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Before The Beginning Of Years"Before the beginning of yearsThere came to the making of manTime, with a gift of tears;Grief, with a glass that ran;Pleasure, with pain for leaven;Summer, with flowers that fell;Remembrance, fallen from heaven,And madness risen from hell;Strength without hands to smite;Love that endures for a breath;Night, the shadow of light,And life, the shadow of death.And the high gods took in handFire, and the falling of tears,And a measure of sliding sandFrom under the feet of the years;And froth and the drift of the sea;And dust of the laboring earth;And bodies of things to beIn the houses of death and of birth;And wrought with weeping and laughter,And fashioned with loathing and love,With life before and afterAnd death beneath and above,For a day and a night and a morrow,That his strength might endure for a spanWith travail and heavy sorrow,The holy spirit of man.From the winds of the north and the south,They gathered as unto strife;They breathed upon his mouth,They filled his body with life;Eyesight and speech they wroughtFor the veils of the soul therein,A time for labor and thought,A time to serve and to sin;They gave him light in his ways,And love, and space for delight,And beauty, and length of days,And night, and sleep in the night.His speech is a burning fire;With his lips he travaileth;In his heart is a blind desire,In his eyes foreknowledge of death;He weaves, and is clothed with derision;Sows, and he shall not reap;His life is a watch or a visionBetween a sleep and a sleep.
― Algernon Charles Swinburne,
Poems and Ballads Atalanta in Calydon

Before The Beginning Of Years”Before the beginning of yearsThere came to...

- 23rd June 2020 0

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