Songs Before Sunrise(txt+pdf+epub+mobi电子书下载)

作者：Swinburne, Algernon Charles

格式: AZW3, DOCX, EPUB, MOBI, PDF, TXT

Songs Before Sunrise试读：

PRELUDE

Between the green bud and the redYouth sat and sang by Time, and shed   From eyes and tresses flowers and tears,   From heart and spirit hopes and fears,Upon the hollow stream whose bed   Is channelled by the foamless years;And with the white the gold-haired head   Mixed running locks, and in Time’s earsYouth’s dreams hung singing, and Time’s truthWas half not harsh in the ears of Youth.

Between the bud and the blown flowerYouth talked with joy and grief an hour,   With footless joy and wingless grief   And twin-born faith and disbeliefWho share the seasons to devour;   And long ere these made up their sheafFelt the winds round him shake and shower   The rose-red and the blood-red leaf,Delight whose germ grew never grain,And passion dyed in its own pain.

Then he stood up, and trod to dustFear and desire, mistrust and trust,   And dreams of bitter sleep and sweet,   And bound for sandals on his feetKnowledge and patience of what must   And what things may be, in the heatAnd cold of years that rot and rust   And alter; and his spirit’s meatWas freedom, and his staff was wroughtOf strength, and his cloak woven of thought.

For what has he whose will sees clearTo do with doubt and faith and fear,   Swift hopes and slow despondencies?   His heart is equal with the sea’sAnd with the sea-wind’s, and his ear   Is level to the speech of these,And his soul communes and takes cheer   With the actual earth’s equalities,Air, light, and night, hills, winds, and streams,And seeks not strength from strengthless dreams.

His soul is even with the sunWhose spirit and whose eye are one,   Who seeks not stars by day, nor light   And heavy heat of day by night.Him can no God cast down, whom none   Can lift in hope beyond the heightOf fate and nature and things done   By the calm rule of might and rightThat bids men be and bear and do,And die beneath blind skies or blue.

To him the lights of even and mornSpeak no vain things of love or scorn,   Fancies and passions miscreate   By man in things dispassionate.Nor holds he fellowship forlorn   With souls that pray and hope and hate,And doubt they had better not been born,   And fain would lure or scare off fateAnd charm their doomsman from their doomAnd make fear dig its own false tomb.

He builds not half of doubts and halfOf dreams his own soul’s cenotaph,   Whence hopes and fears with helpless eyes,   Wrapt loose in cast-off cerecloths, riseAnd dance and wring their hands and laugh,   And weep thin tears and sigh light sighs,And without living lips would quaff   The living spring in man that lies,And drain his soul of faith and strengthIt might have lived on a life’s length.

He hath given himself and hath not soldTo God for heaven or man for gold,   Or grief for comfort that it gives,   Or joy for grief’s restoratives.He hath given himself to time, whose fold   Shuts in the mortal flock that livesOn its plain pasture’s heat and cold   And the equal year’s alternatives.Earth, heaven, and time, death, life, and he,Endure while they shall be to be.

“Yet between death and life are hoursTo flush with love and hide in flowers;   What profit save in these?” men cry:   “Ah, see, between soft earth and sky,What only good things here are ours!”   They say, “what better wouldst thou try,What sweeter sing of? or what powers   Serve, that will give thee ere thou dieMore joy to sing and be less sad,More heart to play and grow more glad?”

Play then and sing; we too have played,We likewise, in that subtle shade.   We too have twisted through our hair   Such tendrils as the wild Loves wear,And heard what mirth the Mænads made,   Till the wind blew our garlands bareAnd left their roses disarrayed,   And smote the summer with strange air,And disengirdled and discrownedThe limbs and locks that vine-wreaths bound.

We too have tracked by star-proof treesThe tempest of the Thyiades   Scare the loud night on hills that hid   The blood-feasts of the Bassarid,Heard their song’s iron cadences   Fright the wolf hungering from the kid,Outroar the lion-throated seas,   Outchide the north-wind if it chid,And hush the torrent-tongued ravinesWith thunders of their tambourines.

But the fierce flute whose notes acclaimDim goddesses of fiery fame,   Cymbal and clamorous kettledrum,   Timbrels and tabrets, all are dumbThat turned the high chill air to flame;   The singing tongues of fire are numbThat called on Cotys by her name   Edonian, till they felt her comeAnd maddened, and her mystic faceLightened along the streams of Thrace.

For Pleasure slumberless and pale,And Passion with rejected veil,   Pass, and the tempest-footed throng   Of hours that follow them with songTill their feet flag and voices fail,   And lips that were so loud so longLearn silence, or a wearier wail;   So keen is change, and time so strong,To weave the robes of life and rendAnd weave again till life have end.

But weak is change, but strengthless time,To take the light from heaven, or climb   The hills of heaven with wasting feet.   Songs they can stop that earth found meet,But the stars keep their ageless rhyme;   Flowers they can slay that spring thought sweet,But the stars keep their spring sublime;   Passions and pleasures can defeat,Actions and agonies control,And life and death, but not the soul.

Because man’s soul is man’s God still,What wind soever waft his will   Across the waves of day and night   To port or shipwreck, left or right,By shores and shoals of good and ill;   And still its flame at mainmast heightThrough the rent air that foam-flakes fill   Sustains the indomitable lightWhence only man hath strength to steerOr helm to handle without fear.

Save his own soul’s light overhead,None leads him, and none ever led,   Across birth’s hidden harbour-bar,   Past youth where shoreward shallows are,Through age that drives on toward the red   Vast void of sunset hailed from far,To the equal waters of the dead;   Save his own soul he hath no star,And sinks, except his own soul guide,Helmless in middle turn of tide.

No blast of air or fire of sunPuts out the light whereby we run   With girded loins our lamplit race,   And each from each takes heart of graceAnd spirit till his turn be done,   And light of face from each man’s faceIn whom the light of trust is one;   Since only souls that keep their placeBy their own light, and watch things roll,And stand, have light for any soul.

A little time we gain from timeTo set our seasons in some chime,   For harsh or sweet or loud or low,   With seasons played out long agoAnd souls that in their time and prime   Took part with summer or with snow,Lived abject lives out or sublime,   And had their chance of seed to sowFor service or disservice doneTo those days daed and this their son.

A little time that we may fillOr with such good works or such ill   As loose the bonds or make them strong   Wherein all manhood suffers wrong.By rose-hung river and light-foot rill   There are who rest not; who think longTill they discern as from a hill   At the sun’s hour of morning song,Known of souls only, and those souls free,The sacred spaces of the sea.

THE EVE OF REVOLUTION

1

The trumpets of the four winds of the world   From the ends of the earth blow battle; the night heaves,With breasts palpitating and wings refurled,   With passion of couched limbs, as one who grievesSleeping, and in her sleep she sees uncurled   Dreams serpent-shapen, such as sickness weaves,Down the wild wind of vision caught and whirled,   Dead leaves of sleep, thicker than autumn leaves,         Shadows of storm-shaped things,         Flights of dim tribes of kings,   The reaping men that reap men for their sheaves,         And, without grain to yield,         Their scythe-swept harvest-field   Thronged thick with men pursuing and fugitives,      Dead foliage of the tree of sleep,Leaves blood-coloured and golden, blown from deep to deep.

2

I hear the midnight on the mountains cry   With many tongues of thunders, and I hearSound and resound the hollow shield of sky   With trumpet-throated winds that charge and cheer,And through the roar of the hours that fighting fly,   Through flight and fight and all the fluctuant fear,A sound sublimer than the heavens are high,   A voice more instant than the winds are clear,         Say to my spirit, “Take         Thy trumpet too, and make   A rallying music in the void night’s ear,         Till the storm lose its track,         And all the night go back;   Till, as through sleep false life knows true life near,      Thou know the morning through the night,And through the thunder silence, and through darkness light.”

3

I set the trumpet to my lips and blow！《

4

The night is broken eastward; is it day,   Or but the watchfires trembling here and there,Like hopes on memory’s devastated way,   In moonless wastes of planet-stricken air?O many-childed mother great and grey,   O multitudinous bosom, and breasts that bareOur fathers’ generations, whereat lay   The weanling peoples and the tribes that were,         Whose new-born mouths long dead         Those ninefold nipples fed,   Dim face with deathless eyes and withered hair,         Fostress of obscure lands,         Whose multiplying hands   Wove the world’s web with divers races fair      And cast it waif-wise on the stream,The waters of the centuries, where thou sat’st to dream;

5

O many-minded mother and visionary,   Asia, that sawest their westering waters sweepWith all the ships and spoils of time to carry   And all the fears and hopes of life to keep,Thy vesture wrought of ages legendary   Hides usward thine impenetrable sleep,And thy veiled head, night’s oldest tributary,   We know not if it speak or smile or weep.         But where for us began         The first live light of man   And first-born fire of deeds to burn and leap,         The first war fair as peace         To shine and lighten Greece,   And the first freedom moved upon the deep,      God’s breath upon the face of timeMoving, a present spirit, seen of men sublime;

6

There where our east looks always to thy west,   Our mornings to thine evenings, Greece to thee,These lights that catch the mountains crest by crest,   Are they of stars or beacons that we see?Taygetus takes here the winds abreast,   And there the sun resumes Thermopylæ;The light is Athens where those remnants rest,   And Salamis the sea-wall of that sea.         The grass men tread upon         Is very Marathon,   The leaves are of that time-unstricken tree         That storm nor sun can fret         Nor wind, since she that set   Made it her sign to men whose shield was she;      Here, as dead time his deathless things,Eurotas and Cephisus keep their sleepless springs.

7

O hills of Crete, are these things dead?  O waves,   O many-mouthed streams, are these springs dry?Earth, dost thou feed and hide now none but slaves?   Heaven, hast thou heard of men that would not die?Is the land thick with only such men’s graves   As were ashamed to look upon the sky?Ye dead, whose name outfaces and outbraves   Death, is the seed of such as you gone by?         Sea, have thy ports not heard         Some Marathonian word   Rise up to landward and to Godward fly?         No thunder, that the skies         Sent not upon us, rise   With fire and earthquake and a cleaving cry?      Nay, light is here, and shall be light,Though all the face of the hour be overborne with night.

8

I set the trumpet to my lips and blow.   The night is broken northward; the pale plainsAnd footless fields of sun-forgotten snow   Feel through their creviced lips and iron veinsSuch quick breath labour and such clean blood flow   As summer-stricken spring feels in her painsWhen dying May bears June, too young to know   The fruit that waxes from the flower that wanes;         Strange tyrannies and vast,         Tribes frost-bound to their past,   Lands that are loud all through their length with chains,         Wastes where the wind’s wings break,         Displumed by daylong ache   And anguish of blind snows and rack-blown rains,      And ice that seals the White Sea’s lips,Whose monstrous weights crush flat the sides of shrieking ships;

9

Horrible sights and sounds of the unreached pole,   And shrill fierce climes of inconsolable air,Shining below the beamless aureole   That hangs about the north-wind’s hurtling hair,A comet-lighted lamp, sublime and sole   Dawn of the dayless heaven where suns despair;Earth, skies, and waters, smitten into soul,   Feel the hard veil that iron centuries wear         Rent as with hands in sunder,         Such hands as make the thunder   And clothe with form all substance and strip bare;         Shapes, shadows, sounds and lights         Of their dead days and nights   Take soul of life too keen for death to bear;      Life, conscience, forethought, will, desire,Flood men’s inanimate eyes and dry-drawn hearts with fire.

10

Light, light, and light! to break and melt in sunder   All clouds and chains that in one bondage bindEyes, hands, and spirits, forged by fear and wonder   And sleek fierce fraud with hidden knife behind;There goes no fire from heaven before their thunder,   Nor are the links not malleable that windRound the snared limbs and souls that ache thereunder;   The hands are mighty, were the head not blind.         Priest is the staff of king,         And chains and clouds one thing,   And fettered flesh with devastated mind.         Open thy soul to see,         Slave, and thy feet are free;   Thy bonds and thy beliefs are one in kind,      And of thy fears thine irons wroughtHang weights upon thee fashioned out of thine own thought.

11

O soul, O God, O glory of liberty,   To night and day their lightning and their light!With heat of heart thou kindlest the quick sea,   And the dead earth takes spirit from thy sight;The natural body of things is warm with thee,   And the world’s weakness parcel of thy might;Thou seest us feeble and forceless, fit to be   Slaves of the years that drive us left and right,         Drowned under hours like waves         Wherethrough we row like slaves;   But if thy finger touch us, these take flight.         If but one sovereign word         Of thy live lips be heard,   What man shall stop us, and what God shall smite?      Do thou but look in our dead eyes,They are stars that light each other till thy sundawn rise.

12

Thou art the eye of this blind body of man,   The tongue of this dumb people; shalt thou notSee, shalt thou speak not for them?   Time is wan And hope is weak with waiting, and swift thoughtHath lost the wings at heel wherewith he ran,   And on the red pit’s edge sits down distraughtTo talk with death of days republican   And dreams and fights long since dreamt out and fought;         Of the last hope that drew         To that red edge anew   The firewhite faith of Poland without spot;         Of the blind Russian might,         And fire that is not light;   Of the green Rhineland where thy spirit wrought;      But though time, hope, and memory tire,Canst thou wax dark as they do, thou whose light is fire?

13

I set the trumpet to my lips and blow.   The night is broken westward; the wide seaThat makes immortal motion to and fro   From world’s end unto world’s end, and shall beWhen nought now grafted of men’s hands shall grow   And as the weed in last year’s waves are weOr spray the sea-wind shook a year ago   From its sharp tresses down the storm to lee,         The moving god that hides         Time in its timeless tides   Wherein time dead seems live eternity,         That breaks and makes again         Much mightier things than men,   Doth it not hear change coming, or not see?      Are the deeps deaf and dead and blind,To catch no light or sound from landward of mankind?

14

O thou, clothed round with raiment of white waves,   Thy brave brows lightening through the grey wet air,Thou, lulled with sea-sounds of a thousand caves,   And lit with sea-shine to thine inland lair,Whose freedom clothed the naked souls of slaves   And stripped the muffled souls of tyrants bare,O, by the centuries of thy glorious graves,   By the live light of the earth that was thy care,         Live, thou must not be dead,         Live; let thine armèd head   Lift itself up to sunward and the fair         Daylight of time and man,         Thine head republican,   With the same splendour on thine helmless hair      That in his eyes kept up a lightWho on thy glory gazed away their sacred sight;

15

Who loved and looked their sense to death on thee;   Who taught thy lips imperishable things,And in thine ears outsang thy singing sea;   Who made thy foot firm on the necks of kingsAnd thy soul somewhile steadfast—woe are we   It was but for a while, and all the stringsWere broken of thy spirit; yet had he   Set to such tunes and clothed it with such wings         It seemed for his sole sake         Impossible to break,   And woundless of the worm that waits and stings,         The golden-headed worm         Made headless for a term,   The king-snake whose life kindles with the spring’s,      To breathe his soul upon her bloom,And while she marks not turn her temple to her tomb.

16

By those eyes blinded and that heavenly head   And the secluded soul adorable,O Milton’s land, what ails thee to be dead?   Thine ears are yet sonorous with his shellThat all the songs of all thy sea-line fed   With motive sound of spring-tides at mid swell,And through thine heart his thought as blood is shed,   Requickening thee with wisdom to do well;         Such sons were of thy womb,         England, for love of whom   Thy name is not yet writ with theirs that fell,         But, till thou quite forget         What were thy children, yet   On the pale lips of hope is as a spell;      And Shelley’s heart and Landor’s mindLit thee with latter watch-fires; why wilt thou be blind?

17

Though all were else indifferent, all that live   Spiritless shapes of nations; though time waitIn vain on hope till these have help to give,   And faith and love crawl famished from the gate;Canst thou sit shamed and self-contemplative   With soulless eyes on thy secluded fate?Though time forgive them, thee shall he forgive,   Whose choice was in thine hand to be so great?         Who cast out of thy mind         The passion of man’s kind,And made thee and thine old name separate?         Now when time looks to see         New names and old and thee   Build up our one Republic state by state,      England with France, and France with Spain,And Spain with sovereign Italy strike hands and reign.

18

O known and unknown fountain-heads that fill   Our dear life-springs of England!  O bright raceOf streams and waters that bear witness still   To the earth her sons were made of!  O fair faceOf England, watched of eyes death cannot kill,   How should the soul that lit you for a spaceFall through sick weakness of a broken will   To the dead cold damnation of disgrace?         Such wind of memory stirs         On all green hills of hers,   Such breath of record from so high a place,         From years whose tongues of flame         Prophesied in her name   Her feet should keep truth’s bright and burning trace,      We needs must have her heart with us,Whose hearts are one with man’s; she must be dead or thus.

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