225

IV.

UNPUBLISHED VERSES.*

AS the refluent sea-weed moves in the languid

exuberant stream,

    Stretches and swings to the slow passionate pulse

of the sea,

Fair as a rose upon earth, as a rose under water in

prison,

Closed up from the air and the sun, but alive, as a

ghost rearisen,

    Pale as the love that revives as a ghost rearisen

in me.

And my heart yearns baffled and blind, moved vainly

toward thee in a vision.

    Thine eyes that are quiet, thine hands that are kinder,

thy lips that are loving,

Comfort and cool me as dew in the dawn of a morn

like a dream,

From the beautiful infinite west, from the happy

memorial places

    Full of the mighty repose and the lordly delight

of the dead,

Where the fortunate islands are fair with the light of

ineffable faces,

    And the sound of a sea without wind is about them,

and gods overhead,

226 Come back to redeem and release me from love

that recalls and represses,

    Cleaves to my flesh as a flame, till the serpent have

eaten his fill.

Thy bosom is warm for my face and profound as a

manifold flower,

    Thine hands are as music, thy lips as an odour that

fades in a flame,

Not a dream, not a dream is the kiss of thy mouth, or

the bountiful hour

    That makes me forget what is sin, and would make

me forget were it shame.

________

*  UNPUBLISHED VERSES | By | Algernon Charles Swinburne | [1866.*]

Collation: Octavo, pp. iv; consisting of Titles as above (with blank reverse), pp. i-ii, and the Text of the Verses (eighteen lines in all) pp. iii-iv.

*  This very misleading date . . . signifies that the Verses were written in 1866, not that they were published in that year. They were printed and circulated in March, 1888. — WISE.