lyrical poetry - OUDL Home

ARNOLD AND PRE-RAPHAELITE GROUPThou hast conquered, O pale Galilean; the world has grown greyfrom thy breath;We have drunken of things Lethaean, and fed on the fulness of death.Not as thine, not as thine was our mother, a blossom of floweringseas,Clothed round with the world's desire as with raiment, and fair asthe foam,And fleeter than kindled fire, and a goddess, and mother of Rome.For thine came pale and a maiden, and sister to sorrow ; but ours,Her deep hair heavily laden with odour and colour of flowers,White rose of the rose-white water, a silver splendour, a flame,Bent down unto us that besought her, and earth grew sweet withher name.For thine came weeping, a slave among slaves, and rejected ; but sheCame flushed from the full-flushed wave, and imperial, her foot onthe sea.And the wonderful waters knew her, the winds and the viewless ways,And the roses grew rosier, and bluer the sea-blue stream of the bays.—these were the strains that swept us off our feet,not necessarily from any deep sympathy with illicitpassion or anti-Christian sentiment but because theyprovided so satisfying a catharsis for moods that willhaunt the heart of youth. It may be that Swinburne'sart had grown more cunning and perfect in the Songsbefore Sunrise, but these had two faults compared withAtalanta and Poems and Ballads. The passion wassomewhat empty, for if Byron's conception of libertywas, so Lord Morley said, a purely negative one,Swinburne had no conception at all and in the secondplace the lyrical poems were growing too long. Oneneeds the support of more thought to keep one'sinterest sustained through rhapsodies of such lengthas Italy and similar tirades. Even Hertha, whichhas been so much commended, says the same thing overand over again. No; the poem which has something113 8