Ay, but we that the wind and sea gird round with shelter
of storms and waves,
Know not him that ye worship, grim as dreams that quicken
from dead men's graves:
God is one with the sea, the sun, the land that nursed us,
the love that saves.
Love whose heart is in ours, and part of all things noble
and all things fair:
Sweet and free as the circling sea, sublime and kind as the
fostering air:
Pure of shame as is England's name, whose crowns to come
are as crowns that were.
Now we have, quite easily, a change in the measure. We have sixteen syllables still, but the whole music is changed.
But the Lord of darkness, the God whose love is a flaming fire,
The master whose mercy fulfils wide hell till its torturers tire,
He shall surely have heed of his servants who serve him for love, not hire.
The double rhymes are not used here. Later on, after the English victory and the storm, they are used again, for the purpose of additional force. The address is to the Spaniards and to their gods.
Lords of night, who would breathe your blight on April's
morning and August's noon,
God your Lord, the condemned, the abhorred, sinks hell-ward,
smitten with deathlike swoon,
Death's own dart in his hateful heart now thrills, and night
shall receive him soon.
God the Devil, thy reign of revel is here forever eclipsed
and fled;
God the Liar, everlasting fire lays hold at last on thee, hand
and head.
Page after page of constantly varying measures of this kind will be found in the poem—a poem which notwithstanding its strong violence at times, represents the power of the verse-maker better than almost any other single piece in the work of his later years.
From what extracts we have already made, I think you will see enough of the value and beauty of Swinburne's diction to take in it such interest as it really deserves. We might continue the study of this author for a much longer time. But the year is waning, the third term, which is very short, will soon be upon us; and I wish to turn with you next week to the study of Browning.