Posthumous Poems/Recollections
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For works with similar titles, see Recollections.
RECOLLECTIONS
Years have sped from us under the sun
Through blossom and snow-tides twenty-one,
Since first your hand as a friend's was mine,
In a season whose days are yet honey and wine
To the pale close lips of Remembrance, shed
By the cupbearer Love for desire of the dead:
And the weeds I send you may half seem flowers
In eyes that were lit by the light of its hours.
For the life (if at all there be life) in them grew
From the sun then risen on a young day's dew,
When ever in August holiday times
I rode or swam through a rapture of rhymes,
Over heather and crag, and by scaur and by stream,
Clothed with delight by the might of a dream,
With the sweet sharp wind blown hard through my hair,
On eyes enkindled and head made bare,
Reining my rhymes into royal order
Through honied leagues of the northland border;
Or loosened a song to seal for me
A kiss on the clamorous mouth of the sea.
So swarmed and sprang, as a covey they start,
The song-birds hatched of a hot glad heart,
With notes too shrill and a windy joy
Fluttering and firing the brain of a boy,
With far keen echoes of painless pain
Beating their wings on his heart and his brain,
Till a life's whole reach, were it brief, were it long,
Seemed but a field to be sown with song.
Through blossom and snow-tides twenty-one,
Since first your hand as a friend's was mine,
In a season whose days are yet honey and wine
To the pale close lips of Remembrance, shed
By the cupbearer Love for desire of the dead:
And the weeds I send you may half seem flowers
In eyes that were lit by the light of its hours.
For the life (if at all there be life) in them grew
From the sun then risen on a young day's dew,
When ever in August holiday times
I rode or swam through a rapture of rhymes,
Over heather and crag, and by scaur and by stream,
Clothed with delight by the might of a dream,
With the sweet sharp wind blown hard through my hair,
On eyes enkindled and head made bare,
Reining my rhymes into royal order
Through honied leagues of the northland border;
Or loosened a song to seal for me
A kiss on the clamorous mouth of the sea.
So swarmed and sprang, as a covey they start,
The song-birds hatched of a hot glad heart,
With notes too shrill and a windy joy
Fluttering and firing the brain of a boy,
With far keen echoes of painless pain
Beating their wings on his heart and his brain,
Till a life's whole reach, were it brief, were it long,
Seemed but a field to be sown with song.
The snow-time is melted, the flower-time is fled,
That were one to me then for the joys they shed.
Joys in garland and sorrows in sheaf,
Rose-red pleasure and gold-eared grief,
Reared of the rays of a mid-noon sky,
I have gathered and housed them, worn and put by,
These wild-weed waifs with a wan green bloom
Found in the grass of that old year's tomb,
Touched by the gleam of it, soiled with its dust,
I well could leave in the green grave's trust,
Lightly could leave in the light wind's care
Were all thoughts dead of the dead life there.
But if some note of its old glad sound
In your ear should ring as a dream's rebound,
As a song, that sleep in his ear keeps yet,
Tho' the senses and soul rewaking forget.
To none so fitly the sprays I send
Could come as at hail of the hand of a friend.
That were one to me then for the joys they shed.
Joys in garland and sorrows in sheaf,
Rose-red pleasure and gold-eared grief,
Reared of the rays of a mid-noon sky,
I have gathered and housed them, worn and put by,
These wild-weed waifs with a wan green bloom
Found in the grass of that old year's tomb,
Touched by the gleam of it, soiled with its dust,
I well could leave in the green grave's trust,
Lightly could leave in the light wind's care
Were all thoughts dead of the dead life there.
But if some note of its old glad sound
In your ear should ring as a dream's rebound,
As a song, that sleep in his ear keeps yet,
Tho' the senses and soul rewaking forget.
To none so fitly the sprays I send
Could come as at hail of the hand of a friend.
1878.
It is evident that "Recollections" was addressed to W. B. Scott, and was intended as the Dedication to Poems and Ballads: Second Series, 1878, but was held back when Swinburne recollected his promise to dedicate that volume to Richard Burton. Poems and Ballads: Third Series, 1889, was inscribed to Scott in a poem which contains two lines that occur in "Recollections." —[E. G.]