Poems by George Meredith Volume Iii Part 5

Thy stature puffed and it swayed, It stiffened to royal-erect; A bra.s.sy trumpet brayed; A whirling seized thy head; The vision of beauty was flecked.

Note well the how and the when, The thing that prompted and sped.

Thereanon the keen pa.s.sions clapped wing, Fixed eye, and the world was prey.

No simple world of thy greenblade Spring, Nor world of thy flowerful prime On the topmost Orient peak Above a yet vaporous day.

Flesh was it, breast to beak: A four-walled windowless world without ray, Only darkening jets on a river of slime, Where harsh over music as woodland jay, A voice chants, Woe to the weak!

And along an insatiate feast, Women and men are one In the cup transforming to beast.

Magian worship they paid to their sun, Lord of the Purse! Behold him climb.

Stalked ever such figure of fun For monarch in great-grin pantomime?

See now the heart dwindle, the frame distend; The soul to its anchorite cavern retreat, From a life that reeks of the rotted end; While he--is he pictureable? replete, Gourd-like swells of the rank of the soil, Hollow, more hollow at core.

And for him did the hundreds toil Despised; in the cold and heat, This image ridiculous bore On their shoulders for morsels of meat!

Gross, with the fumes of incense full, With parasites tickled, with slaves begirt, He strutted, a c.o.c.k, he bellowed, a bull, He rolled him, a dog, in dirt.

And dog, bull, cook, was he, fanged, horned, plumed; Original man, as philosophers vouch; Carnivorous, cannibal; length-long exhumed, Frightfully living and armed to devour; The primitive weapons of prey in his pouch; The bait, the line and the hook: To feed on his fellows intent.

G.o.d of the Danae shower, He had but to follow his bent.

He battened on fowl not safely hutched, On sheep astray from the crook; A lure for the foolish in fold: To carrion turning what flesh he touched.

And O the grace of his air, As he at the goblet sips, A centre of girdles loosed, With their grisly label, Sold!

Credulous hears the fidelity swear, Which has roving eyes over yielded lips: To-morrow will fancy himself the seduced, The stuck in a treacherous slough, Because of his faith in a purchased pair, False to a vinous vow.

In his glory of banquet strip him bare, And what is the creature we view?

Our pursy Apollo Apollyon's tool; A small one, still of the crew By serpent Apollyon blest: His plea in apology, blindfold Fool.

A fool surcharged, propelled, unwarned; Not viler, you hear him protest: Of a popular countenance not incorrect.

But deeds are the picture in essence, deeds Paint him the hooved and homed, Despite the poor pother he pleads, And his look of a nation's elect.

We have him, our quarry confessed!

And scan him: the features inspect Of that b.e.s.t.i.a.l multiform: cry, Corroborate I, O Samian Sage!

The book of thy wisdom, proved On me, its last hieroglyph page, Alive in the horned and hooved?

Thou! will he make reply.

Thus has the plenary purse Done often: to do will engage Anew upon all of thy like, or worse.

And now is thy deepest regret To be man, clean rescued from beast: From the grip of the Sorcerer, Gold, Celestially released.

But now from his cavernous hold, Free may thy soul be set, As a child of the Death and the Life, to learn, Refreshed by some bodily sweat, The meaning of either in turn, What issue may come of the two:- A morn beyond mornings, beyond all reach Of emotional arms at the stretch to enfold: A firmament pa.s.sing our visible blue.

To those having nought to reflect it, 'tis nought; To those who are misty, 'tis mist on the beach From the billow withdrawing; to those who see Earth, our mother, in thought, Her spirit it is, our key.

Ay, the Life and the Death are her words to us here, Of one significance, p.r.i.c.king the blind.

This is thy gain now the surface is clear: To read with a soul in the mirror of mind Is man's chief lesson.--Thou smilest! I preach!

Acid smiling, my friend, reveals Abysses within; frigid preaching a street Paved unconcernedly smooth For the lecturer straight on his heels, Up and down a policeman's beat; Bearing tonics not labelled to soothe.

Thou hast a disgust of the sermon in rhyme.

It is not attractive in being too chaste.

The popular tale of adventure and crime Would equally sicken an overdone taste.

So, then, onward. Philosophy, thoughtless to soothe, Lifts, if thou wilt, or there leaves thee supine.

Thy condition, good sooth, has no seeming of sweet; It walks our first crags, it is flint for the tooth, For the thirsts of our nature brine.

But manful has met it, manful will meet.

And think of thy privilege: supple with youth, To have sight of the headlong swine, Once fouling thee, jumping the dips!

As the coin of thy purse poured out: An animal's holiday past: And free of them thou, to begin a new bout; To start a fresh hunt on a resolute blast: No more an imp-ridden to bournes of eclipse: Having knowledge to spur thee, a gift to compare; Rubbing shoulder to shoulder, as only the book Of the world can be read, by necessity urged.

For witness, what blinkers are they who look From the state of the prince or the millionnaire!

They see but the fish they attract, The hungers on them converged; And never the thought in the sh.e.l.l of the act, Nor ever life's fangless mirth.

But first, that the poisonous of thee be purged, Go into thyself, strike Earth.

She is there, she is felt in a blow struck hard.

Thou findest a pugilist countering quick, Cunning at drives where thy shutters are barred; Not, after the studied professional trick, Blue-sealing; she brightens the sight. Strike Earth, Antaeus, young giant, whom fortune trips!

And thou com'st on a saving fact, To nourish thy planted worth.

Be it clay, flint, mud, or the rubble of chips, Thy roots have grasp in the stern-exact: The redemption of sinners deluded! the last Dry handful, that bruises and saves.

To the common big heart are we bound right fast, When our Mother admonishing nips At the nakedness bare of a clout, And we crave what the commonest craves.

This wealth was a fortress-wall, Under which grew our grim little beast-G.o.d stout; Self-worshipped, the foe, in division from all; With crowds of illogical Christians, no doubt; Till the rescuing earthquake cracked.

Thus are we man made firm; Made warm by the numbers compact.

We follow no longer a trumpet-snout, At a trot where the hog is tracked, Nor wriggle the way of the worm.

Thou wilt spare us the cynical pout At humanity: sign of a nature bechurled.

No stenchy anathemas cast Upon Providence, women, the world.

Distinguish thy tempers and trim thy wits.

The purchased are things of the mart, not cla.s.sed Among resonant types that have freely grown.

Thy knowledge of women might be surpa.s.sed: As any sad dog's of sweet flesh when he quits The wayside wandering bone!

No revilings of comrades as ingrates: thee The tempter, misleader, and criminal (screened By laws yet barbarous) own.

If some one performed Fiend's deputy, He was for awhile the Fiend.

Still, nursing a pa.s.sion to speak, As the punch-bowl does, in the moral vein, When the ladle has finished its leak, And the vessel is loquent of nature's inane, Hie where the demagogues roar Like a Phalaris bull, with the victim's force: Hurrah to their jolly attack On a City that smokes of the Plain; A city of sin's death-dyes, Holding revel of worms in a corse; A city of malady sore, Over-ripe for the big doom's crack: A city of hymnical snore; Connubial truths and lies Demanding an instant divorce, Clean as the bright from the black.

It were well for thy system to sermonize.

There are giants to slay, and they call for their Jack.

Then up stand thou in the midst: Thy good grain out of thee thresh, Hand upon heart: relate What things thou legally didst For the Archseducer of flesh.

Omitting the murmurs of women and fate, Confess thee an instrument armed To be snare of our wanton, our weak, Of all by the sensual charmed.

For once shall repentance be done by the tongue: Speak, though execrate, speak A word on grandmotherly Laws Giving rivers of gold to our young, In the days of their hungers impure; To furnish them beak and claws, And make them a banquet's lure.

Thou the example, saved Miraculously by this poor skin!

Thereat let the Purse be waved: The snake-slough sick of the snaky sin: A devil, if devil as devil behaved Ever, thou knowest, look thou but in, Where he shivers, a culprit fettered and shaved; O a bird stripped of feather, a fish clipped of fin!

And commend for a washing the torrents of wrath, Which hurl at the foe of the dearest men prize Rough-rolling boulders and froth.

Gigantical enginery they can command, For the crushing of enemies not of great size: But hold to thy desperate stand.

Men's right of bequeathing their all to their own (With little regard for the creatures they squeezed); Their mill and mill-water and nether mill-stone Tied fast to their infant; lo, this is the last Of their hungers, by prudent devices appeased.

The law they decree is their ultimate slave; Wherein we perceive old Voracity gla.s.sed.

It works from their dust, and it reeks of their grave.

Point them to greener, though Journals be guns; To brotherly fields under fatherly skies; Where the savage still primitive learns of a debt He has owed since he drummed on his belly for war; And how for his giving, the more will he get; For trusting his fellows, leave friends round his sons: Till they see, with the gape of a startled surprise, Their adored tyrant-monster a brute to abhor, The sun of their system a father of flies!

So, for such good hope, take their scourge unashamed; 'Tis the portion of them who civilize, Who speak the word novel and true: How the brutish antique of our springs may be tamed, Without loss of the strength that should push us to flower; How the G.o.d of old time will act Satan of new, If we keep him not straight at the higher G.o.d aimed; For whose habitation within us we scour This house of our life; where our bitterest pains Are those to eject the Infernal, who heaps Mire on the soul. Take stripes or chains; Grip at thy standard reviled.

And what if our body be dashed from the steeps?

Our spoken in protest remains.

A young generation reaps.

The young generation! ah, there is the child Of our souls down the Ages! to bleed for it, proof That souls we have, with our senses filed, Our shuttles at thread of the woof.

May it be braver than ours, To encounter the rattle of hostile bolts, To look on the rising of Stranger Powers.

May it know how the mind in expansion revolts From a nursery Past with dead letters aloof, And the piping to stupor of Precedents shun, In a field where the forefather print of the hoof Is not yet overgra.s.sed by the watering hours, And should prompt us to Change, as to promise of sun, Till brain-rule splendidly towers.

For that large light we have laboured and tramped Thorough forests and bogland, still to perceive Our animate morning stamped With the lines of a sombre eve.

A timorous thing ran the innocent hind, When the wolf was the hypocrite fang under hood, The snake a lithe lurker up sleeve, And the lion effulgently ramped.

Then our forefather hoof did its work in the wood, By right of the better in kind.

But now will it breed yon b.e.s.t.i.a.l brood Three-fold thrice over, if bent to bind, As the healthy in chains with the sick, Unto despot usage our issuing mind.

It signifies battle or death's dull knell.