C.D. Warner, et al., comp. The Library of the World’s Best Literature.
An Anthology in Thirty Volumes. 1917.

Mater Triumphalis

By Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837–1909)

MOTHER of earth’s time-traveling generations,

Breath of his nostrils, heart-blood of his heart,

God above all Gods worshiped of all nations,

Light above light, law beyond law, thou art.

Thy face is as a sword smiting in sunder

Shadows and chains and dreams and iron things;

The sea is dumb before thy face, the thunder

Silent, the skies are narrower than thy wings.

Angels and Gods, spirit and sense, thou takest

In thy right hand as drops of dust or dew;

The temples and the towers of time thou breakest,

His thoughts and words and works, to make them new.

All we have wandered from thy ways, have hidden

Eyes from thy glory and ears from calls they heard:

Called of thy trumpets vainly, called and chidden,

Scourged of thy speech and wounded of thy word.

We have known thee and have not known thee; stood beside thee,

Felt thy lips breathe, set foot where thy feet trod,

Loved and renounced and worshiped and denied thee,

As though thou wert but as another God.

“One hour for sleep,” we said, “and yet one other;

All day we served her, and who shall serve by night?”

Not knowing of thee, thy face not knowing, O mother,

O light wherethrough the darkness is as light.

Men that forsook thee hast thou not forsaken,

Races of men that knew not hast thou known;

Nations that slept, thou hast doubted not to waken,

Worshipers of strange Gods to make thine own.

All old gray histories hiding thy clear features,

O secret spirit and sovereign, all men’s tales,

Creeds woven of men thy children and thy creatures,

They have woven for vestures of thee and for veils.

Thine hands, without election or exemption,

Feed all men fainting from false peace or strife,

O thou, the resurrection and redemption,

The Godhead and the manhood and the life.

Thy wings shadow the waters; thine eyes lighten

The horror of the hollows of the night;

The depths of the earth and the dark places brighten

Under thy feet, whiter than fire is white.

Death is subdued to thee, and hell’s bands broken;

Where thou art only is heaven; who hears not thee,

Time shall not hear him; when men’s names are spoken,

A nameless sign of death shall his name be.

Deathless shall be the death, the name be nameless;

Sterile of stars his twilight time of death;

With fire of hell shall shame consume him shameless,

And dying, all the night darken his death.

The years are as thy garments, the world’s ages

As sandals bound and loosed from thy swift feet;

Time serves before thee, as one that hath for wages

Praise of shame only, bitter words or sweet.

Thou sayest “Well done,” and all a century kindles;

Again thou sayest “Depart from sight of me,”

And all the light of face of all men dwindles,

And the age is as the broken glass of thee.

The night is as a seal set on men’s faces,

On faces fallen of men that take no light,

Nor give light in the deeps of the dark places,

Blind things incorporate with the body of night.

Their souls are serpents winter-bound and frozen;

Their shame is as a tame beast, at their feet

Couched; their cold lips deride thee and thy chosen,

Their lying lips made gray with dust for meat.

Then when their time is full and days run over,

The splendor of thy sudden brow made bare

Darkens the morning; thy bared hands uncover

The veils of light and night and the awful air.

And the world naked as a new-born maiden

Stands virginal and splendid as at birth,

With all thine heaven of all its light unladen,

Of all its love unburdened all thine earth.

For the utter earth and the utter air of heaven

And the extreme depth is thine and the extreme height;

Shadows of things and veils of ages riven

Are as men’s kings unkingdomed in thy sight.

Through the iron years, the centuries brazen-gated,

By the ages’ barred impenetrable doors,

From the evening to the morning have we waited,

Should thy foot haply sound on the awful floors.

The floors untrodden of the sun’s feet-glimmer,

The star-unstricken pavements of the night;

Do the lights burn inside? the lights wax dimmer

On festal faces withering out of sight.

The crowned heads lose the light on them: it may be

Dawn is at hand to smite the loud feast dumb;

To blind the torch-lit centuries till the day be,

The feasting kingdoms till thy kingdom come.

Shall it not come? deny they or dissemble,

Is it not even as lightning from on high

Now? and though many a soul close eyes and tremble,

How should they tremble at all who love thee as I?

I am thine harp between thine hands, O mother!

All my strong chords are strained with love of thee.

We grapple in love and wrestle, as each with other

Wrestle the wind and the unreluctant sea.

I am no courtier of thee sober-suited,

Who loves a little for a little pay.

Me not thy winds and storms nor thrones disrooted

Nor molten crowns nor thine own sins dismay.

Sinned hast thou sometime, therefore art thou sinless;

Stained hast thou been, who art therefore without stain;

Even as man’s soul is kin to thee, but kinless

Thou, in whose womb Time sows the all-various grain.

I do not bid thee spare me, O dreadful mother!

I pray thee that thou spare not, of thy grace:

How were it with me then, if ever another

Should come to stand before thee in this my place?

I am the trumpet at thy lips, thy clarion

Full of thy cry, sonorous with thy breath;

The grave of souls born worms and creeds grown carrion

Thy blast of judgment fills with fires of death.

Thou art the player whose organ keys are thunders,

And I beneath thy foot the pedal prest;

Thou art the ray whereat the rent night sunders,

And I the cloudlet borne upon thy breast.

I shall burn up before thee, pass and perish,

As haze in sunrise on the red sea-line;

But thou from dawn to sunsetting shalt cherish

The thoughts that led and souls that lighted mine.

Reared between night and noon and truth and error,

Each twilight-traveling bird that trills and screams

Sickens at midday, nor can face for terror

The imperious heaven’s inevitable extremes.

I have no spirit of skill with equal fingers

At sign to sharpen or to slacken strings;

I keep no time of song with gold-perched singers

And chirp of linnets on the wrists of kings.

I am thy storm-thrush of the days that darken,

Thy petrel in the foam that bears thy bark

To port through night and tempest; if thou hearken,

My voice is in thy heaven before the lark.

My song is in the mist that hides thy morning,

My cry is up before the day for thee;

I have heard thee and beheld thee and give warning,

Before thy wheels divide the sky and sea.

Birds shall wake with thee voiced and feathered fairer,

To see in summer what I see in spring;

I have eyes and heart to endure thee, O thunder-bearer,

And they shall be who shall have tongues to sing.

I have love at least, and have not fear, and part not

From thine unnavigable and wingless way;

Thou tarriest, and I have not said thou art not,

Nor all thy night long have denied thy day.

Darkness to daylight shall lift up thy pæan,

Hill to hill thunder, vale cry back to vale,

With wind-notes as of eagles Æschylean,

And Sappho singing in the nightingale.

Sung to by mighty sons of dawn and daughters,

Of this night’s songs thine ear shall keep but one:

That supreme song which shook the channeled waters,

And called thee skyward as God calls the sun.

Come, though all heaven again be fire above thee;

Though death before thee come to clear thy sky:

Let us but see in his thy face who loved thee;

Yea, though thou slay us, arise and let us die.

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