Foresong

A "Foresong" precedes, and an "Aftersong" follows, but the "Vision" itself is comprised in "A Song of Songs."

Descender from the plains, ultimate moon of all flames, from tumescences of fruit and flower dropping, darkened your face already— fool or baptist, summer's fool, echoer, necrologue, or foresong of glaciers, anyway nutcracker, sedge-cutter, ponderer of platitudes—[...]

For the smiles across their oiled, blackened faces, a foresong to the future; the loincloth across their groins, only resplendent of an uneducated, poverty-stricken youth.

But when the speaker resolves his foresong into a claim of predilection for the life (and poetics) of love, he does so.

Swinburne never published a volume entitled Songs of Democracy, but the third section of “Christmas Antiphones,” “Beyond Church,” is in Swinburne's terms “a foresong of democracy and humanity.”