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Songs before Sunrise

A >> Algernon Charles Swinburne >> Songs before Sunrise




And we that cannot hear or see
The sounds and lights of liberty,
The witness of the naked God
That treads on burning hours unshod
With instant feet unwounded; we
That can trace only where he trod
By fire in heaven or storm at sea,
Not know the very present whole
And naked nature of the soul;

We that see wars and woes and kings,
And portents of enormous things,
Empires, and agonies, and slaves,
And whole flame of town-swallowing graves;
That hear the harsh hours clap sharp wings
Above the roar of ranks like waves,
From wreck to wreck as the world swings;
Know but that men there are who see
And hear things other far than we.

By the light sitting on their brows,
The fire wherewith their presence glows,
The music falling with their feet,
The sweet sense of a spirit sweet
That with their speech or motion grows
And breathes and burns men's hearts with heat;
By these signs there is none but knows
Men who have life and grace to give,
Men who have seen the soul and live.

By the strength sleeping in their eyes,
The lips whereon their sorrow lies
Smiling, the lines of tears unshed,
The large divine look of one dead
That speaks out of the breathless skies
In silence, when the light is shed
Upon man's soul of memories;
The supreme look that sets love free,
The look of stars and of the sea;

By the strong patient godhead seen
Implicit in their mortal mien,
The conscience of a God held still
And thunders ruled by their own will
And fast-bound fires that might burn clean
This worldly air that foul things fill,
And the afterglow of what has been,
That, passing, shows us without word
What they have seen, what they have heard,

By all these keen and burning signs
The spirit knows them and divines.
In bonds, in banishment, in grief,
Scoffed at and scourged with unbelief,
Foiled with false trusts and thwart designs,
Stripped of green days and hopes in leaf,
Their mere bare body of glory shines
Higher, and man gazing surelier sees
What light, what comfort is of these.

So I now gazing; till the sense
Being set on fire of confidence
Strains itself sunward, feels out far
Beyond the bright and morning star,
Beyond the extreme wave's refluence,
To where the fierce first sunbeams are
Whose fire intolerant and intense
As birthpangs whence day burns to be
Parts breathless heaven from breathing sea.

I see not, know not, and am blest,
Master, who know that thou knowest,
Dear lord and leader, at whose hand
The first days and the last days stand,
With scars and crowns on head and breast,
That fought for love of the sweet land
Or shall fight in her latter quest;
All the days armed and girt and crowned
Whose glories ring thy glory round.

Thou sawest, when all the world was blind,
The light that should be of mankind,
The very day that was to be;
And how shalt thou not sometime see
Thy city perfect to thy mind
Stand face to living face with thee,
And no miscrowned man's head behind;
The hearth of man, the human home,
The central flame that shall be Rome?

As one that ere a June day rise
Makes seaward for the dawn, and tries
The water with delighted limbs
That taste the sweet dark sea, and swims
Right eastward under strengthening skies,
And sees the gradual rippling rims
Of waves whence day breaks blossom-wise
Take fire ere light peer well above,
And laughs from all his heart with love;

And softlier swimming with raised head
Feels the full flower of morning shed
And fluent sunrise round him rolled
That laps and laves his body bold
With fluctuant heaven in water's stead,
And urgent through the growing gold
Strikes, and sees all the spray flash red,
And his soul takes the sun, and yearns
For joy wherewith the sea's heart burns;

So the soul seeking through the dark
Heavenward, a dove without an ark,
Transcends the unnavigable sea
Of years that wear out memory;
So calls, a sunward-singing lark,
In the ear of souls that should be free;
So points them toward the sun for mark
Who steer not for the stress of waves,
And seek strange helmsmen, and are slaves.

For if the swimmer's eastward eye
Must see no sunrise--must put by
The hope that lifted him and led
Once, to have light about his head,
To see beneath the clear low sky
The green foam-whitened wave wax red
And all the morning's banner fly -
Then, as earth's helpless hopes go down,
Let earth's self in the dark tides drown.

Yea, if no morning must behold
Man, other than were they now cold,
And other deeds than past deeds done,
Nor any near or far-off sun
Salute him risen and sunlike-souled,
Free, boundless, fearless, perfect, one,
Let man's world die like worlds of old,
And here in heaven's sight only be
The sole sun on the worldless sea.



NOTES



P. 7
That called on Cotys by her name.
AEsch. Fr. 54

P. 94

Was it Love brake forth flower-fashion, a bird with gold on his
wings?
Ar. Av. 696.

P. 161

That saw Saint Catherine bodily.

Her pilgrimage to Avignon to recall the Pope into Italy as its
redeemer from the distractions of the time is of course the central
act of St. Catherine's life, the great abiding sign of the greatness
of spirit and genius of heroism which distinguished this daughter of
the people, and should yet keep her name fresh above the holy horde
of saints, in other records than the calendar; but there is no less
significance in the story which tells how she succeeded in humanizing
a criminal under sentence of death, and given over by the priests as
a soul doomed and desperate; how the man thus raised and melted out
of his fierce and brutal despair besought her to sustain him to the
last by her presence; how, having accompanied him with comfort and
support to the very scaffold, and seen his head fall, she took it up,
and turning to the spectators who stood doubtful whether the poor
wretch could be "saved," kissed it in sign of her faith that his sins
were forgiven him. The high and fixed passion of her heroic
temperament gives her a right to remembrance and honour of which the
miracle-mongers have done their best to deprive her. Cleared of all
the refuse rubbish of thaumaturgy, her life would deserve a
chronicler who should do justice at once to the ardour of her
religious imagination and to a thing far rarer and more precious--the
strength and breadth of patriotic thought and devotion which sent
this girl across the Alps to seek the living symbol of Italian hope
and unity, and bring it back by force of simple appeal in the name of
God and of the country. By the light of those solid and actual
qualities which ensure to her no ignoble place on the noble roll of
Italian women who have deserved well of Italy, the record of her
visions and ecstasies may be read without contemptuous intolerance of
hysterical disease. The rapturous visionary and passionate ascetic
was in plain matters of this earth as pure and practical a heroine as
Joan of Arc.

P. 164

There on the dim side-chapel wall.

In the church of San Domenico.

P. 165

But blood nor tears ye love not, you.

In the Sienese Academy the two things notable to me were the detached
wall-painting by Sodoma of the tortures of Christ bound to the
pillar, and the divine though mutilated group of the Graces in the
centre of the main hall. The glory and beauty of ancient sculpture
refresh and satisfy beyond expression a sense wholly wearied and
well-nigh nauseated with contemplation of endless sanctities and
agonies attempted by mediaeval art, while yet as handless as accident
or barbarism has left the sculptured goddesses.

P. 168

Saw all Italian things save one.

O patria mia, vedo le mura e gli archi,
E le colonne e i simulacri e l'erme
Torri degli avi nostri;
Ma la gloria non vedo,
Non vedo il lauro a il ferro ond' eran carchi
I nostri padri antichi.

LEOPARDI.

P. 179

Mother, that by that Pegasean spring.

Call. Lav. Pall. 105-112.

P. 229

With black blood dripping from her eyes.
AEsch. Cho. 1058.

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