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Home  »  The English Poets  »  Extracts from Poems and Ballads, Third Series: From Pan and Thalassius

Thomas Humphry Ward, ed. The English Poets. 1880–1918.rnVol. V. Browning to Rupert Brooke

Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837–1909)

Extracts from Poems and Ballads, Third Series: From Pan and Thalassius

THALASSIUS

PAN!

Pan!

O sea-stray, seed of Apollo,

What word wouldst thou have with me?

My ways thou wast fain to follow

Or ever the years hailed thee

Man.

Now

If August brood on the valleys,

If satyrs laugh on the lawns,

What part in the wildwood alleys

Hast thou with the fleet-foot fauns—

Thou?

See!

Thy feet are a man’s—not cloven

Like these, not light as a boy’s:

The tresses and tendrils inwoven

That lure us, the lure of them cloys

Thee.

Us

The joy of the wild woods never

Leaves free of the thirst it slakes:

The wild love throbs in us ever

That burns in the dense hot brakes

Thus.

Life,

Eternal, passionate, aweless,

Insatiable, mutable, dear,

Makes all men’s laws for us lawless:

We strive not: how should we fear

Strife?

We,

The birds and the bright winds know not

Such joys as are ours in the mild

Warm woodland; joys such as grow not

In waste green fields of the wild

Sea.

No;

Long since, in the world’s wind veering,

Thy heart was estrangèd from me:

Sweet Echo shall yield thee not hearing:

What have we to do with thee?

Go.