Algernon Charles Swinburne

Time found our tired love sleeping, And kissed away his breath; But what should we do weeping, Though light love sleep to death? We have drained his lips at leisure, Till there's not left to drain

Forget that I remember And dream that I forget.

I shall remember while the light lives yet And in the night time I shall not forget.

She hath wasted with fire thine high places, She hath hidden and marred and made sad The fair limbs of the Loves, the fair faces Of gods that were goodly and glad. She slays, and her hands are not bloody; She moves as a moon in the wane,

For the crown of our life as it closes Is darkness, the fruit thereof dust; No thorns go as deep as a rose’s, And love is more cruel than lust. Time turns the old days to derision, Our loves into corpses or wives;

Despair the twin-born of devotion.

Ah beautiful passionate body That never has ached with a heart!

O splendid and sterile Dolores, Our Lady of Pain.

Change in a trice The lilies and languors of virtue For the raptures and roses of vice.

We shift and bedeck and bedrape us, Thou art noble and nude and antique.

If love were what the rose is, And I were like the leaf, Our lives would grow together In sad or singing weather, Blown fields or flowerful closes, Green pasture or grey grief;

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; …

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.

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.

Yea, is not even Apollo, with hair and harpstring of gold, A bitter God to follow, a beautiful God to behold?

Ah, ah, thy beauty! like a beast it bites, Stings like an adder, like an arrow smites.

Wilt thou fear that, and fear not my desire?

For words divide and rend; But silence is most noble till the end.

His life is a watch or a vision Between a sleep and a sleep.

His speech is a burning fire.

Before the beginning of years There came to the making of man Time with a gift of tears, Grief with a glass that ran, Pleasure with pain for leaven, Summer with flowers that fell,

And soft as lips that laugh and hide The laughing leaves of the tree divide, And screen from seeing and leave in sight The god pursuing, the maiden hid.

For winter’s rains and ruins are over, And all the season of snows and sins; The days dividing lover and lover, The light that loses, the night that wins; And time remembered is grief forgotten, And frosts are slain and flowers begotten,

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,