In Harbour
I.
Goodnight and goodbye to the life whose signs denote
As mourners clothed with regret for the life gone by;
To the waters of gloom whence winds of the dayspring float us Goodnight and goodbye.
A time is for mourning, a season for grief to sigh;
But were we not fools and blind, by day to devote
As thralls to the darkness, unseen of the sundawn's eye?
We have drunken of Lethe at length, we have eaten of lotus;
What hurts it us here that sorrows are born and die?
We have said to the dream that caressed and the dread that smote us Goodnight and goodbye.
II.
Outside of the port ye are moored in,
Close from the wind and at ease from the tide,
What sounds come swelling, what notes fall dying Outside?
They will not cease, they will not abide:
Voices of presage in darkness
Pass and return and relapse aside.
Ye see not, but hear ye not wild wings
To the future that wakes from the past that died?
Is grief still sleeping, is joy not sighing Outside?
Algernon Charles Swinburne
Другие работы автора
Change
But now life's face beholden Seemed bright as heaven's bare With hope of gifts withholden But now From time's full-flowering Each bud spake bloom to embolden Love's heart, and seal his vow
At Sea
'Farewell and adieu' was the burden Long since in the chant of a home-faring crew; And the heart in us echoes, with laughing or wailing, Farewell and adieu Each year that we live shall we sing it anew,
Mourning
Alas my brother the cry of the mourners of old That cried on each other, All crying aloud on the dead as the death-note rolled, Alas my brother As flashes of dawn that mists from an east wind smother With fold upon fold,
Past Days
I Dead and gone, the days we had together, Shadow-stricken all the lights that Round them, flown as flies the blown foam's feather, Dead and gone