"The Swimmer" is a poem by the Australian poet Adam Lindsay Gordon. The poem is from his last volume of poems Bush Ballads and Galloping Rhymes published in 1870, when he was living at Melbourne. In The Poems of Adam Lindsay Gordon, it is grouped among "Poems Swinburnian in Form and Pessimism, but full of the Personality of Gordon." The poem was set to music by Sir Edward Elgar as the fifth and last song in his song-cycle Sea Pictures. Lyrics Square brackets [ ] indicate text omitted in Elgar's song. Italics indicate text repeated in the song. "The Swimmer" With short, sharp, violent lights made vivid, To southward far as the sight can roam ; Only the swirl of the surges livid, The seas that climb and the surfs that comb. Only the crag and the cliff to nor'ward, [And] the rocks receding, and reefs flung forward, [And] waifs wrecked seaward and wasted shoreward On shallows sheeted with flaming foam. A grim, grey coast and a seaboard ghastly, And shores trod seldom by feet of men -– Where the battered hull and the broken mast lie, They have lain embedded these long years ten. Love! Love! when we wander'd here together, Hand in hand! Hand in hand through the sparkling weather, From the heights and hollows of fern and heather, God surely loved us a little then. The skies were fairer and shores were firmer -- The blue sea over the bright sand rolled ; Babble and prattle, and ripple and murmur, Sheen of silver and glamour of gold – Sheen of silver and glamour of gold - [And the sunset bath'd in the gulf to lend her A garland of pinks and of purples tender, A tinge of the sun-god's rosy splendour, A tithe of his glories manifold.] [Man's works are graven, cunning, and skilful On earth, where his tabernacles are ; But the sea is wanton, the sea is wilful, And who shall mend her and who shall mar ? Shall we carve success or record disaster On the bosom of her heaving alabaster ? Will her purple pulse beat fainter or faster For fallen sparrow or fallen star ?] [I would that with sleepy, soft embraces The sea would fold me – would find me rest, In luminous shades of her secret places, In depths where her marvels are manifest ; So the earth beneath her