A Ballad of Death
Read "A Ballad of Death" by Algernon Charles Swinburne, a lyrical ballad shaped by love, beauty, loss, and mortality, using Swinburne's musical language and recurring imagery to create an atmosphere of romantic sorrow and remembrance.
Kneel down, fair Love, and fill thyself with tears,
Girdle thyself with sighing for a girth
Upon the sides of mirth,
Cover thy lips and eyelids, let thine ears
Be filled with rumour of people sorrowing;
Make thee soft raiment out of woven sighs
Upon the flesh to cleave,
Set pains therein and many a grievous thing,
And many sorrows after each his wise
For armlet and for gorget and for sleeve.
O Love's lute heard about the lands of death,
Left hanged upon the trees that were therein;
O Love and Time and Sin,
Three singing mouths that mourn now underbreath,
Three lovers, each one evil spoken of;
O smitten lips wherethrough this voice of mine
Came softer with her praise;
Abide a little for our lady's love.
The kisses of her mouth were more than wine,
And more than peace the passage of her days.
O Love, thou knowest if she were good to see.
O Time, thou shalt not find in any land
Till, cast out of thine hand,
The sunlight and the moonlight fail from thee,
Another woman fashioned like as this.
O Sin, thou knowest that all thy shame in her
Was made a goodly thing;
Yea, she caught Shame and shamed him with her kiss,
With her fair kiss, and lips much lovelier
Than lips of amorous roses in late spring.
By night there stood over against my bed
Queen Venus with a hood striped gold and black,
Both sides drawn fully back
From brows wherein the sad blood failed of red,
And temples drained of purple and full of death.
Her curled hair had the wave of sea-water
And the sea's gold in it.
Her eyes were as a dove's that sickeneth.
Strewn dust of gold she had shed over her,
And pearl and purple and amber on her feet.
Upon her raiment of dyed sendaline
Were painted all the secret ways of love
And covered things thereof,
That hold delight as grape-flowers hold their wine;
Red mouths of maidens and red feet of doves,
And brides that kept within the bride-chamber
Their garment of soft shame,
And weeping faces of the wearied loves
That swoon in sleep and awake wearier,
With heat of lips and hair shed out like flame.
The tears that through her eyelids fell on me
Made mine own bitter where they ran between
As blood had fallen therein,
She saying; Arise, lift up thine eyes and see
If any glad thing be or any good
Now the best thing is taken forth of us;
Even she to whom all praise
Was as one flower in a great multitude,
One glorious flower of many and glorious,
One day found gracious among many days:
Even she whose handmaiden was Love--to whom
At kissing times across her stateliest bed
Kings bowed themselves and shed
Pale wine, and honey with the honeycomb,
And spikenard bruised for a burnt-offering;
Even she between whose lips the kiss became
As fire and frankincense;
Whose hair was as gold raiment on a king,
Whose eyes were as the morning purged with flame,
Whose eyelids as sweet savour issuing thence.
Then I beheld, and lo on the other side
My lady's likeness crowned and robed and dead.
Sweet still, but now not red,
Was the shut mouth whereby men lived and died.
And sweet, but emptied of the blood's blue shade,
The great curled eyelids that withheld her eyes.
And sweet, but like spoilt gold,
The weight of colour in her tresses weighed.
And sweet, but as a vesture with new dyes,
The body that was clothed with love of old.
Ah! that my tears filled all her woven hair
And all the hollow bosom of her gown--
Ah! that my tears ran down
Even to the place where many kisses were,
Even where her parted breast-flowers have place,
Even where they are cloven apart--who knows not this?
Ah! the flowers cleave apart
And their sweet fills the tender interspace;
Ah! the leaves grown thereof were things to kiss
Ere their fine gold was tarnished at the heart.
Ah! in the days when God did good to me,
Each part about her was a righteous thing;
Her mouth an almsgiving,
The glory of her garments charity,
The beauty of her bosom a good deed,
In the good days when God kept sight of us;
Love lay upon her eyes,
And on that hair whereof the world takes heed;
And all her body was more virtuous
Than souls of women fashioned otherwise.
Now, ballad, gather poppies in thine hands
And sheaves of brier and many rusted sheaves
Rain-rotten in rank lands,
Waste marigold and late unhappy leaves
And grass that fades ere any of it be mown;
And when thy bosom is filled full thereof
Seek out Death's face ere the light altereth,
And say "My master that was thrall to Love
Is become thrall to Death."
Bow down before him, ballad, sigh and groan.
But make no sojourn in thy outgoing;
For haply it may be
That when thy feet return at evening
Death shall come in with thee.
A Ballad of Death Summary and Analysis
In A Ballad of Death, the poem begins as an act of mourning. The voice turns to Love as if to a person who can be dressed, instructed, and burdened with grief, and the opening stanzas create a ceremonial atmosphere of sorrow. What follows is both elegy and vision: the speaker recalls a beloved woman whose beauty and vitality seem to have stood outside ordinary time, then confronts her in an imagined form of death, where her living radiance has become stillness and loss.
The poem moves through a series of powerful contrasts between vitality and extinction, desire and decay, holiness and corruption. Love, Time, and Sin are treated almost like rival deities, each implicated in the beloved's fate. The speaker cannot settle on a single meaning for her life or death: she is praised as pure, sensual, sacred, and mortal all at once. The ending returns to the poem itself, as if the ballad must become a messenger to Death, carrying wreaths of fading things and speaking on behalf of a world where beauty has been overtaken by mortality. The central tension lies in the way the poem both worships the beloved and insists on the ruin that time brings to even the most exalted forms of love.
Tone in A Ballad of Death
The tone is elevated, mournful, and fervently reverent, with Swinburne's language turning grief into something ceremonial and almost prayer-like. Even when the poem is saturated with sensual detail, the feeling it leaves is one of elegiac urgency: the reader is drawn into a world where beauty shines brightly only to be shadowed at once by death, decay, and the ache of remembrance.
This literary analysis was generated with AI and may contain interpretive differences. Provide your analysis in the comments section.
Themes in A Ballad of Death
- Love transformed by grief - The poem treats love not as comfort but as something deepened and darkened by loss, so that affection is inseparable from mourning.
- Mortality and decay - Death is not a distant idea here but the force that alters beauty, silences desire, and finally claims what the speaker most reveres.
- Idealized beauty - The beloved is presented in near-mythic terms, elevated beyond ordinary comparison, which makes her loss feel even more devastating.
- Time's power over the body - Time appears as an enemy that diminishes living splendor and exposes the fragility of all physical glory.
- Sacred and sensual desire - The poem repeatedly fuses religious language with erotic imagery, suggesting that desire can feel both holy and vulnerable to shame.
- Memory as devotion - The speaker's remembrance becomes a kind of ritual, preserving the beloved through image, praise, and lament even as death remains final.
Literary Devices in A Ballad of Death
- Apostrophe - The poem directly addresses Love, Time, Sin, the ballad itself, and Death, giving abstract forces a dramatic presence and making grief feel like a confrontation.
- Repetition - Recurring phrases and parallel structures intensify the incantatory, mourning-like rhythm and make the lament feel obsessive and ceremonial.
- Imagery - Swinburne piles up tactile, visual, and bodily images of tears, flowers, gold, and fading color to make beauty and loss vividly physical.
- Personification - Love, Time, Sin, and Death act like beings with wills and powers, turning the poem into a struggle among forces rather than a simple elegy.
- Metaphor - The beloved is described through transformed likenesses such as flowers, gold, wine, and sacred offerings, elevating her while emphasizing her fragility.
- Allusion - References to Venus, kings, incense, and offerings give the poem a mythic and ceremonial resonance that enlarges the private lament.
- Paradox - The poem repeatedly joins opposites, especially purity and sexuality, praise and grief, or beauty and corruption, to show how unstable the beloved's image becomes in death.
- Ballad form - The title and formal movement suggest a traditional song of sorrow, but the ornate, highly patterned language expands the ballad into something lush and ritualistic.
Symbolism in A Ballad of Death
- Queen Venus - She symbolizes erotic beauty and desire, but her faded appearance also suggests the fragility of sensual life before death.
- Poppies - These flowers often suggest sleep, forgetting, and death, fitting the poem's movement toward relinquishment and finality.
- Gold - Gold represents splendor, value, and the beloved's radiance, yet it repeatedly appears dulled or tarnished, signaling loss.
- Wine - Wine evokes pleasure, celebration, and bodily richness, but in the poem it also marks the intensity of love that death interrupts.
- Flowers - The many floral images symbolize both beauty and brevity, emphasizing how quickly life's loveliness withers.
- The bed - The bed becomes a site of intimacy, vision, and mortality, linking love and death in the speaker's imagination.
Historical Context of A Ballad of Death
Algernon Charles Swinburne is closely associated with the aesthetic and decadent currents of nineteenth-century English poetry, where musical language, lush imagery, and fascination with beauty, desire, and mortality often intertwine. His work also reflects the influence of the Pre-Raphaelites and the broader Victorian taste for myth, medieval form, and richly ornamented verse.
This poem fits that literary climate by blending religious diction, classical allusion, and sensuous imagery into a highly stylized lament. Its attention to beauty, decadence, and the nearness of death is characteristic of late Romantic and fin-de-siècle writing, which often treats emotion as intense, exalted, and inseparable from transience.
Poems Similar to A Ballad of Death
- One Word More - Robert Browning
- La Belle Dame sans Merci - John Keats
- The Blessed Damozel - Dante Gabriel Rossetti
- When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd - Walt Whitman