Arthur Quiller-Couch, comp. The Oxford Book of Victorian Verse. 1922.
A Jacobites ExileAlgernon Charles Swinburne (18371909)
T
The weary night wears through:
And never an hour is fair wi’ flower,
And never a flower wi’ dew.
I would the night were day:
For then would I stand in my ain fair land,
As now in dreams I may.
And loud the dark Durance:
But bonnier shine the braes of Tyne
Than a’ the fields of France;
And the waves of Till that speak sae still
Gleam goodlier where they glance.
On dark Drumossie’s day:
They keep their hame ayont the faem,
And we die far away.
But night and day wake we;
And ever between the sea-banks green
Sounds loud the sundering sea.
But sweet and fast sleep they;
And the mool that haps them roun’ and laps them
Is e’en their country’s clay;
But the land we tread that are not dead
Is strange as night by day.
Though fair as dawn it be:
For what is here that a stranger’s cheer
Should yet wax blithe to see?
The fields are green and gold:
The hill-streams sing, and the hill-sides ring,
As ours at home of old.
And ours are oversea:
And the kind strange land whereon we stand,
It wotsna what were we
Or ever we came, wi’ scathe and shame,
To try what end might be.
And a weary time and strange,
Have they that seeing a weird for dreeing
Can die, and cannot change.
Though sair be they to dree:
But ill may we bide the thoughts we hide,
Mair keen than wind and sea.
And ill the weary day:
And the dreams that keep the gates of sleep,
A waefu’ gift gie they;
For the sangs they sing us, the sights they bring us,
The morn blaws all away.
The burn rins blithe and fain:
There ’s nought wi’ me I wadna gie
To look thereon again.
There sounds nae hunting-horn
That rings sae sweet as the winds that beat
Round banks where Tyne is born.
The bents and braes give ear;
But the wood that rings wi’ the sang she sings
I may not see nor hear;
For far and far thae blithe burns are,
And strange is a’ thing near.
The loud wind there lives free:
Nae light comes nigh me or wind blaws by me
That I wad hear or see.
Afar ayont the faem,
Cauld and dead in the sweet saft bed
That haps my sires at hame!
And the sweet grey gleaming sky,
And the lordly strand of Northumberland,
And the goodly towers thereby:
And none shall know but the winds that blow
The graves wherein we lie.