The Tale of Balen | Page 3

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This etext was prepared by David Price, email [email protected]
from the 1896 Chatto & Windus edition.

THE TALE OF BALEN
by Algernon Charles Swinburne

DEDICATION

TO MY MOTHER
Love that holds life and death in fee, Deep as the clear unsounded sea
And sweet as life or death can be, Lays here my hope, my heart, and
me Before you, silent, in a song. Since the old wild tale, made new,
found grace, When half sung through, before your face, It needs must
live a springtide space, While April suns grow strong.
March 24, 1896.

THE TALE OF BALEN

In hawthorn-time the heart grows light, The world is sweet in sound
and sight, Glad thoughts and birds take flower and flight, The heather
kindles toward the light, The whin is frankincense and flame. And be it
for strife or be it for love The falcon quickens as the dove When earth
is touched from heaven above With joy that knows no name.
And glad in spirit and sad in soul With dream and doubt of days that
roll As waves that race and find no goal Rode on by bush and brake and
bole A northern child of earth and sea. The pride of life before him lay
Radiant: the heavens of night and day Shone less than shone before his
way His ways and days to be.
And all his life of blood and breath Sang out within him: time and
death Were even as words a dreamer saith When sleep within him
slackeneth, And light and life and spring were one. The steed between
his knees that sprang, The moors and woods that shone and sang, The
hours where through the spring's breath rang, Seemed ageless as the
sun.
But alway through the bounteous bloom That earth gives thanks if
heaven illume His soul forefelt a shadow of doom, His heart foreknew

a gloomier gloom Than closes all men's equal ways, Albeit the spirit of
life's light spring With pride of heart upheld him, king And lord of
hours like snakes that sting And nights that darken days.
And as the strong spring round him grew Stronger, and all blithe winds
that blew Blither, and flowers that flowered anew More glad of sun and
air and dew, The shadow lightened on his soul And brightened into
death and died Like winter, as the bloom waxed wide From woodside
on to riverside And southward goal to goal.
Along the wandering ways of Tyne, By beech and birch and thorn that
shine And laugh when life's requickening wine Makes night and noon
and dawn divine And stirs in all the veins of spring, And past the
brightening banks of Tees, He rode as one that breathes and sees A sun
more blithe, a merrier breeze, A life that