Poems & Ballads (first Series)
1818
Swinburne's 1866 collection caused a scandal that reverberated through Victorian England. These are poems that burn with a feverish, almost dangerous intensity: love as dissolution, desire as destiny, beauty as a force that destroys both speaker and beloved. The famous 'Roses and Rue' sequence and 'The Triumph of Time' render heartbreak with a musicality so ravishing it almost disguises how devastating they are. Swinburne writes with radical honesty about flesh and spirit, pleasure and mortality, creating verses that move with the relentless, intoxicating rhythm of waves or heartbeat. This is Aesthetic poetry at its most transgressive: art that refuses to moralize, that takes beauty as its own justification, that dares to find sublime meaning in what polite society insisted remained unspeakable. For readers who believe poetry should feel slightly dangerous.
Editions
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“Sweet for a little even to fear, and sweet, O love, to lay down fear at love’s fair feet; Shall not some fiery memory of his breath Lie sweet on lips that touch the lips of death? Yet leave me not; yet, if thou wilt, be free;Love me no more, but love my love of thee. Love where thou wilt, and live thy life; and I, One thing I can, and one love cannot”
— Algernon Charles Swinburne
“She knows not loves that kissed her She knows not where.Art thou the ghost, my sister, White sister there, Am I the ghost, who knows? My hand, a fallen rose, Lies snow-white on white snows, and takes no care. ””
— Algernon Charles Swinburne
“Fierce midnights and famishing morrows, And the loves that complete and control All the joys of the flesh, all the sorrows That wear out the soul.””
— Algernon Charles Swinburne
“Out of Dindymus heavily laden Her lions draw bound and unfed A mother, a mortal, a maiden, A queen over death and the dead. She is cold, and her habit is lowly, Her temple of branches and sods; Most fruitful and virginal, holy, A mother of gods. She hath wasted with fire thine high places, She hath hidden and marred and made sad The fair limbs of the Loves, the fair faces Of gods that were goodly and glad. She slays, and her hands are not bloody; She moves as a moon in the wane, White-robed, and thy raiment is ruddy, Our Lady of Pain.””
— Algernon Charles Swinburne
“For the crown of our life as it closes Is darkness, the fruit thereof dust; No thorns go as deep as a rose's, And love is more cruel than lust.””
— Algernon Charles Swinburne
“Time and the Gods are at strife; ye dwell in the midst thereof,Draining a little life from the barren breasts of love.””
— Algernon Charles Swinburne
