Page:Oxford Book of English Verse 1250-1918.djvu/1019

 ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE

And nourished them indeed with bitter bread;

Yet surely from his hand thy soul's food came, The fire that scarr'd thy spirit at his flame

Was lighted, and thine hungering heart he fed Who feeds our hearts with fame.

��Therefore he too now at thy soul's sunsetting, God of all suns and songs, he too bends down To mix his laurel with thy cypress crown,

And save thy dust from blame and from forgetting. Therefore he too, seeing all thou wert and art, Compassionate, with sad and sacred heart,

Mourns thee of many his children the last dead,

And hallows with strange tears and alien sighs Thine unmelodious mouth and sunless eyes,

And over thine irrevocable head

Sheds light from the under skies.

��And one weeps with him in the ways Lethean,

And stains with tears her changing bosom chill; That obscure Venus of the hollow hill,

That thing transform 'd which was the Cytherean, With lips that lost their Grecian laugh divine Long since, and face no more call'd Erycine

A ghost, a bitter and luxurious god.

Thee also with fair flesh and singing spell Did she, a sad and second prey, compel

Into the footless places once more trod, And shadows hot from hell.

�� �