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30
SYNTAX
How wonderfulfy well built these stanzas are! In the
first two the verse glides on, soft and unbroken, thanks
to the perpetual a/ztf-couplings and the still weak antitheses.
And in the last two, what an intensification in tii^
asyndetical structure of the sentence, in order to paint the
fire and wildness of passion, till the climax is reached^
the supplication of the last two lines. Instances of this^
metrical art might be accumulated indefinitely; but I shall
content myself with giving an example from the sea-poems.
VI, 174, All night long in the world of sleep
Skies and waters were soft and deep: ^^
Shadow clothed them and silence made
Soundless music of dream and shade:
All above us, the livelong night,
Shadow kindled with sense of light;
All around us the brief night long,
Silence, laden with sense of song.
Stars and mountains without, we knew,
Watched and waited the soft night through:
All unseen but divined and dear,
Thrilled the touch of the sea’s breath near:
All unheard, but alive like sound,
Throbbed the sense of the sea’s life round:
Round us, near us, in depth and height,
Soft as darkness and keen as light.
Can word-painting be more beautiful?
The fragment, just quoted, also exemplifies another
and all-pervading means of expression in Swinburne’s poetry,
parallelism, which is used, after the style of the Bible,
to create or to deepen an impression. We get a splendid
example in the following verses from the Hymn to
Proserpine.
I, 70, White-eyed and poisonous-finned, shark-toothed and
serpentine-curled,
Rolls, under the whitening wind of the future, the wave
of the world.
The depths stand naked in sunder behind it, the storms
flee away;
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