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Algernon Charles Swinburne – from A Forsaken Garden

 In a coign of the cliff between lowland and highland
At the sea down’s edge between windward and lee
Walled round with rocks as an inland island
The ghost of a garden fronts the sea
A girdle of brushwood and thorn encloses
The steep square slope of the blossomless bed
Where the weeds that grew green from the graves of its roses
Now lie dead

The dense hard passage is blind and stifled
That crawls by a track none turn to climb
To the strait waste place that the years have rifled
Of all but the thorns that are touched not by time
The thorns he spares when the rose is taken
The rocks are left when he wastes the plain
The wind that wanders, the weeds wind shaken
These remain

Not a flower to be pressed of the foot that falls not
As the heart of a dead man the seed plots are dry
From the thicket of thorns whence the nightingale calls not
Could she call, there were never a rose to reply
Over the meadows that blossom and wither
Rings but the note of a sea-birds song
Only the sun and the rain come hither
All year long

…………

They loved their life through and then went whither?
And were one to the end – but what end who knows?
Love deep as the sea as a rose must whither
As the rose red seaweed that mocks the rose