Algernon Charles Swinburne - Atalanta in Calydon (1865)

8 Sourced Quotes

View all Algernon Charles Swinburne Quotes
Before the beginning of years
There came to the making of man
Time with a gift of tears,
Grief with a glass that ran,
Pleasure with pain for leaven,
Summer with flowers that fell,
Remembrance fallen from heaven,
And Madness risen from hell,
Strength without hands to smite,
Love that endures for a breath;
Night, the shadow of light,
And Life, the shadow of death.

Algernon Charles Swinburne
When the hounds of spring are on winter's traces,
The mother of months in meadow or plain
Fills the shadows and windy places
With lisp of leaves and ripple of rain;
And the brown bright nightingale amorous
Is half assuaged for Itylus,
For the Thracian ships and the foreign faces,
The tongueless vigil and all the pain.

Algernon Charles Swinburne
For words divide and rend;
But silence is most noble till the end.

Algernon Charles Swinburne
For winter's rains and ruins are over,
And all the season of snows and sins;
The days dividing lover and lover,
The light that loses, the night that wins;
And time remembered is grief forgotten,
And frosts are slain and flowers begotten,
And in green underwood and cover Blossom by blossom the spring begins.

Algernon Charles Swinburne
And soft as lips that laugh and hide
The laughing leaves of the tree divide,
And screen from seeing and leave in sight
The god pursuing, the maiden hid.

Algernon Charles Swinburne
Maiden, and mistress of the months and stars
Now folded in the flowerless fields of heaven.

Algernon Charles Swinburne
His life is a watch or a vision
Between a sleep and a sleep.

Algernon Charles Swinburne
In the world of dreams, I have chosen my part. To sleep for a season and hear no word Of true love's truth or of light love's art, Only the song of a secret bird.

Algernon Charles Swinburne