Contents -BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD

Thomas Humphry Ward, ed. The English Poets. 1880–1918.rnVol. V. Browning to Rupert Brooke

Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837–1909)

Extracts from Songs before Sunrise: From Hertha

THE TREE many-rooted

That swells to the sky

With frondage red-fruited,

The life-tree am I;

In the buds of your lives is the sap of my leaves: ye shall live and not die.

But the Gods of your fashion

That take and that give,

In their pity and passion

That scourge and forgive,

They are worms that are bred in the bark that falls off; they shall die and not live.

My own blood is what stanches

The wounds in my bark;

Stars caught in my branches

Make day of the dark,

And are worshipped as suns till the sunrise shall tread out their fires as a spark.

Where dead ages hide under

The live roots of the tree,

In my darkness the thunder

Makes utterance of me;

In the clash of my boughs with each other ye hear the waves sound of the sea.

That noise is of Time,

As his feathers are spread

And his feet set to climb

Through the boughs overhead,

And my foliage rings round him and rustles, and branches are bent with his tread.

The storm-winds of ages

Blow through me and cease,

The war-wind that rages,

The spring-wind of peace,

Ere the breath of them roughen my tresses, ere one of my blossoms increase.

All sounds of all changes,

All shadows and lights

On the world’s mountain-ranges

And stream-riven heights,

Whose tongue is the wind’s tongue and language of storm-clouds on earth-shaking nights;

All forms of all faces,

All works of all hands

In unsearchable places

Of time-stricken lands,

All death and all life, and all reigns and all ruins, drop through me as sands.

Though sore be my burden

And more than ye know,

And my growth have no guerdon

But only to grow,

Yet I fail not of growing for lightnings above me or death-worms below.

These too have their part in me,

As I too in these;

Such fire is at heart in me,

Such sap is this tree’s,

Which hath in it all sounds and all secrets of infinite lands and of seas.

In the spring-coloured hours

When my mind was as May’s,

There brake forth of me flowers

By centuries of days,

Strong blossoms with perfume of manhood, shot out from my spirit as rays.

And the sound of them springing

And the smell of their shoots

Were as warmth and sweet singing

And strength to my roots;

And the lives of my children made perfect with freedom of soul were my fruits.

I bid you but be;

I have need not of prayer;

I have need of you free

As your mouths of mine air;

That my heart may be greater within me, beholding the fruits of me fair.

More fair than strange fruit is

Of faiths ye espouse;

In me only the root is

That blooms in your boughs;

Behold now your God that ye made you, to feed him with faith of your vows.

In the darkening and whitening

Abysses adored,

With dayspring and lightning

For lamp and for sword,

God thunders in heaven, and his angels are red with the wrath of the Lord.

O my sons, O too dutiful

Toward Gods not of me,

Was not I enough beautiful?

Was it hard to be free?

For behold, I am with you, am in you and of you; look forth now and see.

Lo, winged with world’s wonders,

With miracles shod,

With the fires of his thunders

For raiment and rod,

God trembles in heaven, and his angels are white with the terror of God.

For his twilight is come on him,

His anguish is here;

And his spirits gaze dumb on him,

Grown grey from his fear;

And his hour taketh hold on him stricken, the last of his infinite year.

Thought made him and breaks him,

Truth slays and forgives;

But to you, as time takes him,

This new thing it gives,

Even love, the beloved Republic, that feeds upon freedom and lives.

For truth only is living,

Truth only is whole,

And the love of his giving

Man’s polestar and pole;

Man, pulse of my centre, and fruit of my body, and seed of my soul.

One birth of my bosom;

One beam of mine eye;

One topmost blossom

That scales the sky;

Man, equal and one with me, man that is made of me, man that is I.