-lived things, long dead, live long,

And thought remake their wan funereal fames,

And the sweet shining signs of women's names

That mark the months out and the weeks anew

He moves in changeless change of seasons through

To fill the days up of his dateless year

Flame from Queen Helen to Queen Guenevere?

For first of all the sphery signs whereby

Love severs light from darkness, and most high,

In the white front of January there glows

The rose-red sign of Helen like a rose:

And gold-eyed as the shore-flower shelterless

Whereon the sharp-breathed sea blows bitterness,

A storm-star that the seafarers of love

Strain their wind-wearied eyes for glimpses of,

Shoots keen through February's grey frost and damp

The lamplike star of Hero for a lamp;

The star that Marlowe sang into our skies

With mouth of gold, and morning in his eyes;

And in clear March across the rough blue sea

The signal sapphire of Alcyone

Makes bright the blown brows of the wind-foot year;

And shining like a sunbeam-smitten tear

Full ere it fall, the fair next sign in sight

Burns opal-wise with April-coloured light

When air is quick with song and rain and flame,

My birth-month star that in love's heaven hath name

Iseult, a light of blossom and beam and shower,

My singing sign that makes the song-tree flower;

Next like a pale and burning pearl beyond

The rose-white sphere of flower-named Rosamond

Signs the sweet head of Maytime; and for June

Flares like an angered and storm-reddening moon

Her signal sphere, whose Carthaginian pyre

Shadowed her traitor's flying sail with fire;

Next, glittering as the wine-bright jacinth-stone,

A star south-risen that first to music shone,

The keen girl-star of golden Juliet bears

Light northward to the month whose forehead wears

Her name for flower upon it, and his trees

Mix their deep English song with Veronese;

And like an awful sovereign chrysolite

Burning, the supreme fire that blinds the night,

The hot gold head of Venus kissed by Mars,

A sun-flower among small sphered flowers of stars,

The light of Cleopatra fills and burns

The hollow of heaven whence ardent August yearns;

And fixed and shining as the sister-shed

Sweet tears for Phaethon disorbed and dead,

The pale bright autumn's amber-coloured sphere,

That through September sees the saddening year

As love sees change through sorrow, hath to name

Francesca's; and the star that watches flame

The embers of the harvest overgone

Is Thisbe's, slain of love in Babylon,

Set in the golden girdle of sweet signs

A blood-bright ruby; last save one light shines

An eastern wonder of sphery chrysopras,

The star that made men mad, Angelica's;

And latest named and lordliest, with a sound

Of swords and harps in heaven that ring it round,

Last love-light and last love-song of the year's,

Gleams like a glorious emerald Guenevere's.

These are the signs wherethrough the year sees move,

Full of the sun, the sun-god which is love,

A fiery body blood-red from the heart

Outward, with fire-white wings made wide apart,

That close not and unclose not, but upright

Steered without wind by their own light and might

Sweep through the flameless fire of air that rings

From heaven to heaven with thunder of wheels and wings

And antiphones of motion-moulded rhyme

Through spaces out of space and timeless time.

So shine above dead chance and conquered change

The spher'd signs, and leave without their range

Doubt and desire, and hope with fear for wife,

Pale pains, and pleasures long worn out of life.

Yea, even the shadows of them spiritless,

Through the dim door of sleep that seem to press,

Forms without form, a piteous people and blind,

Men and no men, whose lamentable kind

The shadow of death and shadow of life compel

Through semblances of heaven and false-faced hell,

Through dreams of light and dreams of darkness tost

On waves innavigable, are these so lost?

Shapes that wax pale and shift in swift strange wise,

Void faces with unspeculative eyes,

Dim things that gaze and glare, dead mouths that move,

Featureless heads discrowned of hate and love,

Mockeries and masks of motion and mute breath,

Leavings of life, the superflux of death'

If these things and no more than these things be

Left when man ends or changes, who can see?

Or who can say with what more subtle sense

Their subtler natures taste in air less dense

A life less thick and palpable than ours,

Warmed with faint fires and sweetened with dead flowers

And measured by low music? how time fares

In that wan time-forgotten world of theirs,

Their pale poor world too deep for sun or star

To live in, where the eyes of Helen are,

And hers who made as God's own eyes to shine

The eyes that met them of the Florentine,

Wherein the godhead thence transfigured lit

All time for all men with the shadow of it?

Ah, and these too felt on them as God's grace

The pity and glory of this man's breathing face;

For these too, these my lovers, these my twain,

Saw Dante, saw God visible by pain,

With lips that thundered and with feet that trod

Before men's eyes incognisable God;

Saw love and wrath and light and night and fire

Live with one life and at one mouth respire,

And in one golden sound their whole soul heard

Sounding, one sweet immitigable word.

They have the night, who had like us the day;

We, whom day binds, shall have the night as they.

We, from the fetters of the light unbound,

Healed of our wound of living, shall sleep sound.

All gifts but one the jealous God may keep

From our soul's longing, one he cannot'sleep.

This, though he grudge all other grace to prayer,

This grace his closed hand cannot choose but spare.

This, though his ear be sealed to all that live,

Be it lightly given or lothly, God must give.

We, as the men whose name on earth is none,

We too shall surely pass out of the sun;

Out of the sound and eyeless light of things,

Wide as the stretch of life's time-wandering wings,

Wide as the naked world and shadowless,

And long-lived as the world's own weariness.

Us too, when all the fires of time are cold,

The heights shall hide us and the depths shall hold.

Us too, when all the tears of time are dry,

The night shall lighten from her tearless eye.

Blind is the day and eyeless all its light,

But the large unbewildered eye of night

Hath sense and speculation; and the sheer

Limitless length of lifeless life and clear,

The timeless space wherein the brief worlds move

Clothed with light life and fruitful with light love,

With hopes that threaten, and with fears that cease,

Past fear and hope, hath in it only peace.

Yet of these lives inlaid with hopes and fears,

Spun fine as fire and jewelled thick with tears,

These lives made out of loves that long since were,

Lives wrought as ours of earth and burning air,

Fugitive flame, and water of secret springs,

And clothed with joys and sorrows as with wings,

Some yet are good, if aught be good, to save

Some while from washing wreck and wrecking wave.

Was such not theirs, the twain I take, and give

Out of my life to make their dead life live

Some days of mine, and blow my living breath

Between dead lips forgotten even of death?

So many and many of old have given my twain

Love and live song and honey-hearted pain,

Whose root is sweetness and whose fruit is sweet,

So many and with such joy have tracked their feet,

What should I do to follow? yet I too,

I have the heart to follow, many or few

Be the feet gone before me; for the way,

Rose-red with remnant roses of the day

Westward, and eastward white with stars that break,

Between the green and foam is fair to take

For any sail the sea-wind steers for me

From morning into morning, sea to sea.