Chapter III: Studies in Swinburne (2)

To understand the terrible bitterness of this scorn, it is necessary for the student to remember that a Roman citizen could not be tortured or flogged or gibbeted. Such punishments and penalties were reserved for slaves and for barbarians. Therefore to a Roman the mere fact of Christ's death and punishment--for he was tortured before being crucified--was a subject for contempt; accordingly he speaks of such a divinity as the "leavings of racks and rods"--that is, so much of a man's body as might be left after the torturers and executioners had finished with it. Should a Roman citizen kneel down and humble himself before that? A little while, some thousands of years, perhaps, Christianity may be a triumphant religion, but all religions must die and pass away, one after another, and this new and detestable religion, with its ugly gods, must also pass away. For although the old Roman has studied too much philosophy to believe in all that his fathers believed, he believes in a power that is greater than man and gods and the universe itself, in the unknown power which gives life and death, and makes perpetual change, and sweeps away everything that man foolishly believes to be permanent. He gives to this law of impermanency the name of the goddess of death, but the name makes little difference; he has recognised the eternal law. Time will sweep away Christianity itself, and his description of this mighty wave of time is one of the finest passages in all his poetry:

All delicate days and pleasant, all spirits and sorrows are
cast
Far out with the foam of the present that sweeps to the
surf of the past:
. . . . . . . . .

Where, mighty with deepening sides, clad about with the
seas as with wings,
And impelled of invisible tides, and fulfilled of unspeakable
things,
White-eyed and poisonous-finned, shark-toothed and serpentine-curled,
Rolls, under the whitening wind of the future, the wave of
the world.

The depths stand naked in sunder behind it, the storms flee
away;
In the hollow before it the thunder is taken and snared as
a prey;
In its sides is the north-wind bound; and its salt is of all
men's tears;
With light of ruins and sound of changes, and pulse of
years:
With travail of day after day, and with trouble of hour
upon hour;
And bitter as blood is the spray; and the crests are as fangs
that devour:
And its vapour and storm of its steam as the sighing of
spirits to be;
And its noise as the noise in a dream; and its depth as the
roots of the sea:
And the height of its heads as the height of the utmost stars
of the air:
And the ends of the earth at the might thereof tremble, and
time is made bare.

When the poet calls this the wave of the world, you must not understand world to mean our planet only, but the universe, the cosmos; and the wave is the great wave of impermanency, including all forces of time and death and life and pain. But why these terrible similes of white eyes and poisonous things and shark's teeth, of blood and bitterness and terror? Because the old philosopher dimly recognises the cruelty of nature, the mercilessness of that awful law of change which, having swept away his old gods, will just as certainly sweep away the new gods that have appeared. Who can resist that mighty power, higher than the stars, deeper than the depths, in whose motion even gods are but as bubbles and foam? Assuredly not Christ and his new religion. Speaking to the new gods the Roman cries:

All ye as a wind shall go by, as a fire shall ye pass and be
past;
Ye are Gods, and behold, ye shall die, and the waves be
upon you at last.
. . . . . . . . .

Yet thy kingdom shall pass, Galilean, thy dead shall go
down to thee dead.

Here follows a beautiful picture of the contrast between the beauty of the old gods and the uninviting aspect of the new. It is a comparison between the Virgin Mary, mother of Christ, and Venus or Aphrodite, the ancient goddess of love, born from the sea. For to the Roman mind the Christian gods and saints wanted even the common charm of beauty and tenderness. All the divinities of the old Greek world were beautiful to look upon, and warmly human; but these strange new gods from Asia seemed to be not even artistically endurable. Addressing Christ, he continues:

Of the maiden thy mother men sing as a goddess with grace
clad around;
Thou art throned where another was king; where another
was queen she is crowned.
Yea, once we had sight of another: but now she is queen,
say these.
Not as thine, not as thine was our mother, a blossom of
flowering seas,
Clothed around with the world's desire as with raiment and
fair as the foam,
And fleeter than kindled fire, and a goddess and mother of
Rome.
For thine came pale and a maiden, and sister to sorrow;
but ours,
Her deep hair heavily laden with odour and colour of
flowers,
White rose of the rose-white water, a silver splendour, a
flame,
Bent down unto us that besought her, and earth grew sweet
with her name.
For thine came weeping, a slave among slaves, and rejected;
but she
Came flushed from the full-flushed wave, and imperial, her
foot on the sea.
And the wonderful waters knew her, the winds and the
viewless ways,
And the roses grew rosier, and bluer the sea-blue stream
of the bays.
Ye are fallen, our lords, by what token? we wist that ye
should not fall.
Ye were all so fair that are broken; and one more fair than
ye all.

Why, by what power, for what reason, should the old gods have passed away? Even if one could not believe in them all, they were too beautiful to pass away and be broken, as their statues were broken by the early Christians in the rage of their ignorant and brutal zeal. The triumph of Christianity meant much more than the introduction of a new religion; it meant the destruction of priceless art and priceless literature, it signified the victory of barbarism over culture and refinement. Doubtless the change, like all great changes, was for the better in some ways; but no lover of art and the refinements of civilisation can read without regret the history of the iconoclasm in which the Christian fanatics indulged when they got the government and the law upon their side. It is this feeling of regret and horror that the poet well expresses through the mouth of the Roman who cares no more to live, because the gods and everything beautiful must pass away. But there is one goddess still left for him, one whom the Christians cannot break but who will at last break them and their religion, and scatter them as dust--the goddess of death. To her he turns with a last prayer:

But I turn to her still, having seen she shall 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.
. . . . . . . . .

Thou art more than the Gods who number the days of our
temporal breath;

For these give labour and slumber, but thou, Proserpina,
death.
Therefore now at thy feet I abide for a season in silence.
I know
I shall die as my fathers died, and sleep as they sleep;
even so.
For the glass of the years is brittle wherein we gaze for a
span;
A little soul for a little bears up this corpse which is man.
So long I endure, no longer; and laugh not again, neither
weep.
For there is no God found stronger than death; and death
is a sleep.

The third line from the end, "a little soul for a little," is a translation from the philosopher Epictetus. It is the Epicurean philosophy especially which speaks in this poetry. The address to the goddess of death as the daughter of earth, cannot be understood without some reference to Greek mythology. Proserpina was the daughter of the goddess Ceres, whom the ancients termed the Holy Mother--queen of the earth, but especially the goddess of fruitfulness and of harvests. While playing in the fields as a young girl, Proserpina was seized and carried away by the god of the dead, Hades or Pluto, to become his wife. Everywhere her mother sought after her to no purpose; and because of the grief of the goddess, the earth dried up, the harvests failed, and all nature became desolate. Afterwards, finding that her daughter had become the queen of the kingdom of the dead, Ceres agreed that Proserpina should spend a part of every year with her husband, and part of the year with her mother. To this arrangement the Greeks partly attributed the origin of the seasons.

Incidentally in the poem there is a very beautiful passage describing the world of death, where no sun is, where the silence is more than music, where the flowers are white and full of strange sleepy smell, and where the sound of the speech of the dead is like the sound of water heard far away, or a humming of bees-whither the old man prays to go, to rest with his ancestors away from the light of the sun, and to forget all the sorrow of this world and its changes. But I think that you will do well to study this poem in detail by yourselves, when opportunity allows. It happens to be one of the very few poems in the first series of Swinburne's "Poems and Ballads" to which no reasonable exception can be made; and it is without doubt one of the very finest things that he has ever written. I could recommend this for translation; there are many pieces in the same book which I could not so recommend, notwithstanding their beauty. For instance, the poem entitled "Hesperia," with its splendid beginning:

Out of the golden remote wild west where the sea without
shore is,
Full of the sunset, and sad, if at all, with the fulness of joy.

There is nothing more perfect in modern literature than the beginning of this poem, which gives us an exact imitation in English words of the sound of the Greek hexameter and pentameter. But much of this work is too passionate and violent for even the most indulgent ears; and though I think that you ought to study the beginning, I should never recommend it for translation.

The comparison of the wave in the hymn to Proserpina must have given you an idea of Swinburne's power to deal with colossal images. I know of few descriptions in any literature to be compared with that picture of the wave; but Swinburne himself in another poem has given us descriptions nearly as surprising, if not as beautiful. There is a poem called "Thalassius," a kind of philosophical moral fable in Greek form, that contains a surprise of this kind. The subject is a young man's first experience with love. Walking in the meadows he sees a pretty boy, or rather child, just able to walk--a delicious child, tender as a flower, and apparently needing kindly care. So he takes the child by the hand, wondering at his beauty; and he speaks to the child, but never gets any reply except a smile. Suddenly, at a certain point of the road the child begins to grow tall, to grow tremendous; his stature reaches the sky, and in a terrible voice that shakes everything like an earthquake, he announces that though he may be Love, he is also Death, and that only the fool imagines him to be Love alone. There is a bit both of old and of new philosophy in this; and I remarked when reading it that in Indian mythology there is a similar representation of this double attribute of divinity, love and death, creation and destruction, represented by one personage. But we had better read the scene which I have been trying to describe, the meeting with the child:

That wellnigh wept for wonder that it smiled,
And was so feeble and fearful, with soft speech
The youth bespake him softly; but there fell
From the sweet lips no sweet word audible
That ear or thought might reach;
No sound to make the dim cold silence glad,
No breath to thaw the hard harsh air with heat,
Only the saddest smile of all things sweet,
Only the sweetest smile of all things sad.

And so they went together one green way
Till April dying made free the world for May;
And on his guide suddenly Love's face turned,
And in his blind eyes burned
Hard light and heat of laughter; and like flame
That opens in a mountain's ravening mouth
To blear and sear the sunlight from the south,
His mute mouth opened, and his first word came;
"Knowest thou me now by name?"
And all his stature waxed immeasurable,
As of one shadowing heaven and lightening hell;
And statelier stood he than a tower that stands
And darkens with its darkness far-off sands
Whereon the sky leans red;
And with a voice that stilled the winds he said:
"I am he that was thy lord before thy birth,
I am he that is thy lord till thou turn earth;
I make the night more dark, and all the morrow
Dark as the night whose darkness was my breath:
O fool, my name is sorrow;
Thou fool, my name is death."

By the term "darkness" in the third line from the end of the above quotation, we must understand the darkness and mystery out of which man comes into this world, and comes only to die. This monstrous symbolism may need some explanation, before you see how very fine the meaning is. Love, that is the attraction of sex to sex, with all its emotions, heroisms, sacrifices, and nobilities, cannot be understood by the young. To them, love is only the physical and the moral charm of the being that is loved. In man the passion of love becomes noble and specialised by the development in him of moral, æsthetic, and other feelings that are purely human. But the attraction of sex, that is behind all this, is a universal and terrible fact, a tremendous mystery, whose ultimate nature no man knows or ever will know. Why? Because if we knew the nature and origin of the forces that create, we could understand the whole universe, and ourselves, and everything that men now call mystery. But all that we certainly do know is this, that we come into the world out of mystery and go out of the world again back into mystery, and that no mortal man can explain the Whence, the Why, or the Whither. The first sensations of love for another being are perhaps the most delicious feelings known to men; the person loved seems for the time to be more beautiful and good than any one else in the world. This is what the poet means by describing the first appearance of love as a beautiful, tender child, innocent and dumb. But later in life the physical illusion passes away; then one learns the relation of this seeming romance to the awful questions of life and death. The girl beloved becomes the wife; then she becomes the mother; but in becoming a mother, she enters into the very shadow of death, sometimes never to return from it. Birth itself is an agony, the greatest agony that humanity has to bear. We come into the world through pains of the most deadly kind, and leave the world later on in pain; and what all this means, we do not know. We are only certain that the Greeks were not wrong in representing love as the brother of death. The Oriental philosophers went further; they identified love with death, making them one and the same. One cannot help thinking of the Indian statue representing the creative power, holding in his hand the symbol of life, but wearing around his neck a necklace of human skulls.

The poem that introduces the first volume of Swinburne's poems, as published in America, gave its name to the book, so that thousands of English readers used to call the volume by the name of this poem, "Laus Veneris," which means the praise of Venus. I do not think that there is a more characteristic poem in all Swinburne's work; it is certainly the most interesting version in any modern language of the old mediæval story. Without understanding the story you could not possibly understand the poem, and as the story has been famous for hundreds of years, I shall first relate it.

After Christianity had made laws forbidding people to worship the old gods, it was believed that these gods still remained wandering about like ghosts and tempting men to sin. One of these divinities especially dreaded by the Christian priests, was Venus. Now in the Middle t Ages there was a strange story about a knight called Tannhäuser, who, riding home one evening, saw by the wayside a beautiful woman unclad, who smiled at him, and induced him to follow her. He followed her to the foot of a great mountain; the mountain opened like a door, and they went in, and found a splendid palace under the mountain. The fairy woman was Venus herself; and the knight lived with her for seven years. At the end of the seven years he became afraid because of the sin which he had committed; and he begged her, as Urashima begged the daughter of the Dragon King, to let him return for a little time to the world of men. She let him go; and he went to Rome. There he told his story to different priests, and asked them to obtain for him the forgiveness of God. But each of the priests made answer that the sin was so great that nobody except the Pope of Rome could forgive it. Then the knight went to the Pope. But when the Pope heard his confession, the Pope said that there was no forgiveness possible for such a crime as that of loving a demon. The Pope had a wooden staff in his hand, and he said, "Sooner shall this dry stick burst into blossom than you obtain God's pardon for such a sin." Then the knight, sorrowing greatly, went back to the mountain and to Venus. After he had gone, the Pope was astonished to see that the dry staff was covered with beautiful flowers and leaves that had suddenly grown out of it, as a sign that God was more merciful than his priests. At this the Pope became sorry and afraid, and he sent out messengers to look for the knight. But no man ever saw him again, for Venus kept him hidden in her palace under the mountain. Swinburne found his version of the story in a quaint French book published in 1530. He represents, not the incidents of the story itself, but only the feelings of the knight after his return from Rome. There is no more hope for him. His only consolation is his love and worship for her; but this love and worship is mingled with fear of hell and regret for his condition. Into the poem Swinburne has put the whole spirit of revolt of which he and the Pre-Raphaelite school were exponents. A few verses will show you the tone. The knight praises Venus:

Lo, this is she that was the world's delight;
The old grey years were parcels of her might;
The strewings of the ways wherein she trod
Were the twain seasons of the day and night.

Lo, she was thus when her clear limbs enticed
All lips that now grow sad with kissing Christ,
Stained with blood fallen from the feet of God,
The feet and hands whereat our souls were priced.

Alas, Lord, surely thou art great and fair.
But lo her wonderfully woven hair!
And thou didst heal us With thy piteous kiss;
But see now, Lord; her mouth is lovelier.

She is right fair; what hath she done to thee?
Nay, fair Lord Christ, lift up thine eyes and see;
Had now thy mother such a lip--like this?
Thou knowest how sweet a thing it is to me.

This calling upon God to admire Venus, this asking Christ whether his mother was even half as beautiful as Venus, was to religious people extremely shocking, of course. And still more shocking seemed the confession in the latter part of the poem that the knight does not care whether he has sinned or not, since, after all, he has been more fortunate than any other man. This expression of exultation after remorse appeared to reverent minds diabolical, the thought of a new Satanic School. But really the poet was doing his work excellently, so far as truth to nature was concerned; and these criticisms were as ignorant as they were out of place. The real fault of the poem was only a fault of youth, a too great sensuousness in its descriptive passages. We might say that Swinburne himself was, during those years, very much in the position of the knight Tannhäuser; he had gone back to the worship of the old gods because they were more beautiful and more joyous than the Christian gods; we may even say that he never came back from the mountain of Venus. But all this poetry of the first series was experimental; it was an expression of the Renaissance feeling that visits the youth of every poet possessing a strong sense of beauty. Before the emotions can be fully corrected by the intellect, such poets are apt to offend the proprieties, and even to say things which the most liberal philosopher would have to condemn. It was at such a time that in another poem, "Dolores," Swinburne spoke of leaving

The lilies and languors of virtue
For the raptures and roses of vice,

--lines that immediately became famous. It was also at such a time that he uttered the prayer to a pagan ideal:

Come down and redeem us from virtue.

But on the other hand, if all poets were to wait for the age of wisdom before they began to sing, we should miss a thousand beautiful things of which only youth is capable, wherefore it were best to forgive the eccentricities for the sake of the incomparable merits. For example, in the very poem from which these quotations have been made, we have such splendid verses as these, referring to the worship of Venus in the time of Nero:

Dost thou dream, in a respite of slumber,
In a lull of the fires of thy life,
Of the days without name, without number,
When thy will stung the world into strife;

When, a goddess, the pulse of thy passion
Smote kings as they revelled in Rome,
And they hailed thee re-risen, O Thalassian,
Foam-white, from the foam?

Thalassian means the sea-born, derived from the Greek word Thalatta, the sea. Here--Swinburne might be referring to the times of the Triumvirate, when Cleopatra succeeded in bewitching the great captain Cæsar and the great captain Antony, and set the world fighting for her sake. Then we have a reference to the great games in Rome, the splendour and the horror of the amphitheatre:

On sands by the storm never shaken,
Nor wet from the washing of tides;
Nor by foam of the waves overtaken,
Nor winds that the thunder bestrides;
But red from the print of thy paces,
Made smooth for the world and its lords,
Ringed round with a flame of fair faces,
And splendid with swords.

The floor of the amphitheatre was covered with sand, which absorbed the blood of the combatants. But you will ask what had the games to da with the goddess? All the Roman festivities of this kind were, to a certain extent, considered as religious celebrations; they formed parts of holiday ceremony.

There the gladiator, pale for thy pleasure,
Drew bitter and perilous breath;
There torments laid hold on the treasure
Of limbs too delicious for death;

When thy gardens were lit with live torches;
When the world was a steed for thy rein;
When the nations lay prone in thy porches,
Our Lady of Pain.

When with flame all around him aspirant,
Stood flushed, as a harp-player stands,
The implacable beautiful tyrant,
Rose-crowned, having death in his hands;
And a sound as the sound of loud water
Smote far through the flight of the fires,
And mixed with the lightning of slaughter
A thunder of lyres.

The reference here in the third, fourth, and fifth lines of the first of the above stanzas is to the torture of the Christians by Nero in the amphitheatre. By "limbs too delicious for death" the poet refers to the torture of young girls. The "live torches" refers to Nero's cruelty in having hundreds of Christians wrapped about with combustible material, tied to lofty poles, and set on fire, to serve as torches during a great festival which he gave in the gardens of his palace. The second stanza represents him as the destroyer of Rome. It is said that he secretly had the city set on fire in a dozen different places, in order that he might be thereby enabled to imagine the scene of the burning of Troy, as described by Homer. He wanted to write a poem about it; and it is said that while the city was burning, he watched it from a high place, at the same time composing and singing a poem on the spectacle. The "flight of fires" refers of course to the spreading of fire through Rome. The "lightning of slaughter" means the flashing of swords in the work of killing, and is explained by the legend that Nero sent soldiers to kill anybody who tried to put out the fire. Anything was possible in the times of which Swinburne sings; for the world was then governed by emperors who were not simply wicked but mad. But what I wish to point out is that while a poet can write verses so splendid in sound and colour as those that I have quoted, even such a composition as "Dolores" must be preserved, with all its good and bad, among the treasures of English verse.

In spite of his radicalism in the matter of religion and of ethics, the Bible has had no more devoted student than Swinburne; he has not only appreciated all the beauties of its imagery and the strength of its wonderful English, but he has used for the subjects of not a few of his pieces, and his more daring pieces, Biblical subjects. The extraordinary composition "Aholibah" was inspired by a study of Ezekiel; unfortunately this is one of the pieces especially inappropriate to the classroom. "A Litany" will suit our purpose better. It consists of a number of Biblical prophecies, from Isaiah and other books of the Old Testament, arranged into a kind of dramatic chorus. God is made the chief speaker, and he is answered by his people. This is a kind of imitation of a certain part of the old church-service, in which one band of singers answers another, such singing being called "antiphonal," and the different parts, "antiphones." There is very little English verse written in the measure which Swinburne has adopted for this study, and I hope that you will notice the peculiar rhythmic force of the stanzas. We need quote only a few.

All the bright lights of heaven
I will make dark over thee;
One night shall be as seven
That its skirts may cover thee;
I will send on thy strong men a sword,
On thy remnant a rod:
Ye shall know that I am the Lord,
Saith the Lord God.

And the people answer:

All the bright lights of heaven
Thou hast made dark over us;
One night has been as seven,
That its skirt might cover us;
Thou hast sent on our strong men a sword,
On our remnant a rod;
We know that thou art the Lord,
O Lord our God.

But this submission is not enough; for the Lord replies

As the tresses and wings of the wind
Are scattered and shaken,
I will scatter all them that have sinned,
There shall none be taken;
As a sower that scattereth seed,
So will I scatter them;
As one breaketh and shattereth a reed,
I will break and shatter them.

The antiphone is:

As the wings and the locks of the wind
Are scattered and shaken,
Thou hast scattered all them that have sinned;
There was no man taken;

As a sower that scattereth seed,
So hast thou scattered us;
As one breaketh and shattereth a reed,
Thou hast broken and shattered us.

Observe that, simple as this versification looks, there is nothing more difficult. With, the simplest possible words, the greatest possible amount of sound and force is here obtained. There are many other stanzas, and a noteworthy fact is that very few words of Latin origin are used. Most of the words are Anglo-Saxon; perhaps that is why the language is so sonorous and strong. But when the poet does use a word of Latin origin, the result is simply splendid:

Ye whom your lords loved well,
Putting silver and gold on you,
The inevitable hell
Shall surely take hold on you;
Your gold shall be for a token,
Your staff for a rod;
With the breaking of bands ye are broken,
Saith the Lord God.

The use of the Latin adjective "inevitable" here gives an extraordinary effect, the main accent of the line coming on the second syllable of the word. But, as if to show his power, in the antiphonal response the poet does not repeat this effect, but goes back to the simple Anglo-Saxon with astonishing success:

We whom the world loved well,
Laying silver and gold on us,
The kingdom of death and of hell
Riseth up to take hold on us;

Our gold is turned to a token,
Our staff to a rod;
Yet shalt thou bind them up that were broken,
O Lord our God.

Here the substitution of these much simpler words gives nearly as fine an effect of sound and a grander effect of sense because of the grim power of the words themselves.

Besides studies in Biblical English, the poet has made a number of studies in the Old Anglo-Saxon poets, most of whom were religious men who liked sad and terrible subjects. In the poem entitled "After Death" we have an example of this Anglo-Saxon feeling combined with the plain strength of a later form of language, chiefly Middle English, with here and there a very quaint use of grammar. It was common in Anglo-Saxon poetry to depict the horrors of the grave. Here we have a dead man talking to his own coffin, and the coffin answers him horribly:

The four boards of the coffin lid
Heard all the dead man did.
. . . . . . .

"I had fair coins red and white,
And my name was as great light;

"I had fair clothes green and red,
And strong gold bound round my head.

"But no meat comes in my mouth,
Now I fare as the worm doth;

"And no gold binds in my hair,
Now I fare as the blind fare.

"My live thews were of great strength,
Now am I waxen a span's length;

"My live sides were full of lust,
Now are they dried with dust."

The first board spake and said:
"Is it best eating flesh or bread?"

The second answered it:
"Is wine or honey the more sweet?"

The third board spake and said:
"Is red gold worth a girl's gold head?"

The fourth made answer thus:
"All these things are as one with us."

The dead man asked of them:
"Is the green land stained brown with flame?

"Have they hewn my son for beasts to eat,
And my wife's body for beasts' meat?

"Have they boiled my maid in a brass pan,
And built a gallows to hang my man?"

The boards said to him:
"This is a lewd thing that ye deem.

"Your wife has gotten a golden bed;
All the sheets are sewn with red.

"Your son has gotten a coat of silk,
The sleeves are soft as curded milk.

"Your maid has gotten a kirtle new,
All the skirt has braids of blue.

"Your man has gotten both ring and glove,
Wrought well for eyes to love."

The dead man answered thus:
"What good gift shall God give us?"

The boards answered anon:
"Flesh to feed hell's worm upon."

I doubt very much whether a more terrible effect could be produced by any change of language. The poem is an excellent illustration of the force of the Old English, without admixture of any sort. Do not think that this is simple and easy work; perhaps no other living man could have done it equally well. It is not only in these simple forms, however, that Swinburne shows us the results of his Old English studies. Two of the most celebrated among his early poems, "The Triumph of Time" and the poem on the swallow, "Itylus," are imitations of very old forms of English verse, though the language is luxurious and new. I have already given you a quotation from the former poem, describing the poet's love of the sea. I now cite a single stanza of "Itylus."

Swallow, my sister, O sister swallow,
How can thine heart be full of the spring?
A thousand summers are over and dead.
What hast thou found in the spring to follow?
What hast thou found in thine heart to sing?
What wilt thou do when the summer is shed?

Probably Swinburne found this measure in early Middle English poetry; it was used by the old poet Hampole in his "Prick of Conscience." After it had been forgotten for five hundred years, Swinburne brought it to life again. Something very close to it forms the splendid and beautiful chorus of "Atalanta in Calydon":

When the hounds of spring are on winter's traces,
The mother of months in meadow or plain
Fills the shadows and windy places
With lisp of leaves and ripple of rain;
And the brown bright nightingale amorous
Is half assuaged for Itylus,
For the Thracian ships and the foreign faces,
The tongueless vigil, and all the pain.

Here as in all other cases, however, the poet has far surpassed his model. The measures which he revived take new life only because of the extraordinary charm which he has put into them.

Passing suddenly from these lighter structures, let us observe the great power which Swinburne manifests in another kind of revival, the sixteen syllable line. This is not a modern measure at all. It was used long ago, but was practically-abandoned and almost forgotten except by scholars when Swinburne revived it. Nor has he revived it only in one shape, but in a great many shapes, sometimes using single lines, sometimes double, or again varying the accent so as to make four or five different kinds of verse with the same number of syllables. The poem "The Armada" is a rich example of this re-animation and variation of the long dead form. In this poem Swinburne describes the god of Spain as opposed to the god of England, and the most forceful lines are those devoted to these conceptions. Observe the double rhymes.

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.