The poor and the halt and the blind are keen and mighty and fleet:Like the noise of the blowing of wind is the sound of the noise of their feet.
The wind has the sound of a laugh in the clamour of days and of deeds:The priests are scattered like chaff, and the rulers broken like reeds.
The high-priest sick from qualms, with his raiment bloodily dashed;The thief with branded palms, and the liar with cheeks abashed.
They are smitten, they tremble greatly, they are pained for their pleasant things:For the house of the priests made stately, and the might in the mouth of the kings.
They are grieved and greatly afraid; they are taken, they shall not flee:For the heart of the nations is made as the strength of the springs of the sea.
They were fair in the grace of gold, they walked with delicate feet:They were clothed with the cunning of old, and the smell of their garments was sweet.
For the breaking of gold in their hair they halt as a man made lame:They are utterly naked and bare; their mouths are bitter with shame.
Wilt thou judge thy people now, O king that wast found most wise?Wilt thou lie any more, O thou whose mouth is emptied of lies?
Shall God make a pact with thee, till his hook be found in thy sides?Wilt thou put back the time of the sea, or the place of the season of tides?
Set a word in thy lips, to stand before God with a word in thy mouth;That “the rain shall return in the land, and the tender dew after drouth.”
But the arm of the elders is broken, their strength is unbound and undone:They wait for a sign of a token; they cry, and there cometh none.
Their moan is in every place, the cry of them filleth the land:There is shame in the sight of their face, there is fear in the thews of their hand.
They are girdled about the reins with a curse for the girdle thereon:For the noise of the rending of chains the face of their colour is gone.
For the sound of the shouting of men they are grievously stricken at heart:They are smitten asunder with pain, their bones are smitten apart.
There is none of them all that is whole; their lips gape open for breath;They are clothed with sickness of soul, and the shape of the shadow of death.
The wind is thwart in their feet; it is full of the shouting of mirth;As one shaketh the sides of a sheet, so it shaketh the ends of the earth.
The sword, the sword is made keen; the iron has opened its mouth;The corn is red that was green; it is bound for the sheaves of the south.
The sound of a word was shed, the sound of the wind as a breath,In the ears of the souls that were dead, in the dust of the deepness of death;
Where the face of the moon is taken, the ways of the stars undone,The light of the whole sky shaken, the light of the face of the sun:
Where the waters are emptied and broken, the waves of the waters are stayed;Where God has bound for a token the darkness that maketh afraid;
Where the sword was covered and hidden, and dust had grown in its side,A word came forth which was bidden, the crying of one that cried:
The sides of the two-edged sword shall be bare, and its mouth shall be red,For the breath of the face of the Lord that is felt in the bones of the dead.
About the author
About the poet
Algernon Charles Swinburne was an English poet, playwright, novelist, and critic. He invented the roundel form, wrote several novels, and contributed to the famous Eleventh Edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in every year from 1903 to 1907 and again in 1909.
Biography
Swinburne was born at 7 Chester Street, Grosvenor Place, London, on 5 April 1837. He was the eldest of six children born to Captain (later Admiral) Charles Henry Swinburne and Lady Jane Henrietta, daughter of the 3rd Earl of Ashburnham. He grew up at East Dene in Bonchurch on the Isle of Wight and attended Eton College 1849-53, where he first started writing poetry, and then Balliol College, Oxford 1856-60 with a brief hiatus when he was rusticated from the university in 1859 for having publicly supported the attempted assassination of Napoleon III by Felice Orsini, returning in May 1860, though he never received a degree.
He spent summer holidays at Capheaton Hall in Northumberland, the house of his grandfather, Sir John Swinburne, 6th Baronet (1762–1860) who had a famous library and was President of the Literary and Philosophical Society in Newcastle upon Tyne. Swinburne considered Northumberland to be his native county, an emotion memorably reflected in poems like the intensely patriotic 'Northumberland', 'Grace Darling' and others. He enjoyed riding his pony across the moors (he was a daring horseman) 'through honeyed leagues of the northland border'. He never called it the Scottish border.
In the years 1857–60, Swinburne became one of Lady Pauline Trevelyan's intellectual circle at Wallington Hall and after his grandfather's death in 1860, would stay with William Bell Scott in Newcastle. In December 1862, Swinburne accompanied Scott and his guests, probably including Dante Gabriel Rossetti , on a trip to Tynemouth. Scott writes in his memoirs that as they walked by the sea, Swinburne declaimed the as yet unpublished 'Hymn to Proserpine' and 'Laus Veneris' in his lilting intonation, while the waves 'were running the whole length of the long level sands towards Cullercoats and sounding like far-off acclamations'.
At Oxford Swinburne met several Pre-Raphaelites, including Dante Gabriel Rossetti. He also met William Morris. After leaving college he lived in London and started an active writing career, where Rossetti was delighted with his 'little Northumbrian friend', a reference to Swinburne's diminutive height—he was just over five feet tall.
His poetic works include: Atalanta in Calydon (1865), Poems and Ballads (1866), Songs before Sunrise (1871), Poems and Ballads Second Series, (1878) Tristram of Lyonesse (1882), Poems and Ballads Third Series (1889), and the novel Lesbia Brandon (published posthumously in 1952).
Poems and Ballads caused a sensation when it was first published , especially the poems written in homage of Sappho of Lesbos such as "Anactoria" and "Sapphics": Moxon and Co. transferred its publication rights to John Camden Hotten.Other poems in this volume such as "The Leper," "Laus Veneris," and "St Dorothy" evoke a Victorian fascination with the Middle Ages, and are explicitly mediaeval in style, tone and construction. Also featured in this volume are "Hymn to Proserpine", "The Triumph of Time" and "Dolores (Notre-Dame des Sept Douleurs)".
Swinburne devised the poetic form called the roundel, a variation of the French Rondeau form, and some were included in A Century of Roundels dedicated to Christina Rossetti. Swinburne wrote to Edward Burne-Jones in 1883: "I have got a tiny new book of songs or songlets, in one form and all manner of metres ... just coming out, of which Miss Rossetti has accepted the dedication. I hope you and Georgie [his wife Georgiana, one of the MacDonald sisters] will find something to like among a hundred poems of nine lines each, twenty-four of which are about babies or small children". Opinions of these poems vary between those who find them captivating and brilliant, to those who find them merely clever and contrived. One of them, A Baby's Death, was set to music by the English composer Sir Edward Elgar as the song Roundel: The little eyes that never knew Light.
Swinburne was an alcoholic and algolagniac, and a highly excitable character. His health suffered as a result, and in 1879 at the age of 42 he was taken into care by his friend Theodore Watts, who looked after him for the rest of his life at The Pines, 11 Putney Hill, Putney SW15.Thereafter he lost his youthful rebelliousness and developed into a figure of social respectability. He died at the Pines,on 10 April 1909 at the age of 72 and was buried at St. Boniface Church, Bonchurch on the Isle of Wight.
Criticism
Swinburne is considered a decadent poet, although he perhaps professed to more vice than he actually indulged in; Oscar Wilde stated that Swinburne was "a braggart in matters of vice, who had done everything he could to convince his fellow citizens of his homosexuality and bestiality without being in the slightest degree a homosexual or a bestializer."
His mastery of vocabulary, rhyme and metre is impressive, although he has also been criticized for his florid style and word choices that only fit the rhyme scheme rather than contributing to the meaning of the piece. He is the virtual star of the third volume of George Saintsbury's famous History of English Prosody, and A. E. Housman, a more measured and even somewhat hostile critic, devoted paragraphs of praise to his rhyming ability.
Swinburne's work was once quite popular among undergraduates at Oxford and Cambridge, though today it has gone out of fashion. This is at least somewhat contextual, as it tends to mirror the popular and academic consensus regarding his work, although his Poems and Ballads, First Series and his Atalanta in Calydon have never been out of critical favour.
It was Swinburne's misfortune that the two works, published when he was nearly 30, soon established him as England's premier poet, the successor to Robert Browning This was a position he held in the popular mind until his death, but sophisticated critics like A. E. Housman felt, rightly or wrongly, that the job of being one of England's very greatest poets was beyond him.
After the first Poems and Ballads, Swinburne's later poetry is devoted more to philosophy and politics (notably, in favour of the unification of Italy, particularly in the volume Songs before Sunrise). He does not stop writing love poetry entirely (including his great epic-length poem, Tristram of Lyonesse), but the content is much less shocking. His versification, and especially his rhyming technique, remain in top form to the end.
T.S. Eliot read Swinburne's essays on the Shakespearean and Jonsonian dramatists in The Contemporaries of Shakespeare and The Age of Shakespeare and Swinburne's books on Shakespeare and Jonson. Writing on Swinburne in 'The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism', Eliot found that as a poet writing notes on poets, he had mastered his material, writing "'he is more reliable to them than Hazlitt, Coleridge , or Lamb : and his perception of relative values is almost always correct." However, Eliot disliked Swinburne's prose. About this he wrote "the tumultuous outcry of adjectives, the headstrong rush of undisciplined sentences, are the index to the impatience and perhaps laziness of a disorderly mind."