THE DAY IS COMING

Come hither, lads, and hearken, for a tale there is to tell,

Of the wonderful days a-coming, when all shall be better than well.

And the tale shall be told of a country, a land in the midst of the sea, And folk shall call it England in the days that are going to be.

There more than one in a thousand in the days that are yet to come, Shall have some hope of the morrow some joy of the ancient home.

For then, laugh not, but listen to this strange tale of mine, All folk that are in England

shall be better lodged than swine.

Then a man shall work and bethink him

and rejoice in the deeds of his hand,

Nor yet come home in the even

too faint and weary to stand.

Men in that time a-coming
shall work and have no fear
For to-morrow's lack of earning
and the hunger-wolf anear.

I tell you this for a wonder, that no man then shall be glad Of his fellow's fall and mishap to snatch at the work he had.

For that which the worker winneth shall then be his indeed,

Nor shall half be reaped for nothing by him that sowed no seed.

O strange new wonderful justice!

But for whom shall we gather the gain? For ourselves and for each of our fellows, and no hand shall labour in vain.

Then all Mine and all Thine shall be Ours, and no more shall any man crave For riches that serve for nothing

but to fetter a friend for a slave.

And what wealth then shall be left us when none shall gather gold

To buy his friend in the market, and pinch and pine the sold?

Nay, what save the lovely city,

and the little house on the hill,

And the wastes and the woodland beauty, and the happy fields we till;

And the homes of ancient stories,

the tombs of the mighty dead;

And the wise men seeking out marvels,

and the poet's teeming head;

And the painter's hand of wonder;

and the marvellous fiddle-bow,

And the banded choirs of music:

all those that do and know.

For all these shall be ours and all men's,

nor shall any lack a share

Of the toil and the gain of living

in the days when the world grows fair.

THUNDER IN THE GARDEN

When the boughs of the garden hang heavy with rain
And the blackbird reneweth his song,

And the thunder departing yet rolleth again,

I remember the ending of wrong.

When the day that was dusk while his death was aloof Is ending wide-gleaming and strange

For the clearness of all things beneath the world's roof I call back the wild chance and the change.

For once we twain sat through the hot afternoon

While the rain held aloof for a while,

Till she, the soft-clad, for the glory of June
Changed all with the change of her smile.

For her smile was of longing, no longer of glee,
And her fingers, entwined with mine own,
With caresses unquiet sought kindness of me

For the gift that I never had known.

Then down rushed the rain, and the voice of the thunder Smote dumb all the sound of the street,

And I to myself was grown nought but a wonder,

As she leaned down my kisses to meet.

That she craved for my lips that had craved her so often, And the hand that had trembled to touch,

That the tears filled her eyes I had hoped not to soften In this world was a marvel too much.

It was dusk 'mid the thunder, dusk e'en as the night,
When first brake out our love like the storm,

But no night-hour was it, and back came the light
While our hands with each other were warm.

And her smile, killed with kisses, came back as at first

As she rose up and led me along,

And out to the garden, where nought was athirst,
And the blackbird renewing his song.

Earth's fragrance went with her, as in the wet grass
Her feet little hidden were set;

She bent down her head, 'neath the roses to pass,
And her arm with the lily was wet.

In the garden we wandered while day waned apace
And the thunder was dying aloof;

Till the moon o'er the minster-wall lifted his face,

And grey gleamed out the lead of the roof.

Then we turned from the blossoms, and cold were they grown;

In the trees the wind westering moved;

Till over the threshold back fluttered her gown,

And in the dark house was I loved.

THE FLOWERING ORCHARD

[For a Silk Embroidery]

Lo, silken my garden
and silken my sky,
And silken my apple-boughs
hanging on high;

All wrought by the worm
in the peasant-carle's cot
On the mulberry leafage
when summer was hot.

'ALGERNON CHARLES

SWINBURNE

[ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE was born on April 5, 1837, in London. He was the eldest son of Admiral Swinburne and Lady Jane, daughter of the third Earl of Ashburnham. He was sent to Eton in 1849 and left in 1853. After some private work with a tutor, he matriculated at Balliol College, Oxford, in 1856. He left Oxford, without a degree, in 1859, and settled in London. In 1860 his earliest volume, a brace of dramas in vers?, was published, but he became first known to the public by Atalanta in Calydon (1865), which was quickly followed by Chastelard (1865) and Poems and Ballads (1866). The last named was accused of indecency and profanity, and produced a vociferous protest. The poet, however, was little moved, and continued to write in prose and verse with the greatest assiduity. His life, which was wholly dedicated to literature, was without external movement. In 1879, in consequence of his state of health, he was induced to take up his abode with a friend at Putney, and here he remained for nearly thirty years, in great retirement, which was partly forced upon him by his deafness. His daily walk over Putney Hill became classic. He died of pneumonia, after a short illness, on the 10th of April, 1909, and was buried at Bonchurch among the graves of his family.]

The gift by which Swinburne first won his way to the hearts of a multitude of readers was unquestionably the melody of his verse. The choruses in Atalanta in Calydon and the metrical inventions in Poems and Ballads acted on the ear of his contemporaries like an enchantment. Swinburne carried the prosody of the romantic age to its extreme point of mellifluousness, and he introduced into it a quality of speed, of throbbing velocity, which no one, not even Shelley, had anticipated. In some of the odes in Songs before Sunrise he went even farther, and produced effects of such sonorous volume and such elaborate antiphonal harmony that it was obvious that English verse, along those lines, could proceed no farther. In point of fact, after 1871, it did proceed no farther even in Swinburne's own hands, his later efforts to surpass his own miraculous virtuosity being less and less completely satisfactory, and indeed