Text 66

LOVE AND SLEEP

Lying asleep between the strokes of night

I saw my love lean over my sad bed,

Pale as the duskiest lily's leaf or head,

Smooth-skinned and dark, with bare throat made to bite,

Too wan for blushing and too warn for white,

But perfect-coloured without white or red.

And her lips opened amorously, and said –

I wist not what, saving one word – Delight.

And all her face was honey to my mouth,

And all her body pasture to my eyes;

The long lithe arms and hotter hands than fire,

The quivering flanks, hair smelling of the south,

The bright light feet, the splendid supple things

And glittering eyelids of my soul's desire.

Swinburne took as his theme the old Romantic spirit of revolt – down with morality and religion! – but his main aim seemed merely to shock. Shock he did; his poems, with their sensuality and noise, had almost a Byronic impact on the public. Swinburne added to his reputation of a rebel with the volume of poetry devoted to the national liberation movement in Italy. Yet his radicalism withered with time. Swinburne had a fine musical gift and he could overwhelm the ear with his alliteration, which he largely misused, and his 'mighty line', but beneath the jeweled words is a great emptiness. However, he was a thoughtful critic, and contributed to the consolidation of William Blake's position in the poetic pantheon.

The second half of the 19^th century saw the rise of the workers' movement in Great Britain. Poetry came to be used for political propaganda. Sometimes socialist ideas took root in the thinking of poets whom nobody could have expected to become socialists. The prodigious activities of William Morris (1834—1896) are a striking example of versatility.

Morris excelled in poetry and propaganda, art and craftsmanship, politics and translation. His cult of beauty was permeated with social issues. Morris had a clear sense of the importance of economic and political issues, and found inspiration in Marx's theory of class struggle. The song "John Brown's Body", which became Battle Hymn of the Republic during the Civil War in the USA, gave Morris inspiration to write The March of the Workers (1888). Such was the socialist poetry of the day, listen up.

What is this, the sound and rumour?

What is this that all men hear,

Like the wind in hollow valleys

when the storm is drawing near,

Like the rolling on of ocean in the eventide of fear?

'Tis the people marching on.

One and the same man wrote this and translated the Odyssey. Revelations and revolutions lived next door in those days, and even befriended one another.