Offering to these unknown, the gods of gloom,
And what of honey and spice my seedlands bear,
And what I may of fruits in this chilled air,
120 And lay, Orestes-like, across the tomb
A curl of severed hair.3
12
But by no hand nor any treason stricken,
Not like the low-lying head of Him, the King,
The flame that made of Troy a ruinous thing,
125 Thou liest, and on this dust no tears could quicken
There fall no tears like theirs4 that all men hear
Fall tear by sweet imperishable tear
Down the opening leaves of holy poets' pages.
Thee not Orestes, not Electra mourns;
ljo But bending us-ward with memorial urns
1. According to Jerome McGann, Swinburne event that made 'a ruinous thing' of the Greek associates Baudelaire's distinctive kind of poetry victory. His son, Orestes, visits Agamemnon's grave with a tenth muse, one who inspires songs of lam-and dedicates on it a lock of his own hair; it is entation ('funereal'). What is meant by this muse's discovered soon thereafter by his sister, Electra, 'veiled porches' seems tantalizingly obscure. who visits her father's grave to offer mourning liba2. I.e., a musical mourning. tions. 3. For lines 120?29 see Aeschylus's The Libation 4. Referring to the muses and holy poets, not to Bearers 4-8. King Agamemnon, after returning Orestes and Electra [noted by Jerome McGann]. home from Troy, had been treacherously slain, an
.
1 502 / ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE
The most high Muses that fulfill all ages
Weep, and our God's heart yearns.
?3 For, sparing of his sacred strength, not often
Among us darkling here the lord of light5
135 Makes manifest his music and his might
In hearts that open and in lips that soften
With the soft flame and heat of songs that shine.
Thy lips indeed he touched with bitter wine,
And nourished them indeed with bitter bread;
140 Yet surely from his hand thy soul's food came;
The fire that scarred thy spirit at his flame
Was lighted, and thine hungering heart he fed
Who feeds our hearts with fame. 14
Therefore he too now at thy soul's sunsetting,
145 God of all suns and songs he too bends down
To mix his laurel with thy cypress6 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,
150 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.7
15
155 And one weeps with him in the ways Lethean,8
And stains with tears her changing bosom chill;
That obscure Venus of the hollow hill,
That thing transformed which was the Cytherean,
