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<div style="background:#fff;border:#bbb dashed 1px;padding:5px"><a href="http://en.citatepedia.ro/comments.php?id=342078" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none"><div style="margin:10px 0"><strong>The Eve Of Revolution</strong></div><div style="margin:10px 0">The trumpets of the four winds of the world<br> From the ends of the earth blow battle; the night heaves,<br>With breasts palpitating and wings refurled,<br> With passion of couched limbs, as one who grieves<br>Sleeping, and in her sleep she sees uncurled<br> Dreams serpent-shapen, such as sickness weaves,<br>Down the wild wind of vision caught and whirled,<br> Dead leaves of sleep, thicker than autumn leaves,<br> Shadows of storm-shaped things,<br> Flights of dim tribes of kings,<br> The reaping men that reap men for their sheaves,<br> And, without grain to yield,<br> Their scythe-swept harvest-field<br> Thronged thick with men pursuing and fugitives,<br> Dead foliage of the tree of sleep,<br>Leaves blood-coloured and golden, blown from deep to deep.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"></div><div style="margin:10px 0">I hear the midnight on the mountains cry<br> With many tongues of thunders, and I hear<br>Sound and resound the hollow shield of sky<br> With trumpet-throated winds that charge and cheer,<br>And through the roar of the hours that fighting fly,<br> Through flight and fight and all the fluctuant fear,<br>A sound sublimer than the heavens are high,<br> A voice more instant than the winds are clear,<br> Say to my spirit, &quot;Take<br> Thy trumpet too, and make<br> A rallying music in the void night's ear,<br> Till the storm lose its track,<br> And all the night go back;<br> Till, as through sleep false life knows true life near,<br> Thou know the morning through the night,<br>And through the thunder silence, and through darkness light.&quot;</div><div style="margin:10px 0"></div><div style="margin:10px 0">I set the trumpet to my lips and blow.<br> The height of night is shaken, the skies break,<br>The winds and stars and waters come and go<br> By fits of breath and light and sound, that wake<br>As out of sleep, and perish as the show<br> Built up of sleep, when all her strengths forsake<br>The sense-compelling spirit; the depths glow,<br> The heights flash, and the roots and summits shake<br> Of earth in all her mountains,<br> And the inner foamless fountains<br> And wellsprings of her fast-bound forces quake;<br> Yea, the whole air of life<br> Is set on fire of strife,<br> Till change unmake things made and love remake;<br> Reason and love, whose names are one,<br>Seeing reason is the sunlight shed from love the sun.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"></div><div style="margin:10px 0">The night is broken eastward; is it day,<br> Or but the watchfires trembling here and there,<br>Like hopes on memory's devastated way,<br> In moonless wastes of planet-stricken air?<br>O many-childed mother great and grey,<br> O multitudinous bosom, and breasts that bare<br>Our fathers' generations, whereat lay<br> The weanling peoples and the tribes that were,<br> Whose new-born mouths long dead<br> Those ninefold nipples fed,<br> Dim face with deathless eyes and withered hair,<br> Fostress of obscure lands,<br> Whose multiplying hands<br> Wove the world's web with divers races fair<br> And cast it waif-wise on the stream,<br>The waters of the centuries, where thou sat'st to dream;</div><div style="margin:10px 0"></div><div style="margin:10px 0">O many-minded mother and visionary,<br> Asia, that sawest their westering waters sweep<br>With all the ships and spoils of time to carry<br> And all the fears and hopes of life to keep,<br>Thy vesture wrought of ages legendary<br> Hides usward thine impenetrable sleep,<br>And thy veiled head, night's oldest tributary,<br> We know not if it speak or smile or weep.<br> But where for us began<br> The first live light of man<br> And first-born fire of deeds to burn and leap,<br> The first war fair as peace<br> To shine and lighten Greece,<br> And the first freedom moved upon the deep,<br> God's breath upon the face of time<br>Moving, a present spirit, seen of men sublime;</div><div style="margin:10px 0"></div><div style="margin:10px 0">There where our east looks always to thy west,<br> Our mornings to thine evenings, Greece to thee,<br>These lights that catch the mountains crest by crest,<br> Are they of stars or beacons that we see?<br>Taygetus takes here the winds abreast,<br> And there the sun resumes Thermopylae;<br>The light is Athens where those remnants rest,<br> And Salamis the sea-wall of that sea.<br> The grass men tread upon<br> Is very Marathon,<br> The leaves are of that time-unstricken tree<br> That storm nor sun can fret<br> Nor wind, since she that set<br> Made it her sign to men whose shield was she;<br> Here, as dead time his deathless things,<br>Eurotas and Cephisus keep their sleepless springs.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"></div><div style="margin:10px 0">O hills of Crete, are these things dead? O waves,<br> O many-mouthed streams, are these springs dry?<br>Earth, dost thou feed and hide now none but slaves?<br> Heaven, hast thou heard of men that would not die?<br>Is the land thick with only such men's graves<br> As were ashamed to look upon the sky?<br>Ye dead, whose name outfaces and outbraves<br> Death, is the seed of such as you gone by?<br> Sea, have thy ports not heard<br> Some Marathonian word<br> Rise up to landward and to Godward fly?<br> No thunder, that the skies<br> Sent not upon us, rise<br> With fire and earthquake and a cleaving cry?<br> Nay, light is here, and shall be light,<br>Though all the face of the hour be overborne with night.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"></div><div style="margin:10px 0">I set the trumpet to my lips and blow.<br> The night is broken northward; the pale plains<br>And footless fields of sun-forgotten snow<br> Feel through their creviced lips and iron veins<br>Such quick breath labour and such clean blood flow<br> As summer-stricken spring feels in her pains<br>When dying May bears June, too young to know<br> The fruit that waxes from the flower that wanes;<br> Strange tyrannies and vast,<br> Tribes frost-bound to their past,<br> Lands that are loud all through their length with chains,<br> Wastes where the wind's wings break,<br> Displumed by daylong ache<br> And anguish of blind snows and rack-blown rains,<br> And ice that seals the White Sea's lips,<br>Whose monstrous weights crush flat the sides of shrieking ships;</div><div style="margin:10px 0"></div><div style="margin:10px 0">Horrible sights and sounds of the unreached pole,<br> And shrill fierce climes of inconsolable air,<br>Shining below the beamless aureole<br> That hangs about the north-wind's hurtling hair,<br>A comet-lighted lamp, sublime and sole<br> Dawn of the dayless heaven where suns despair;<br>Earth, skies, and waters, smitten into soul,<br> Feel the hard veil that iron centuries wear<br> Rent as with hands in sunder,<br> Such hands as make the thunder<br> And clothe with form all substance and strip bare;<br> Shapes, shadows, sounds and lights<br> Of their dead days and nights<br> Take soul of life too keen for death to bear;<br> Life, conscience, forethought, will, desire,<br>Flood men's inanimate eyes and dry-drawn hearts with fire.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"></div><div style="margin:10px 0">Light, light, and light! to break and melt in sunder<br> All clouds and chains that in one bondage bind<br>Eyes, hands, and spirits, forged by fear and wonder<br> And sleek fierce fraud with hidden knife behind;<br>There goes no fire from heaven before their thunder,<br> Nor are the links not malleable that wind<br>Round the snared limbs and souls that ache thereunder;<br> The hands are mighty, were the head not blind.<br> Priest is the staff of king,<br> And chains and clouds one thing,<br> And fettered flesh with devastated mind.<br> Open thy soul to see,<br> Slave, and thy feet are free;<br> Thy bonds and thy beliefs are one in kind,<br> And of thy fears thine irons wrought<br>Hang weights upon thee fashioned out of thine own thought.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"></div><div style="margin:10px 0">O soul, O God, O glory of liberty,<br> To night and day their lightning and their light!<br>With heat of heart thou kindlest the quick sea,<br> And the dead earth takes spirit from thy sight;<br>The natural body of things is warm with thee,<br> And the world's weakness parcel of thy might;<br>Thou seest us feeble and forceless, fit to be<br> Slaves of the years that drive us left and right,<br> Drowned under hours like waves<br> Wherethrough we row like slaves;<br> But if thy finger touch us, these take flight.<br> If but one sovereign word<br> Of thy live lips be heard,<br> What man shall stop us, and what God shall smite?<br> Do thou but look in our dead eyes,<br>They are stars that light each other till thy sundawn rise.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"></div><div style="margin:10px 0">Thou art the eye of this blind body of man,<br> The tongue of this dumb people; shalt thou not<br>See, shalt thou speak not for them?<br> Time is wan And hope is weak with waiting, and swift thought<br>Hath lost the wings at heel wherewith he ran,<br> And on the red pit's edge sits down distraught<br>To talk with death of days republican<br> And dreams and fights long since dreamt out and fought;<br> Of the last hope that drew<br> To that red edge anew<br> The firewhite faith of Poland without spot;<br> Of the blind Russian might,<br> And fire that is not light;<br> Of the green Rhineland where thy spirit wrought;<br> But though time, hope, and memory tire,<br>Canst thou wax dark as they do, thou whose light is fire?</div><div style="margin:10px 0"></div><div style="margin:10px 0">I set the trumpet to my lips and blow.<br> The night is broken westward; the wide sea<br>That makes immortal motion to and fro<br> From world's end unto world's end, and shall be<br>When nought now grafted of men's hands shall grow<br> And as the weed in last year's waves are we<br>Or spray the sea-wind shook a year ago<br> From its sharp tresses down the storm to lee,<br> The moving god that hides<br> Time in its timeless tides<br> Wherein time dead seems live eternity,<br> That breaks and makes again<br> Much mightier things than men,<br> Doth it not hear change coming, or not see?<br> Are the deeps deaf and dead and blind,<br>To catch no light or sound from landward of mankind?</div><div style="margin:10px 0"></div><div style="margin:10px 0">O thou, clothed round with raiment of white waves,<br> Thy brave brows lightening through the grey wet air,<br>Thou, lulled with sea-sounds of a thousand caves,<br> And lit with sea-shine to thine inland lair,<br>Whose freedom clothed the naked souls of slaves<br> And stripped the muffled souls of tyrants bare,<br>O, by the centuries of thy glorious graves,<br> By the live light of the earth that was thy care,<br> Live, thou must not be dead,<br> Live; let thine armed head<br> Lift itself up to sunward and the fair<br> Daylight of time and man,<br> Thine head republican,<br> With the same splendour on thine helmless hair<br> That in his eyes kept up a light<br>Who on thy glory gazed away their sacred sight;</div><div style="margin:10px 0"></div><div style="margin:10px 0">Who loved and looked their sense to death on thee;<br> Who taught thy lips imperishable things,<br>And in thine ears outsang thy singing sea;<br> Who made thy foot firm on the necks of kings<br>And thy soul somewhile steadfast--woe are we<br> It was but for a while, and all the strings<br>Were broken of thy spirit; yet had he<br> Set to such tunes and clothed it with such wings<br> It seemed for his sole sake<br> Impossible to break,<br> And woundless of the worm that waits and stings,<br> The golden-headed worm<br> Made headless for a term,<br> The king-snake whose life kindles with the spring's,<br> To breathe his soul upon her bloom,<br>And while she marks not turn her temple to her tomb.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"></div><div style="margin:10px 0">By those eyes blinded and that heavenly head<br> And the secluded soul adorable,<br>O Milton's land, what ails thee to be dead?<br> Thine ears are yet sonorous with his shell<br>That all the songs of all thy sea-line fed<br> With motive sound of spring-tides at mid swell,<br>And through thine heart his thought as blood is shed,<br> Requickening thee with wisdom to do well;<br> Such sons were of thy womb,<br> England, for love of whom<br> Thy name is not yet writ with theirs that fell,<br> But, till thou quite forget<br> What were thy children, yet<br> On the pale lips of hope is as a spell;<br> And Shelley's heart and Landor's mind<br>Lit thee with latter watch-fires; why wilt thou be blind?</div><div style="margin:10px 0"></div><div style="margin:10px 0">Though all were else indifferent, all that live<br> Spiritless shapes of nations; though time wait<br>In vain on hope till these have help to give,<br> And faith and love crawl famished from the gate;<br>Canst thou sit shamed and self-contemplative<br> With soulless eyes on thy secluded fate?<br>Though time forgive them, thee shall he forgive,<br> Whose choice was in thine hand to be so great?<br> Who cast out of thy mind<br> The passion of man's kind,<br>And made thee and thine old name separate?<br> Now when time looks to see<br> New names and old and thee<br> Build up our one Republic state by state,<br> England with France, and France with Spain,<br>And Spain with sovereign Italy strike hands and reign.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"></div><div style="margin:10px 0">O known and unknown fountain-heads that fill<br> Our dear life-springs of England! O bright race<br>Of streams and waters that bear witness still<br> To the earth her sons were made of! O fair face<br>Of England, watched of eyes death cannot kill,<br> How should the soul that lit you for a space<br>Fall through sick weakness of a broken will<br> To the dead cold damnation of disgrace?<br> Such wind of memory stirs<br> On all green hills of hers,<br> Such breath of record from so high a place,<br> From years whose tongues of flame<br> Prophesied in her name<br> Her feet should keep truth's bright and burning trace,<br> We needs must have her heart with us,<br>Whose hearts are one with man's; she must be dead or thus.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"></div><div style="margin:10px 0">Who is against us? who is on our side?<br> Whose heart of all men's hearts is one with man's?<br>Where art thou that wast prophetess and bride,<br> When truth and thou trod under time and chance?<br>What latter light of what new hope shall guide<br> Out of the snares of hell thy feet, O France?<br>What heel shall bruise these heads that hiss and glide,<br> What wind blow out these fen-born fires that dance<br> Before thee to thy death?<br> No light, no life, no breath,<br> From thy dead eyes and lips shall take the trance,<br> Till on that deadliest crime<br> Reddening the feet of time<br> Who treads through blood and passes, time shall glance<br> Pardon, and Italy forgive,<br>And Rome arise up whom thou slewest, and bid thee live.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"></div><div style="margin:10px 0">I set the trumpet to my lips and blow.<br> The night is broken southward; the springs run,<br>The daysprings and the watersprings that flow<br> Forth with one will from where their source was one,<br>Out of the might of morning: high and low,<br> The hungering hills feed full upon the sun,<br>The thirsting valleys drink of him and glow<br> As a heart burns with some divine thing done,<br> Or as blood burns again<br> In the bruised heart of Spain,<br> A rose renewed with red new life begun,<br> Dragged down with thorns and briers,<br> That puts forth buds like fires<br> Till the whole tree take flower in unison,<br> And prince that clogs and priest that clings<br>Be cast as weeds upon the dunghill of dead things.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"></div><div style="margin:10px 0">Ah heaven, bow down, be nearer! This is she,<br> Italia, the world's wonder, the world's care,<br>Free in her heart ere quite her hands be free,<br> And lovelier than her loveliest robe of air.<br>The earth hath voice, and speech is in the sea,<br> Sounds of great joy, too beautiful to bear;<br>All things are glad because of her, but we<br> Most glad, who loved her when the worst days were.<br> O sweetest, fairest, first,<br> O flower, when times were worst,<br> Thou hadst no stripe wherein we had no share.<br> Have not our hearts held close,<br> Kept fast the whole world's rose?<br> Have we not worn thee at heart whom none would wear?<br> First love and last love, light of lands,<br>Shall we not touch thee full-blown with our lips and hands?</div><div style="margin:10px 0"></div><div style="margin:10px 0">O too much loved, what shall we say of thee?<br> What shall we make of our heart's burning fire,<br>The passion in our lives that fain would be<br> Made each a brand to pile into the pyre<br>That shall burn up thy foemen, and set free<br> The flame whence thy sun-shadowing wings aspire?<br>Love of our life, what more than men are we,<br> That this our breath for thy sake should expire,<br> For whom to joyous death<br> Glad gods might yield their breath,<br> Great gods drop down from heaven to serve for hire?<br> We are but men, are we,<br> And thou art Italy;<br> What shall we do for thee with our desire?<br> What gift shall we deserve to give?<br>How shall we die to do thee service, or how live?</div><div style="margin:10px 0"></div><div style="margin:10px 0">The very thought in us how much we love thee<br> Makes the throat sob with love and blinds the eyes.<br>How should love bear thee, to behold above thee<br> His own light burning from reverberate skies?<br>They give thee light, but the light given them of thee<br> Makes faint the wheeling fires that fall and rise.<br>What love, what life, what death of man's should move thee,<br> What face that lingers or what foot that flies?<br> It is not heaven that lights<br> Thee with such days and nights,<br> But thou that heaven is lit from in such wise.<br> O thou her dearest birth,<br> Turn thee to lighten earth,<br> Earth too that bore thee and yearns to thee and cries;<br> Stand up, shine, lighten, become flame,<br>Till as the sun's name through all nations be thy name.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"></div><div style="margin:10px 0">I take the trumpet from my lips and sing.<br> O life immeasurable and imminent love,<br>And fear like winter leading hope like spring,<br> Whose flower-bright brows the day-star sits above,<br>Whose hand unweariable and untiring wing<br> Strike music from a world that wailed and strove,<br>Each bright soul born and every glorious thing,<br> From very freedom to man's joy thereof,<br> O time, O change and death,<br> Whose now not hateful breath<br> But gives the music swifter feet to move<br> Through sharp remeasuring tones<br> Of refluent antiphones<br> More tender-tuned than heart or throat of dove,<br> Soul into soul, song into song,<br>Life changing into life, by laws that work not wrong;</div><div style="margin:10px 0"></div><div style="margin:10px 0">O natural force in spirit and sense, that art<br> One thing in all things, fruit of thine own fruit,<br>O thought illimitable and infinite heart<br> Whose blood is life in limbs indissolute<br>That still keeps hurtless thine invisible part<br> And inextirpable thy viewless root<br>Whence all sweet shafts of green and each thy dart<br> Of sharpening leaf and bud resundering shoot;<br> Hills that the day-star hails,<br> Heights that the first beam scales,<br> And heights that souls outshining suns salute,<br> Valleys for each mouth born<br> Free now of plenteous corn,<br> Waters and woodlands' musical or mute;<br> Free winds that brighten brows as free,<br>And thunder and laughter and lightning of the sovereign sea;</div><div style="margin:10px 0"></div><div style="margin:10px 0">Rivers and springs, and storms that seek your prey;<br> With strong wings ravening through the skies by night;<br>Spirits and stars that hold one choral way;<br> O light of heaven, and thou the heavenlier light<br>Aflame above the souls of men that sway<br> All generations of all years with might;<br>O sunrise of the repossessing day,<br> And sunrise of all-renovating right;<br> And thou, whose trackless foot<br> Mocks hope's or fear's pursuit,<br> Swift Revolution, changing depth with height;<br> And thou, whose mouth makes one<br> All songs that seek the sun,<br> Serene Republic of a world made white;<br> Thou, Freedom, whence the soul's springs ran;<br>Praise earth for man's sake living, and for earth's sake man.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"></div><div style="margin:10px 0">Make yourselves wings, O tarrying feet of fate,<br> And hidden hour that hast our hope to bear,<br>A child-god, through the morning-coloured gate<br> That lets love in upon the golden air,<br>Dead on whose threshold lies heart-broken hate,<br> Dead discord, dead injustice, dead despair;<br>O love long looked for, wherefore wilt thou wait,<br> And shew not yet the dawn on thy bright hair.<br> Not yet thine hand released<br> Refreshing the faint east,<br> Thine hand reconquering heaven, to seat man there?<br> Come forth, be born and live,<br> Thou that hast help to give<br> And light to make man's day of manhood fair:<br> With flight outflying the sphered sun,<br>Hasten thine hour and halt not, till thy work be done.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"><br /></a><br />poem by <a href="http://en.citatepedia.ro/by.php?a=Algernon+Charles+Swinburne">Algernon Charles Swinburne</a><div class=q>
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<script type="text/javascript" src="//s7.addthis.com/js/300/addthis_widget.js#pubid=citatepedia" async="async"></script><div style="display:inline-block" class="addthis_sharing_toolbox" data-url="http://en.citatepedia.ro/comments.php?id=342078" data-title="The Eve Of Revolution de Algernon Charles Swinburne" data-description="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 grieves
Sleeping, and in her sleep she sees uncurled
 Dr..."></div>
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