Poems & Ballads (First Series)Swinburne, Algernon Charles
General
Poems & Ballads (First Series)
Swinburne, Algernon Charles
Ballads, English; English poetry
possible and natural to live while dead in heart and brain. Marlowe and
Shakespeare, Æschylus and Sappho, do not for us live only on the dusty
shelves of libraries.
It is hardly probable that especial and familiar love of places should
give any special value to verses written under the influence of their
charm: no intimacy of years and no association with the past gave any
colour of emotion to many other studies of English land and sea which
certainly are no less faithful and possibly have no less spiritual or
poetic life in them than the four to which I have just referred, whose
localities lie all within the boundary of a mile or so. No contrast
could be stronger than that between the majestic and exquisite glory of
cliff and crag, lawn and woodland, garden and lea, to which I have done
homage though assuredly I have not done justice in these four poems--'In
the Bay,' 'On the Cliffs,' 'A Forsaken Garden,' the dedication of 'The
Sisters'--and the dreary beauty, inhuman if not unearthly in its
desolation, of the innumerable creeks and inlets, lined and paven with
sea-flowers, which make of the salt marshes a fit and funereal setting,
a fatal and appropriate foreground, for the supreme desolation of the
relics of Dunwich; the beautiful and awful solitude of a wilderness on
which the sea has forbidden man to build or live, overtopped and bounded
by the tragic and ghastly solitude of a headland on which the sea has
forbidden the works of human charity and piety to survive: between the
dense and sand-encumbered tides which are eating the desecrated wreck
and ruin of them all away, and the matchless magic, the ineffable
fascination of the sea whose beauties and delights, whose translucent
depths of water and divers-coloured banks of submarine foliage and
flowerage, but faintly reflected in the stanzas of the little ode 'Off
Shore,' complete the charm of the scenes as faintly sketched or shadowed
forth in the poems just named, or the sterner and stranger magic of the
seaboard to which tribute was paid in 'An Autumn Vision,' 'A Swimmer's
Dream,' 'On the South Coast,' 'Neap-tide': or, again, between the
sterile stretches and sad limitless outlook of the shore which faces a
hitherto undetermined and interminable sea, and the joyful and fateful
beauty of the seas off Bamborough and the seas about Sark and Guernsey.
But if there is enough of the human or personal note to bring into touch
the various poems which deal with these various impressions, there may
perhaps be no less of it discernible in such as try to render the effect
of inland or woodland solitude--the splendid oppression of nature at
noon which found utterance of old in words of such singular and
everlasting significance as panic and nympholepsy.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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