HENDECASYLLABICS.
IN the month of the long decline of
roses
I, beholding the summer dead before
me,
Set my face to the sea and journeyed
silent,
Gazing eagerly where above the
sea-mark
Flame as fierce as the fervid eyes
of lions
Half divided the eyelids of the
sunset;
Till I heard as it were a noise of
waters
Moving tremulous under feet of
angels
Multitudinous, out of all the
heavens;
Knew the fluttering wind, the
fluttered foliage,
Shaken fitfully, full of sound and
shadow;
And saw, trodden upon by noiseless
angels,
Long mysterious reaches fed with
moonlight,
Sweet sad straits in a soft
subsiding channel,
Blown about by the lips of winds I
knew not,
Winds not born in the north nor any
quarter,
Winds not warm with the south nor
any sunshine;
Heard between them a voice of
exultation,
“Lo, the summer is dead, the sun is
faded,
Even like as a leaf the year is
withered,
All the fruits of the day from all
her branches
Gathered, neither is any left to
gather.
All the flowers are dead, the tender
blossoms,
All are taken away; the season
wasted,
Like an ember among the fallen
ashes.
Now with light of the winter days,
with moonlight,
Light of snow, and the bitter light
of hoarfrost,
We bring flowers that fade not after
autumn,
Pale white chaplets and crowns of
latter seasons,
Fair false leaves (but the summer
leaves were falser),
Woven under the eyes of stars and
planets
When low light was upon the windy
reaches
Where the flower of foam was blown,
a lily
Dropt among the sonorous fruitless
furrows
And green fields of the sea that
make no pasture:
Since the winter begins, the weeping
winter,
All whose flowers are tears, and
round his temples
Iron blossom of frost is bound for
ever.”
Source
of the text – Algernon Charles Swinburne, Poems
and Ballads, Third Edition.
London: John Camden Hotten, 1868, pp. 233-234.
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