Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilean; the world has grown grey from thy breath; We have drunken of things Lethean, and fed on the fullness of death.

Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837-1909), an English poet who was famous in his day but hardly remembered in ours. One of his best-remembered lines is about this very changing of times, in which mighty figures of one age are forgotten by the next. But the mighty figure whose rise and inevitable fall Swinburne prophesied was Jesus Christ.
The lines occur in Swinburne’s 1866 “Hymn to Proserpine.” The sub-title of the poem is “after the proclamation in Rome of the Christian Faith,” and the epitaph is “Vicisti, Galilaee,” which were supposed to be the dying words spoken by Julian the Apostate, the last pagan emperor of Rome. Constantine had already set the empire on its path to Christ, and Julian had self-consciously set out to turn Rome back to the worship of the old gods. In legend and in Swinburne’s poetic crafting of the scene, Julian had challenged the faith of Jesus to a fight, and had to admit defeat with his dying breath: “Vicisti, Galilaee.” Or, in Swinburne’s longer version:

Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilean; the world has grown grey from thy breath;
We have drunken of things Lethean, and fed on the fullness of death.

Never mind that it was a case of the pot calling the kettle pale; little Algernon was a small (just over 5 feet), thin, pasty, fair-haired fellow. And “swarthy Galilean” probably didn’t scan as well. Nor did it make the point that Swinburne wanted to make: That paganism was great, lusty, life-affirming, and vigorous, but Christianity sucked the life out of it and left everything behind it dead. “Pale Galilean” seemed to describe all that Swinburne and his ilk hated about Victorian Christianity, and soon Nietzsche would be taking his turn at calling Christianity the ultimate form of life-denial. It was a critique the world-weary age was ready to hear, even if they didn’t quite think they had the alternative worked out yet.
Swinburne’s emperor Julian took his stand against the rising Christian faith of the Galilean, and said defiantly:

Though all men abase them before you in spirit, and all knees bend,
I kneel not neither adore you, but standing, look to the end.

And he predicted that, just as pagan Rome fell when its cycle came around, the empire of Jesus would inevitably fall as well:

Though the feet of thine high priests tread where thy lords and our forefathers trod,
Though these that were Gods are dead, and thou being dead art a God,
Though before thee the throned Cytherean be fallen, and hidden her head,
Yet thy kingdom shall pass, Galilean, thy dead shall go down to thee dead.

Swinburne set his hopes on the collapse of Christianity, a collapse that he thought was inevitable because all gods fail. The two brief words of the dying Julian are elaborated in this long hymn to Proserpine, and it is Proserpine not so much as the goddess of Spring, but as the symbol of the cycle that includes universal death. This is who Julian, or rather Swinburne, turns to, “having seen she shall surely abide in the end; Goddess and maiden and queen, be near me now and befriend.”
Under the heading of “Decadents” in literature and life, Swinburne has a major entry. Things run downhill and fall apart; everything breaks up eventually; and we are living at a time when the crashing and colliding of dying systems and gods is ringing in our ears every day. This was his worldview, and he extracted whatever fin de siècle vigor he could from it. It’s not exactly what you could call hope, but it was a kind of artsy resignation that gave him the energy for remarkable craftsmanship in his poetry.
Swinburne suffered a breakdown in his early forties, related to alcohol abuse, general “nervous excitability,” and dissolute living of various kinds. He survived into his seventies, perpetually convalescing and cared for by a friend. We do not know his last words, though he had given much thought to Julian’s last words, and had even written a funny poem on “The Last Words of a Seventh-Rate Poet.”
Swinburne was no seventh-rate poet. He had the full blessing of the poet’s power to charm, which his contemporaries acknowledged whether they found his views scandalous or exciting. One critic said, “His poetry is like fairy gold. We dream that we are wealthy, but our wealth perpetually eludes us.”

I have lived long enough, having seen one thing, that love hath an end;

Goddess and maiden and queen, be near me now and befriend.

Thou art more than the day or the morrow, the seasons that laugh or that weep;

For these give joy and sorrow; but thou, Proserpina, sleep.

Sweet is the treading of wine, and sweet the feet of the dove;

But a goodlier gift is thine than foam of the grapes or love.

Yea, is not even Apollo, with hair and harpstring of gold,

A bitter God to follow, a beautiful God to behold?

I am sick of singing; the bays burn deep and chafe: I am fain

To rest a little from praise and grievous pleasure and pain.

For the Gods we know not of, who give us our daily breath,

We know they are cruel as love or life, and lovely as death.

O Gods dethroned and deceased, cast forth, wiped out in a day!

From your wrath is the world released, redeemed from your chains, men say.

New Gods are crowned in the city; their flowers have broken your rods;

They are merciful, clothed with pity, the young compassionate Gods.

But for me their new device is barren, the days are bare;

Things long past over suffice, and men forgotten that were.

Time and the Gods are at strife; ye dwell in the midst thereof,

Draining a little life from the barren breasts of love.

I say to you, cease, take rest; yea, I say to you all, be at peace,

Till the bitter milk of her breast and the barren bosom shall cease.

Wilt thou yet take all, Galilean? but these thou shalt not take,

The laurel, the palms and the pæan, the breasts of the nymphs in the brake;

Breasts more soft than a dove's, that tremble with tenderer breath;

And all the wings of the Loves, and all the joy before death;

All the feet of the hours that sound as a single lyre,

Dropped and deep in the flowers, with strings that flicker like fire.

More than these wilt thou give, things fairer than all these things?

Nay, for a little we live, and life hath mutable wings.

A little while and we die; shall life not thrive as it may?

For no man under the sky lives twice, outliving his day.

And grief is a grievous thing, and a man hath enough of his tears:

Why should he labour, and bring fresh grief to blacken his years?

Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilean; the world has grown grey from thy breath;

We have drunken of things Lethean, and fed on the fullness of death.

Laurel is green for a season, and love is sweet for a day;

But love grows bitter with treason, and laurel outlives not May.

Sleep, shall we sleep after all? for the world is not sweet in the end;

For the old faiths loosen and fall, the new years ruin and rend.

Fate is a sea without shore, and the soul is a rock that abides;

But her ears are vexed with the roar and her face with the foam of the tides.

O lips that the live blood faints in, the leavings of racks and rods!

O ghastly glories of saints, dead limbs of gibbeted Gods!

Though all men abase them before you in spirit, and all knees bend,

I kneel not neither adore you, but standing, look to the end.

All delicate days and pleasant, all spirits and sorrows are cast

Far out with the foam of the present that sweeps to the surf of the past:

Where beyond the extreme sea-wall, and between the remote sea-gates,

Waste water washes, and tall ships founder, and deep death waits:

Where, mighty with deepening sides, clad about with the seas as with wings,

And impelled of invisible tides, and fulfilled of unspeakable things,

White-eyed and poisonous-finned, shark-toothed and serpentine-curled,

Rolls, under the whitening wind of the future, the wave of the world.

The depths stand naked in sunder behind it, the storms flee away;

In the hollow before it the thunder is taken and snared as a prey;

In its sides is the north-wind bound; and its salt is of all men's tears;

With light of ruin, and sound of changes, and pulse of years:

With travail of day after day, and with trouble of hour upon hour;

And bitter as blood is the spray; and the crests are as fangs that devour:

And its vapour and storm of its steam as the sighing of spirits to be;

And its noise as the noise in a dream; and its depth as the roots of the sea:

And the height of its heads as the height of the utmost stars of the air:

And the ends of the earth at the might thereof tremble, and time is made bare.

Will ye bridle the deep sea with reins, will ye chasten the high sea with rods?

Will ye take her to chain her with chains, who is older than all ye Gods?

All ye as a wind shall go by, as a fire shall ye pass and be past;

Ye are Gods, and behold, ye shall die, and the waves be upon you at last.

In the darkness of time, in the deeps of the years, in the changes of things,

Ye shall sleep as a slain man sleeps, and the world shall forget you for kings.

Though the feet of thine high priests tread where thy lords and our forefathers trod,

Though these that were Gods are dead, and thou being dead art a God,

Though before thee the throned Cytherean be fallen, and hidden her head,

Yet thy kingdom shall pass, Galilean, thy dead shall go down to thee dead.

Of the maiden thy mother men sing as a goddess with grace clad around;

Thou art throned where another was king; where another was queen she is crowned.

Yea, once we had sight of another: but now she is queen, say these.

Not as thine, not as thine was our mother, a blossom of flowering seas,

Clothed round with the world's desire as with raiment, and fair as the foam,

And fleeter than kindled fire, and a goddess, and mother of Rome.

For thine came pale and a maiden, and sister to sorrow; but ours,

Her deep hair heavily laden with odour and colour of flowers,

White rose of the rose-white water, a silver splendour, a flame,

Bent down unto us that besought her, and earth grew sweet with her name.

For thine came weeping, a slave among slaves, and rejected; but she

Came flushed from the full-flushed wave, and imperial, her foot on the sea.

And the wonderful waters knew her, the winds and the viewless ways,

And the roses grew rosier, and bluer the sea-blue stream of the bays.

Ye are fallen, our lords, by what token? we wise that ye should not fall.

Ye were all so fair that are broken; and one more fair than ye all.

But I turn to her still, having seen she shall surely abide in the end;

Goddess and maiden and queen, be near me now and befriend.

O daughter of earth, of my mother, her crown and blossom of birth,

I am also, I also, thy brother; I go as I came unto earth.

In the night where thine eyes are as moons are in heaven, the night where thou art,

Where the silence is more than all tunes, where sleep overflows from the heart,

Where the poppies are sweet as the rose in our world, and the red rose is white,

And the wind falls faint as it blows with the fume of the flowers of the night,

And the murmur of spirits that sleep in the shadow of Gods from afar

Grows dim in thine ears and deep as the deep dim soul of a star,

In the sweet low light of thy face, under heavens untrod by the sun,

Let my soul with their souls find place, and forget what is done and undone.

Thou art more than the Gods who number the days of our temporal breath;

Let these give labour and slumber; but thou, Proserpina, death.

Therefore now at thy feet I abide for a season in silence. I know

I shall die as my fathers died, and sleep as they sleep; even so.

For the glass of the years is brittle wherein we gaze for a span;

A little soul for a little bears up this corpse which is man.

So long I endure, no longer; and laugh not again, neither weep.

For there is no God found stronger than death; and death is a sleep.

More Poems by Algernon Charles Swinburne