Thomas Humphry Ward, ed. The English Poets. 1880–1918.rnVol. V. Browning to Rupert Brooke
Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837–1909)Extracts from Poems and Ballads, Third Series: From Pan and Thalassius
P
Pan!
O sea-stray, seed of Apollo,
What word wouldst thou have with me?
My ways thou wast fain to follow
Or ever the years hailed thee
Man.
If August brood on the valleys,
If satyrs laugh on the lawns,
What part in the wildwood alleys
Hast thou with the fleet-foot fauns—
Thou?
Thy feet are a man’s—not cloven
Like these, not light as a boy’s:
The tresses and tendrils inwoven
That lure us, the lure of them cloys
Thee.
The joy of the wild woods never
Leaves free of the thirst it slakes:
The wild love throbs in us ever
That burns in the dense hot brakes
Thus.
Eternal, passionate, aweless,
Insatiable, mutable, dear,
Makes all men’s laws for us lawless:
We strive not: how should we fear
Strife?
The birds and the bright winds know not
Such joys as are ours in the mild
Warm woodland; joys such as grow not
In waste green fields of the wild
Sea.
Long since, in the world’s wind veering,
Thy heart was estrangèd from me:
Sweet Echo shall yield thee not hearing:
What have we to do with thee?
Go.