第19章 A SINGER ASLEEP

(Algernon Charles Swinburne, 1837-1909)

In this fair niche above the unslumbering sea, That sentrys up and down all night, all day, From cove to promontory, from ness to bay, The Fates have fitly bidden that he should be Pillowed eternally.

- It was as though a garland of red roses Had fallen about the hood of some smug nun When irresponsibly dropped as from the sun, In fulth of numbers freaked with musical closes, Upon Victoria's formal middle time His leaves of rhythm and rhyme.

III

O that far morning of a summer day When, down a terraced street whose pavements lay Glassing the sunshine into my bent eyes, I walked and read with a quick glad surprise New words, in classic guise, -

The passionate pages of his earlier years, Fraught with hot sighs, sad laughters, kisses, tears;

Fresh-fluted notes, yet from a minstrel who Blew them not naively, but as one who knew Full well why thus he blew.

I still can hear the brabble and the roar At those thy tunes, O still one, now passed through That fitful fire of tongues then entered new!

Their power is spent like spindrift on this shore;

Thine swells yet more and more.

- His singing-mistress verily was no other Than she the Lesbian, she the music-mother Of all the tribe that feel in melodies;

Who leapt, love-anguished, from the Leucadian steep Into the rambling world-encircling deep Which hides her where none sees.

VII

And one can hold in thought that nightly here His phantom may draw down to the water's brim, And hers come up to meet it, as a dim Lone shine upon the heaving hydrosphere, And mariners wonder as they traverse near, Unknowing of her and him.

VIII

One dreams him sighing to her spectral form:

"O teacher, where lies hid thy burning line;

Where are those songs, O poetess divine Whose very arts are love incarnadine?"

And her smile back: "Disciple true and warm, Sufficient now are thine." . . .

So here, beneath the waking constellations, Where the waves peal their everlasting strains, And their dull subterrene reverberations Shake him when storms make mountains of their plains -

Him once their peer in sad improvisations, And deft as wind to cleave their frothy manes -

I leave him, while the daylight gleam declines Upon the capes and chines.

BONCHURCH, 1910.