SWINBURNE IN HELL Comments

Now that time denies me the mortal dream,
The dream I dreamt in the sea of England.
Now that I am invisible
And not even remembered
By the moon of the mirror, and can't find the books I wrote,
Nor the sullen, drunken king who promised
To drink my ashes in a cup of gold;
Now that my memory is preserved in fresh
Clods of mire
And poplars and almond trees grow on me,
I don't fear to blindly disperse myself and sink
In the spheres down to the mansions of the dead.
The night of hell is older than the night of London.
Here time is like a black twilight
And it's not necessary we turn to stone
Or that seven languages adorn our epitaph.
This is the mysterious kingdom of human lucidity,
The vertiginous dream of an incessant fire that does not burn
The souls of the ungodly
But lights up thought.
When earth granted me its secret faculties
I used to imagine that when someone died
He or she was sent to an identical world
So they got used to death.
How many times did we die since the first instant
And did not know?
Sometimes I manage to listen to the footsteps of the living
Behind the walls,
But I am more frightened by the footsteps
Of the dead.
I survived the ruins invented by dreams,
The war of the invisible cities
And their sick uncertainty.
But the scene of time lasted longer than the gold of my words
And the beauty you gave me.
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