The faint fresh flame of the young year | All is reaped now; no grass is left to mow;

A LEAVE-TAKING

Come hence, let be, lie still; it is enough.
Love is a barren sea, bitter and deep;
And though she saw all heaven in flower above,
She would not love.

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Let us give up, go down; she will not care.
Though all the stars made gold of all the air,
And the sea moving saw before it move
One moon-flower making all the foam-flowers
fair,

Though all those waves went over us, and drove
Deep down the stifling lips and drowning hair,
She would not care.

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Let us go hence, go hence; she will not see.
Sing all once more together; surely she,
She, too, remembering days and words that

were,

Will turn a little toward us, sighing; but we,

not been there.

Nay, and though all men seeing had pity on me,
She would not see.

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Let us go hence, my songs; she will not hear. We are hence, we are gone, as though we had
Let us go hence together without fear;
Keep silence now, for singing-time is over,
And over all old things and all things dear.
She loves not you nor me as all we love her.
Yea, though we sang as angels in her ear,
She would not hear.

HYMN TO PROSERPINE*

(AFTER THE PROCLAMATION IN ROME OF THE
CHRISTIAN FAITH)
Vicisti, Galilæe

Let us rise up and part; she will not know.
Let us go seaward as the great winds go,
Full of blown sand and foam; what help is I have lived long enough, having seen one thing,

here?

There is no help, for all these things are so,
And all the world is bitter as a tear;

that love hath an end;

Goddess and maiden and queen, be near me now and befriend.

And how these things are, though ye strove to Thou art more than the day or the morrow, the seasons that laugh or that weep; 14 For these give joy and sorrow; but thou, Pros

show,

She would not know.

Let us go home and hence; she will not weep.
We gave love many dreams and days to keep,
Flowers without scent, and fruits that would
not grow,

Saying, "If thou wilt, thrust in thy sickle and
reap."

2 Names for bacchanals, or frenzied votaries of Bacchus.

That is, pastoral, out-of-door music takes the place of indoor, festal song; Pan supplants Apollo. An oat is a shepherd's pipe made of an oat stem.

erpina, sleep.

Sweet is the treading of wine, and sweet the feet of the dove;

Proserpine, or Proserpina, was the Roman goddess of death and the under world. The Latin motto set before this poem means "Thou hast conquered, Galilean." T words are traditionally ascribed to the dying Em peror Julian-Julian "the apostate," who had been brought up as a Christian but who re verted to paganism after his accession to the throne. The poem attempts to portray th sentiment of expiring paganism; Swinburn called it "the death-song of spiritual deca dence."

But a goodlier gift is thine than foam of the Why should he labour and bring fresh grief to grapes or love. blacken his years?

Yea, is not even Apollo, with hair and harp- Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilean; the world string of gold, has grown gray from thy breath; A bitter God to follow, a beautiful God to We have drunken of things Lethean, and fed behold? on the fulness of death.

I am sick of singing; the bays burn deep and Laurel is green for a season, and love is sweet chafe; I am fain for a day; To rest a little from praise and grievous pleas- But love grows bitter with treason, and laurel ure and pain. outlives not May. For the Gods we know not of, who give us our Sleep, shall we sleep after all? for the world is not sweet in the end;

daily breath,

10

We know they are cruel as love or life,, and For the old faiths loosen and fall, the new lovely as death.

years ruin and rend.

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O Gods dethroned and deceased, cast forth, Fate is a sea without shore, and the soul is a wiped out in a day! rock that abides; From your wrath is the world released, re- But her ears are vexed with the roar and her deemed from your chains, men say. face with the foam of the tides.

New Gods are crowned in the city, their flow- O lips that the live blood faints in, the leavings ers have broken your rods; of racks and rods!

They are merciful, clothed with pity, the young O ghastly glories of saints, dead limbs of gibcompassionate Gods. beted Gods!

But for me their new device is barren, the days Though all men abase them before you in are bare;

I say to you, cease, take rest; yea, I say to you all, be at peace,

spirit, and all knees bend,

Till the bitter milk of her breast and the bar- Waste water washes, and tall ship founder,

All the feet of the hours that sound as a single The depths stand naked in sunder behind it, lyre,

the storms flee away;

Dropped and deep in the flowers, with strings In the hollow before it the thunder is taken that flicker like fire.

and snared as a prey;

More than these wilt thou give, things fairer In its sides is the north-wind bound; and its than all these things?

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salt is of all men's tears;

pulse of years;

Nay, for a little we live, and life hath mutable With light of ruin, and sound of changes, and wings. A little while and we die; shall life not thrive With travail of day after day, and with trouble as it may? of hour upon hour;

For no man under the sky lives twice, outliving And bitter as blood is the spray; and the his day.

crests are as fangs that devour:

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And grief is a grievous thing, and a man hath And its vapour and storm of its steam as the enough of his tears:

sighing of spirits to be;

And its noise as the noise in a dream; and its Ye were all so fair that are broken; and one depth as the roots of the sea:

more fair than ye all.

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And the height of its heads as the height of the But I turn to her still, having seen she shall

utmost stars of the air;

And the ends of the earth at the might thereof tremble, and time is made bare.

Will ye bridle the deep sea with reins, will ye chasten the high sea with rods?

Will ye take her to chain her with chains, who is older than all ye Gods?

surely abide in the end;

Goddess and maiden and queen, be near me now and befriend.

O daughter of earth, of my mother, her crown and blossom of birth,

I am also, I also, thy brother; I go as I came unto earth.

All ye as a wind shall go by, as a fire shall ye In the night where thine eyes are as moons are pass and be past; in heaven, the night where thou art, Ye are Gods, and behold ye shall die, and the Where the silence is more than all tunes, where sleep overflows from the heart,

waves be upon you at last.

In the darkness of time, in the deeps of the Where the poppies are sweet as the rose in our years, in the changes of things,

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world, and the red rose is white,

fume of the flowers of the night, the murmur of spirits that sleep in the shadow of Gods from afar

Ye shall sleep as a slain man sleeps, and the And the wind falls faint as it blows with the world shall forget you for kings. Though the feet of thine high priests tread And where thy lords and our forefathers trod, Though these that were Gods are dead, and

Grows dim in thine ears and deep as the deep dim soul of a star,

100

thou being dead art a God, Though before thee the throned Cytherean be In the sweet low light of thy face, under heavfallen, and hidden her head, ens untrod by the sun, Yet thy kingdom shall pass, Galilean, thy dead Let my soul with their souls find place, and shall go down to thee dead. forget what is done and undone.

Of the maiden thy mother, men sing as a god- Thou art more than the Gods who number the dess with grace clad around; days of our temporal breath;

Thou art throned where another was king; For these give labour and slumber; but thou, where another was queen she is crowned. Proserpina, death.

Yea, once we had sight of another; but now she is queen, say these.

Therefore now at thy feet I abide for a season in silence. I know

Not as thine, not as thine was our mother, a I shall die as my fathers died, and sleep as they blossom of flowering seas,1 sleep; even so. Clothed round with the world's desire as with For the glass of the years is brittle wherein we raiment, and fair as the foam, gaze for a span;

And fleeter than kindled fire, and a goddess A little soul for a little bears up this corpse and mother of Rome.

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which is man.2

For thine came pale and a maiden, and sister So long I endure, no longer; and laugh not to sorrow; but ours, again, neither weep.

Her deep hair heavily laden with odour and For there is no God found stronger than death;

And the wonderful waters knew her, the winds Swinburne's Songs Before Sunrise, published in

and the viewless ways,

And the roses grew rosier, and bluer the seablue stream of the bays.

Ye are fallen, our lords, by what token? we wist that ye should not fall.

1 Venus, born of the foam.

1871, and dedicated to Joseph Mazzini, the Italian patriot, are a noteworthy contribution to the poetry of political and religious freedom. They were mainly inspired by the long struggle for a free and united Italy. The partial union of Italy, effected in 1861, was completed by the occupation of Rome in 1870, but the government was monarchical, and not republican, as the more ardent revolutionists had hoped.

Upon the hollow stream whose bed

Is channelled by the foamless years;
And with the white the gold-haired head
Mixed running locks, and in Time's ears
Youth's dreams hung singing, and Time's truth
Was half not harsh in the ears of Youth.

Between the bud and the blown flower
Youth talked with joy and grief an hour,
With footless joy and wingless grief
And twin-born faith and disbelief
Who share the seasons to devour;

And long ere these made up their sheaf
Felt the winds round him shake and shower
The rose-red and the blood-red leaf,
Delight whose germ grew never grain,
And passion dyed in its own pain.

Then he stood up, and trod to dust
Fear and desire, mistrust and trust,

And dreams of bitter sleep and sweet,
And bound for sandals on his feet
Knowledge and patience of what must

And what things may be, in the heat And cold of years that rot and rust

And alter; and his spirit's meat

Was freedom, and his staff was wrought

10

He builds not half of doubts and half
Of dreams his own soul's cenotaph,
Whence hopes and fears with helpless eyes,
Wrapt loose in cast-off cerecloths, rise
And dance and wring their hands and laugh,
And weep thin tears and sigh light sighs,
And without living lips would quaff

The living spring in man that lies,
And drain his soul of faith and strength
It might have lived on a life's length.

He hath given himself and hath not sold
20 To God for heaven or man for gold,
Or grief for comfort that it gives,
Or joy for grief's restoratives.
He hath given himself to time, whose fold
Shuts in the mortal flock that lives

On its plain pasture's heat and cold
And the equal year's alternatives.
Earth, heaven, and time, death, life, and he,
Endure while they shall be to be.

"Yet between death and life are hours

Of strength, and his cloak woven of thought. 30 To flush with love and hide in flowers;

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80

What profit save in these?'' men cry:
"Ah, see, between soft earth and sky,
What only good things here are ours!"'
They say, "What better wouldst thou try,
What sweeter sing of? or what powers
Serve, that will give thee ere thou die
More joy to sing and be less sad,
More heart to play and grow more glad?'' 90

Play then and sing; we too have played,
We likewise, in that subtle shade.

We too have twisted through our hair
Such tendrils as the wild Loves wear,
And heard what mirth the Mænads1 made,
Till the wind blew our garlands bare

And left their roses disarrayed,

And smote the summer with strange air, And disengirdled and discrowned

99

The limbs and locks that vine-wreaths bound.

We too have tracked by star-proof trees

The tempest of the Thyiades1

Scare the loud night on hills that hid

50

120 A little time we gain from time
To set our seasons in some chime,
For harsh or sweet or loud or low,
With seasons played out long ago
And souls that in their time and prime
Took part with summer or with snow,
Lived abject lives out or sublime,