Poems by George Meredith Volume Ii Part 40

MEDITATION UNDER STARS

What links are ours with orbs that are So resolutely far: The solitary asks, and they Give radiance as from a shield: Still at the death of day, The seen, the unrevealed.

Implacable they shine To us who would of Life obtain An answer for the life we strain To nourish with one sign.

Nor can imagination throw The penetrative shaft: we pa.s.s The breath of thought, who would divine If haply they may grow As Earth; have our desire to know; If life comes there to grain from gra.s.s, And flowers like ours of toil and pain; Has pa.s.sion to beat bar, Win s.p.a.ce from cleaving brain; The mystic link attain, Whereby star holds on star.

Those visible immortals beam Allurement to the dream: Ireful at human hungers brook No question in the look.

For ever virgin to our sense, Remote they wane to gaze intense: Prolong it, and in ruthlessness they smite The beating heart behind the ball of sight: Till we conceive their heavens h.o.a.r, Those lights they raise but sparkles frore, And Earth, our blood-warm Earth, a shuddering prey To that frigidity of brainless ray.

Yet s.p.a.ce is given for breath of thought Beyond our bounds when musing: more When to that musing love is brought, And love is asked of love's wherefore.

'Tis Earth's, her gift; else have we nought: Her gift, her secret, here our tie.

And not with her and yonder sky?

Bethink you: were it Earth alone Breeds love, would not her region be The sole delight and throne Of generous Deity?

To deeper than this ball of sight Appeal the l.u.s.trous people of the night.

Fronting yon sh.o.r.eless, sown with fiery sails, It is our ravenous that quails, Flesh by its craven thirsts and fears distraught.

The spirit leaps alight, Doubts not in them is he, The binder of his sheaves, the sane, the right: Of magnitude to magnitude is wrought, To feel it large of the great life they hold: In them to come, or vaster intervolved, The issues known in us, our unsolved solved: That there with toil Life climbs the self-same Tree, Whose roots enrichment have from ripeness dropped.

So may we read and little find them cold: Let it but be the lord of Mind to guide Our eyes; no branch of Reason's growing lopped; Nor dreaming on a dream; but fortified By day to penetrate black midnight; see, Hear, feel, outside the senses; even that we, The specks of dust upon a mound of mould, We who reflect those rays, though low our place, To them are lastingly allied.

So may we read, and little find them cold: Not frosty lamps illumining dead s.p.a.ce, Not distant aliens, not senseless Powers.

The fire is in them whereof we are born; The music of their motion may be ours.

Spirit shall deem them beckoning Earth and voiced Sisterly to her, in her beams rejoiced.

Of love, the grand impulsion, we behold The love that lends her grace Among the starry fold.

Then at new flood of customary morn, Look at her through her showers, Her mists, her streaming gold, A wonder edges the familiar face: She wears no more that robe of printed hours; Half strange seems Earth, and sweeter than her flowers.

WOODMAN AND ECHO

Close Echo hears the woodman's axe, To double on it, as in glee, With clap of hands, and little lacks Of meaning in her repartee.

For all shall fall, As one has done, The tree of me, Of thee the tree; And unto all The fate we wait Reveals the wheels Whereon we run: We tower to flower, We spread the shade, We drop for crop, At length are laid; Are rolled in mould, From chop and lop: And are we thick in woodland tracks, Or tempting of our stature we, The end is one, we do but wax For service over land and sea.

So, strike! the like Shall thus of us, My brawny woodman, claim the tax.

Nor foe thy blow, Though wood be good, And shriekingly the timber cracks: The ground we crowned Shall speed the seed Of younger into swelling sacks.

For use he hews, To make awake The spirit of what stuff we be: Our earth of mirth And tears he clears For braver, let our minds agree; And then will men Within them win An Echo clapping harmony.

THE WISDOM OF ELD

We spend our lives in learning pilotage, And grow good steersmen when the vessel's crank!

Gap-toothed he spake, and with a tottering shank Sidled to gain the sunny bench of Age.

It is the sentence which completes that stage; A testament of wisdom reading blank.

The seniors of the race, on their last plank, Pa.s.s mumbling it as nature's final page.

These, bent by such experience, are the band Who captain young enthusiasts to maintain What things we view, and Earth's decree withstand, Lest dreaded Change, long dammed by dull decay, Should bring the world a vessel steered by brain, And ancients musical at close of day.

EARTH'S PREFERENCE

Earth loves her young: a preference manifest: She prompts them to her fruits and flower-beds; Their beauty with her choicest interthreads, And makes her revel of their merry zest; As in our East much were it in our West, If men had risen to do the work of heads.

Her gabbling grey she eyes askant, nor treads The ways they walk; by what they speak oppressed.

How wrought they in their zenith? 'Tis not writ; Not all; yet she by one sure sign can read: Have they but held her laws and nature dear, They mouth no sentence of inverted wit.

More prizes she her beasts than this high breed Wry in the shape she wastes her milk to rear.

SOCIETY

Historic be the survey of our kind, And how their brave Society took shape.

Lion, wolf, vulture, fox, jackal and ape, The strong of limb, the keen of nose, we find, Who, with some jars in harmony, combined, Their primal instincts taming, to escape The brawl indecent, and hot pa.s.sions drape.

Convenience p.r.i.c.ked conscience, that the mind.

Thus entered they the field of milder beasts, Which in some sort of civil order graze, And do half-homage to the G.o.d of Laws.

But are they still for their old ravenous feasts, Earth gives the edifice they build no base: They spring another flood of fangs and claws.

WINTER HEAVENS

Sharp is the night, but stars with frost alive Leap off the rim of earth across the dome.

It is a night to make the heavens our home More than the nest whereto apace we strive.

Lengths down our road each fir-tree seems a hive, In swarms outrushing from the golden comb.

They waken waves of thoughts that burst to foam: The living throb in me, the dead revive.

Yon mantle clothes us: there, past mortal breath, Life glistens on the river of the death.

It folds us, flesh and dust; and have we knelt, Or never knelt, or eyed as kine the springs Of radiance, the radiance enrings: And this is the soul's haven to have felt.