Swinburne’s compact lament insists that death and birth are so fundamentally opposite they should never share the same space. The lines heap up stark contrasts — wealth and poverty, rose-red joy and black mourning, warm and cold seasons — to show how violently these forces clash. Fate, the speaker says, does a terrible thing by chaining them together in a “brief tether,” as if the passage from cradle to grave is a forced, unwelcome pairing. The refrain “Death and birth” pounds through the poem, making the contradiction feel inescapable. Halfway through, a broken question surfaces: who can say whether death or life on earth is better? No answer comes. Instead, the speaker lingers in the discomfort of knowing that our beginning and our end are yoked tightly, and that blending them is always “ill.” The poem leaves a bitter, unsettled taste, as if the natural cycle itself were a design flaw.
Death And Birth — Summary
Death and birth should dwell not near together: Wealth keeps house not, even for shame, with dearth: Fate doth ill to link in one brief tether Death and birth.
Harsh the yoke that binds them, strange the girth Seems that girds them each with each: yet whether Death be best, who knows, or life on earth?
Ill the rose-red and the sable feather Blend in one crown's plume, as grief with mirth: Ill met still are warm and wintry weather, Death and birth.