(In public domain due to expiration of copyright)
(Swinburne's Poems, London: Chatto & Windus, 1904, Vol. I pp. 67-73)
(Footnote not reproduced)
- HYMN TO PROSERPINE
- (AFTER THE PROCLAMATION IN ROME OF THE CHRISTIAN FAITH)
- Vicisti, Galilaee
- I HAVE lived long enough, having seen one thing, that love hath an end;
- Goddess and maiden and queen, be near me now and befriend
- Thou art more than the day or the morrow, the seasons that laugh or that weep;
- For these give joy and sorrow; but thou, Proserpina, sleep.
- Sweet is the treading of the wine, and sweet the feet of the dove;
- But a goodlier gift is thine than foam of the grapes or love.
- Yea, is not even Apollo, with hair and harpstring of gold,
- A bitter God to follow, a beautiful God to behold?
- I am sick of singing : the bays burn deep and chafe : I am fain
- To rest a little from praise and grevious pleasure and pain.
- For the Gods we know not of, who give us our daily breath,
- We know they are cruel as love or life, and lovely as death.
- O Gods dethroned and deceased, cast forth, wiped out in a day
- From your wrath is the world released, redeemed from your chains, men say.
- New Gods are crowned in the city; their flowers have broken your rods;
- They are merciful, clothed with pity, the young compassionate Gods.
- But for me their new device is barren, the days are bare;
- Things long past over suffice, and men forgotten that were.
- Time and the Gods are at strife; ye dwell in the midst thereof,
- Draining a little life from the barren breasts of love.
- I say to you, cease, take rest; yea, I say to you all, be at peace,
- Till the bitter milk of her breast and the barren bosom shall cease.
- Wilt thou yet take all Galilean? but these thou shalt not take,
- The laurel, the palms and the paean, the breasts of the nymphs in the brake;
- Breasts more soft than a dove's, that tremble with tenderer breath;
- And all the wings of the Loves, and all the joy before death;
- All the feet of the hours that sound as a single lyre,
- Dropped and deep in the flowers, with strings that flicker like fire.
- More than these wilt thou give, things fairer than all these things?
- Nay, for a little we live, and life hath mutable wings.
- A little while and we die; shall life not thrive as it may?
- For no man under the sky lives twice, outliving his day.
- And grief is a grevious thing, and a man hath enough of his tears:
- Why should he labour, and bring fresh grief to blacken his years?
- Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilean; the world has grown grey from thy breath;
- We have drunken of things Lethean, and fed on the fullness of death.
- Laurel is green for a season, and love is sweet for a day;
- But love grows bitter with treason, and laurel outlives not May.
- Sleep, shall we sleep after all? for the world is not sweet in the end;
- For the old faiths loosen and fall, the new years ruin and rend.
- Fate is a sea without shore, and the soul is a rock that abides;
- But her ears are vexed with the roar and her face with the foam of the tides.
- O lips that the live blood faints in, the leavings of racks and rods!
- O ghastly glories of saints, dead limbs of gibbeted Gods!
- Though all men abase them before you in spirit, and all knees bend,
- I kneel not neither adore you, but standing, look to the end.
- 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 beyond the extreme sea-wall, and between the remote sea-gates,
- Waste water washes, and tall ships founder, and deep death waits:
- 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 prey;
- In its sides is the north-wind bound; and its salt is of all men's tears;
- With light of ruin, 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.
- 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?
- 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.
- In the darkness of time, in the deeps of years, in the changes of things,
- Ye shall sleep as a slain man sleeps, and the world shall forget you for kings.
- Though the feet of thine high priests tread where thy lords and our forefathers trod,
- Though these that were Gods are dead, and thou being dead art a God,
- Though before thee the throned Cytherean be fallen, and hidden her head,
- Yet thy kingdom shall pass, Galilean, thy dead shall go down to thee dead.
- Of the maiden thy mother men sing as 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 round 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.
- 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.
- In the night were thine eyes are as moons are in heaven, the night where thou art,
- Where the silence is more than all tunes, where sleep overflows from the heart,
- Where the poppies are sweet as the rose in our world, and the red rose is white,
- And the wind falls faint as it blows with the fume of the flowers of night,
- And the murmur of spirits that sleep in the shadow of Gods from afar
- Grows dim in thine ears and deep as the deep dim soul of a star
- In the sweet low light of thy face, under heavens untrod by the sun,
- Let my soul with their souls find place, and forget what is done and undone.
- 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 forefathers died, 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.