AN IMMORALITY
Sing we for love and idleness,
Naught else is worth the having.
Though I have been in many a land,
There is naught else in living.
And I would rather have my sweet,
Though rose-leaves die of grieving,
Than do high deeds in Hungary
To pass all men's believing.
DIEU! QU'IL LA FAIT
From Charles D'Orleans
For music
God! that mad'st her well regard her,
How she is so fair and bonny;
For the great charms that are upon her
Ready are all folk to reward her.
Who could part him from her borders
When spells are alway renewed on her?
God! that mad'st her well regard her,
How she is so fair and bonny.
From here to there to the sea's border,
Dame nor damsel there's not any
Hath of perfect charms so many.
Thoughts of her are of dream's order:
God! that mad'st her well regard her.
SALVE PONTIFEX
(A.C.S.)
One after one they leave thee,
High Priest of Iacchus,
Intoning thy melodies as winds intone
The whisperings of leaves on sunlit days.
And the sands are many
And the seas beyond the sands are one
In ultimate, so we here being many
Are unity; nathless thy compeers,
Knowing thy melody,
Lulled with the wine of thy music
Go seaward silently, leaving thee sentinel
O'er all the mysteries,
High Priest of Iacchus.
For the lines of life lie under thy fingers,
And above the vari-coloured strands
Thine eyes look out unto the infinitude
Of the blue waves of heaven,
And even as Triplex Sisterhood
Thou fingerest the threads knowing neither
Cause nor the ending,
High Priest of Iacchus,
Draw'st forth a multiplicity
Of strands, and, beholding
The colour thereof, raisest thy voice
Towards the sunset,
O High Priest of Iacchus!
And out of the secrets of the inmost mysteries
Thou chantest strange far-sourced canticles:
O High Priest of Iacchus!
Life and the ways of Death her
Twin-born sister, that is life's counterpart,
And of night and the winds of night;
Silent voices ministering to the souls
Of hamadryads that hold council concealèd
In streams and tree-shadowing
Forests on hill slopes,
O High Priest of Iacchus,
All the manifold mystery
Thou makest a wine of song,
And maddest thy following even
With visions of great deeds
And their futility,
O High Priest of Iacchus!
Though thy co-novices are bent to the scythe
Of the magian wind that is voice of Persephone,
Leaving thee solitary, master of initiating
Mænads that come through the
Vine-entangled ways of the forest
Seeking, out of all the world,
Madness of Iacchus,
That being skilled in the secrets of the double cup
They might turn the dead of the world
Into pæans,
O High Priest of Iacchus,
Wreathed with the glory of thy years of creating
Entangled music,
Breathe!
Now that the evening cometh upon thee,
Breathe upon us, that low-bowed and exultant
Drink wine of Iacchus, that since the conquering
Hath been chiefly containèd in the numbers
Of them that, even as thou, have woven
Wicker baskets for grape clusters
Wherein is concealèd the source of the vintage,
O High Priest of Iacchus,
Breathe thou upon us
Thy magic in parting!
Even as they thy co-novices,
At being mingled with the sea,
While yet thou madest thy canticles
Serving upright before the altar
That is bound about with shadows
Of dead years wherein thy Iacchus
Looked not upon the hills, that being
Uncared for, praised not him in entirety.
O High Priest of Iacchus,
Being now near to the border of the sands
Where the sapphire girdle of the sea
Encinctureth the maiden
Persephone, released for the spring,
Look! Breathe upon us
The wonder of the thrice encinctured mystery
Whereby thou being full of years art young,
Loving even this lithe Persephone
That is free for the seasons of plenty;
Whereby thou being young art old
And shalt stand before this Persephone
Whom thou lovest,
In darkness, even at that time
That she being returned to her husband
Shall be queen and a maiden no longer,
Wherein thou being neither old nor young
Standing on the verge of the sea
Shalt pass from being sand,
O High Priest of Iacchus,
And becoming wave
Shalt encircle all sands,
Being transmuted through all
The girdling of the sea.
O High Priest of Iacchus,
Breathe thou upon us!
Note.—This apostrophe was written three years
before Swinburne's death.
Δώρια
Be in me as the eternal moods of the bleak wind, and not
As transient things are—gaiety of flowers.
Have me in the strong loneliness of sunless cliffs
And of grey waters.
Let the gods speak softly of us
In days hereafter,
The shadowy flowers of Orcus
Remember Thee.
THE NEEDLE
Come, or the stellar tide will slip away,
Eastward avoid the hour of its decline,
Now! for the needle trembles in my soul!
Here have we had our vantage, the good hour.
Here we have had our day, your day and mine.
Come now, before this power
That bears us up, shall turn against the pole.
Mock not the flood of stars, the thing's to be.
O Love, come now, this land turns evil slowly.
The waves bore in, soon will they bear away.
The treasure is ours, make we fast land with it.
Move we and take the tide, with its next favour,
Abide
Under some neutral force
Until this course turneth aside.
SUB MARE
It is, and is not, I am sane enough,
Since you have come this place has hovered round me,
This fabrication built of autumn roses,
Then there's a goldish colour, different.
And one gropes in these things as delicate
Algae reach up and out beneath
Pale slow green surgings of the under-wave,
'Mid these things older than the names they have,
These things that are familiars of the god.
PLUNGE
I would bathe myself in strangeness:
These comforts heaped upon me,
smother me!
I burn, I scald so for the new,
New friends, new faces,
Places!
Oh to be out of this,
This that is all I wanted
—save the new.
And you,
Love, you the much, the more desired!
Do I not loathe all walls, streets, stones,
All mire, mist, all fog,
All ways of traffic?
You, I would have flow over me like water,
Oh, but far out of this!
Grass, and low fields, and hills,
And sun,
Oh, sun enough!
Out and alone, among some
Alien people!
A VIRGINAL
No, no! Go from me. I have left her lately,
I will not spoil my sheath with lesser brightness,
For my surrounding air has a new lightness;
Slight are her arms, yet they have bound me straitly
And left me cloaked as with a gauze of æther;
As with sweet leaves; as with a subtle clearness.
Oh, I have picked up magic in her nearness
To sheathe me half in half the things that sheathe her.
No, no! Go from me. I have still the flavour,
Soft as spring wind that's come from birchen bowers.
Green come the shoots, aye April in the branches,
As winter's wound with her sleight hand she staunches,
Hath of the tress a likeness of the savour:
As white their bark, so white this lady's hours.
PAN IS DEAD
Pan is dead. Great Pan is dead.
Ah! bow your heads, ye maidens all,
And weave ye him his coronal.
There is no summer in the leaves,
And withered are the sedges;
How shall we weave a coronal,
Or gather floral pledges?
That I may not say, Ladies.
Death was ever a churl.
That I may not say, Ladies.
How should he show a reason,
That he has taken our Lord away
Upon such hollow season?
THE PICTURE[1]
The eyes of this dead lady speak to me,
For here was love, was not to be drowned out,
And here desire, not to be kissed away.
The eyes of this dead lady speak to me.
[1] "Venus Reclining," by Jacopo del Sellaio
(1442-93).
OF JACOPO DEL SELLAIO
This man knew out the secret ways of love,
No man could paint such things who did not know.
And now she's gone, who was his Cyprian,
And you are here, who are "The Isles" to me.
And here's the thing that lasts the whole thing out:
The eyes of this dead lady speak to me.
THE RETURN
See, they return; ah, see the tentative
Movements, and the slow feet,
The trouble in the pace and the uncertain
Wavering!
See, they return, one, and by one,
With fear, as half-awakened;
As if the snow should hesitate
And murmur in the wind,
and half turn back;
These were the "Wing'd-with-Awe,"
Inviolable.
Gods of the wingèd shoe!
With them the silver hounds,
sniffing the trace of air!
Haie! Haie!
These were the swift to harry;
These the keen-scented;
These were the souls of blood.
Slow on the leash,
pallid the leash-men.
EFFECTS OF MUSIC UPON A COMPANY OF PEOPLE
I
DEUX MOVEMENTS
1. Temple qui fut.
2. Poissons d'or.
1
A soul curls back,
Their souls like petals,
Thin, long, spiral,
Like those of a chrysanthemum curl
Smoke-like up and back from the
Vavicel, the calyx,
Pale green, pale gold, transparent,
Green of plasma, rose-white,
Spirate like smoke,
Curled,
Vibrating,
Slowly, waving slowly.
O Flower animate!
O calyx!
O crowd of foolish people!
2
The petals!
On the tip of each the figure
Delicate.
See, they dance, step to step.
Flora to festival,
Twine, bend, bow,
Frolic involve ye.
Woven the step,
Woven the tread, the moving.
Ribands they move,
Wave, bow to the centre.
Pause, rise, deepen in colour,
And fold in drowsily.
II
FROM A THING BY SCHUMANN
Breast high, floating and welling
Their soul, moving beneath the satin,
Plied the gold threads,
Pushed at the gauze above it.
The notes beat upon this,
Beat and indented it;
Rain dropped and came and fell upon this,
Hail and snow,
My sight gone in the flurry!
And then across the white silken,
Bellied up, as a sail bellies to the wind,
Over the fluid tenuous, diaphanous,
Over this curled a wave, greenish,
Mounted and overwhelmed it.
This membrane floating above,
And bellied out by the up-pressing soul.
Then came a mer-host,
And after them legion of Romans,
The usual, dull, theatrical!
THE COMPLETE POETICAL WORKS OF T.E. HULME
PREFATORY NOTE
In publishing his Complete Poetical Works at thirty,[1] Mr Hulme has set an enviable example to many of his contemporarieswho have had less to say.
They are reprinted here for good fellowship; for good custom, a custom out of Tuscany and of Provence; and thirdly, for convenience, seeing their smallness of bulk; and for good memory, seeing that they recall certain evenings and meetings of two years gone, dull enough at the time, but rather pleasant to look back upon.
As for the "School of Images," which may or may not have existed, its principles were not so interesting as those of the "inherent dynamists" or of Les Unanimistes, yet they were probably sounder than those of a certain French school which attempted to dispense with verbs altogether; or of the Impressionists who brought forth: