Imágenes de página
PDF
ePub

For all these shall be ours and all men's,
nor shall any lack a share

Of the toil and the gain of living

in the days when the world grows fair.

THUNDER IN THE GARDEN.

When the boughs of the garden hang heavy with rain
And the blackbird reneweth his song,

And the thunder departing yet rolleth again,

I remember the ending of wrong.

When the day that was dusk while his death was aloof

Is ending wide-gleaming and strange

For the clearness of all things beneath the world's roof, I call back the wild chance and the change.

For once we twain sat through the hot afternoon

While the rain held aloof for a while,

Till she, the soft-clad, for the glory of June
Changed all with the change of her smile.

For her smile was of longing, no longer of glee,
And her fingers, entwined with mine own,

With caresses unquiet sought kindness of me

For the gift that I never had known.

Then down rushed the rain, and the voice of the thunder

Smote dumb all the sound of the street,

And I to myself was grown nought but a wonder,

As she leaned down my kisses to meet.

That she craved for my lips that had craved her so often, And the hand that had trembled to touch,

That the tears filled her eyes I had hoped not to soften In this world was a marvel too much.

It was dusk 'mid the thunder, dusk e'en as the night,
When first brake out our love like the storm,

But no night-hour was it, and back came the light
While our hands with each other were warm.

And her smile, killed with kisses, came back as at first

As she rose up and led me along,

And out to the garden, where nought was athirst,
And the blackbird renewing his song.

Earth's fragrance went with her, as in the wet grass
Her feet little hidden were set;

She bent down her head, 'neath the roses to pass,
And her arm with the lily was wet.

In the garden we wandered while day waned apace
And the thunder was dying aloof;

Till the moon o'er the minster-wall lifted his face,

And grey gleamed out the lead of the roof.

Then we turned from the blossoms, and cold were they grown;

In the trees the wind westering moved;

Till over the threshold back fluttered her gown,

And in the dark house was I loved.

THE FLOWERING ORCHARD.

[For a Silk Embroidery.]

Lo, silken my garden.
and silken my sky,
And silken my apple-boughs
hanging on high;

All wrought by the worm
in the peasant-carle's cot
On the mulberry leafage
when summer was hot.

ALGERNON CHARLES

SWINBURNE.

[ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE was born on April 5, 1837, in London. He was the eldest son of Admiral Swinburne and Lady Jane, daughter of the third Earl of Ashburnham. He was sent to Eton in 1849 and left in 1853. After some private work with a tutor, he matriculated at Balliol College, Oxford, in 1856. He left Oxford, without a degrée, in 1859, and settled in London. In 1860 his earliest volume, a brace of dramas in verse, was published, but he became first known to the public by Atalanta in Calydon (1865), which was quickly followed by Chastelard (1865) and Poems and Ballads (1866). The last named was accused of indecency and profanity, and produced a vociferous protest. The poet, however, was little moved, and continued to write in prose and verse with the greatest assiduity. His life, which was wholly dedicated to literature, was without external movement. In 1879, in consequence of his state of health, he was induced to take up his abode with a friend at Putney, and here he remained for nearly thirty years, in great retirement, which was partly forced upon him by his deafness. His daily walk over Putney Hill became classic. He died of pneumonia, after a short illness, on the 10th of April, 1909, and was buried at Bonchurch among the graves of his family.]

The gift by which Swinburne first won his way to the hearts of a multitude of readers was unquestionably the melody of his verse. The choruses in Atalanta in Calydon and the metrical inventions in Poems and Ballads acted on the ear of his contemporaries like an enchantment. Swinburne carried the prosody of the romantic age to its extreme point of mellifluousness, and he introduced into it a quality of speed, of throbbing velocity, which no one, not even Shelley, had anticipated. In some of the odes in Songs before Sunrise he went even farther, and produced effects of such sonorous volume and such elaborate antiphonal harmony that it was obvious that English verse, along those lines, could proceed no farther. In point of fact, after 1871, it did proceed no farther even in Swinburne's own hands, his later efforts to surpass his own miraculous virtuosity

being less and less completely satisfactory, and indeed more and more like an imitation of himself. The poem called Mater Triumphalis may be taken as the extreme instance of Swinburne's redundant volubility of sound before his talent in this direction began to decline, and we may hold it to be certain that in this species of prosody, about which a strong heretical reaction has long ago begun to set in, no other poet will ever surpass or even equal Swinburne,

This undisputed mastery in regular verse has, however, from the first tended to obscure the intellectual and imaginative qualities of a poet who was almost more directly and exclusively endowed with them than any one else who ever lived. There may, that is to say, have been greater poets than he, but none was ever more penetrated with a sense of his high calling, or enjoyed an intenser exhilaration in the performance of it. He was preserved by a remarkable strain of common sense from losing his sanity and even from plunging into extravagance, but he was always at the edge of frenzy, always simmering on the flames of his enthusiasm. This high literary temperature of Swinburne's was one of his most notable characteristics, and it must be borne in mind in every attempt to estimate the value of his work. It gave to his poems an impression of heat and speed, a sort of volcanic impetus, which delighted those who liked it and infuriated those who did not. In the beginning, it was impossible to estimate the poems of Swinburne without prejudice. There is still no recent figure more difficult to approach judicially. To begin to comprehend him we must perceive that he was completely dominated by the intuitive forms of sensibility, in the Kantian sense. His mind and character are neither intelligible nor worthy of attention unless we regard them from the aesthetic point of view. Other great poets present various facets of being which may not be so important or so striking as their literary side, but are perceptible. Swinburne alone is a man of letters, or nothing at all. His long life offers us a series of extraordinary negatives; he was never married, he was never responsible for the career of another human being, he possessed no home of his own, he exercised no business or profession, he passed through the years like the fabulous Bird of Paradise, which never perched, because it had no feet. Swinburne never perched, but we may pursue the image so far as to say that when he was weary of his ceaseless flight, in middle age, he sank upon a nest from which he never had the energy to rise again. Charles Darwin tells us that 'birds appear VOL. V.

въ

to be the most aesthetic of all animals'; Swinburne, who was often compared with a bird, was the most aesthetic of all human beings. The dullness of his final thirty years in a sort of voluntary captivity at Putney has tended to obscure the picturesque legend of his prime, to which it is essential that memory should return. His childhood and early youth--contrary to the customary idea—were not artistically productive; his old age was monotonous and insipid; but there was a middle period of about twenty years in which he flamed like a comet right across our poetical heavens. This period extended from his last term at Oxford to the rapid decline of his energy when he had passed his fortieth birthday. During the first half of this part of his career he was known only to a close circle of admirers; from 1865 to 1875, or a little later, he was the cynosure and centre of public curiosity, awakening in the latter case such passions of adoration and loathing, rapture and fear, as literature had wholly ceased to rouse since 1815. He represented to a dazzled generation the uncontrolled worship of beauty, and he did so with unrivalled power because he was so disinterested. The world was astonished at the phenomenon of a voice which rang out like that of the angel of the Morning Star, and which yet, so far as action went, was nothing but a voice. Swinburne reminded us of the hero of Gautier's novel (which he admired so extravagantly) 'dont la sensualité imaginative s'est compliquée et raffinée, avant l'expérience, dans les musées et les bibliothèques.' Swinburne displayed a prodigious sensibility, which was fed on books and pictures, not on life.

We shall, therefore, not merely fail to appreciate the position of Swinburne, but stumble blindly in our examination of his qualities, if we do not begin by perceiving that, to a degree unparalleled, he was cerebral in all his forces. He was an unbodied intelligence 'hidden in the light of thought,' showering a rain of melody from some altitude untouched by the drawbacks and privileges of mortality. Tennyson might have been a farmer, Browning a stockbroker; Rossetti was a painter and Morris an upholsterer; but it is impossible to conceive Swinburne as 'taking up' any species of useful employment. To our great good fortune, he was possessed of what are called 'moderate means,' which happily clung to him, by no conscious effort of his own, to the end of his days. He was therefore able to spin out his dream and his music without any species of material disturbance, his only approaches to' action' being the chimerical controversies, always on aesthetic questions, in which

« AnteriorContinuar »