Poems by George Meredith Volume Iii Part 7

TO THE COMIC SPIRIT

Sword of Common Sense! - Our surest gift: the sacred chain Of man to man: firm earth for trust In structures vowed to permanence:- Thou guardian issue of the harvest brain!

Implacable perforce of just; With that good treasure in defence, Which is our gold crushed out of joy and pain Since first men planted foot and hand was king: Bright, nimble of the marrow-nerve To wield thy double edge, retort Or hold the deadlier reserve, And through thy victim's weapon sting: Thine is the service, thine the sport This shifty heart of ours to hunt Across its webs and round the many a ring Where fox it is, or snake, or mingled seeds Occasion heats to shape, or the poor smoke Struck from a puff-ball, or the troughster's grunt; - Once lion of our desert's trodden weeds; And but for thy straight finger at the yoke, Again to be the lordly paw, Naming his appet.i.tes his needs, Behind a decorative cloak: Thou, of the highest, the unwritten Law We read upon that building's architrave In the mind's firmament, by men upraised With sweat of blood when they had quitted cave For fellowship, and rearward looked amazed, Where the prime motive gapes a lurid jaw, Thou, soul of wakened heads, art armed to warn, Restrain, lest we backslide on whence we sprang, Scarce better than our dwarf beginning shoot, Of every gathered pearl and blossom shorn; Through thee, in novel wiles to win disguise, Seen are the pits of the disruptor, seen His rebel agitation at our root: Thou hast him out of hawking eyes; Nor ever morning of the clang Young Echo sped on hill from horn In forest blown when scent was keen Off earthy dews besprinkling blades Of covert gra.s.s more merrily rang The yelp of chase down alleys green, Forth of the headlong-pouring glades, Over the dappled fallows wild away, Than thy fine unaccented scorn At sight of man's old secret brute, Devout for pasture on his prey, Advancing, yawning to devour; With step of deer, with voice of flute, Haply with visage of the lily flower.

Let the c.o.c.k crow and ruddy morn His handmaiden appear! Youth claims his hour.

The generously ludicrous Espouses it. But see we sons of day, Off whom Life leans for guidance in our fight, Accept the throb for lord of us; For lord, for the main central light That gives direction, not the eclipse; Or dost thou look where n.i.g.g.ard Age, Demanding reverence for wrinkles, whips A tumbled top to grind a wolf's worn tooth; - h.o.a.r despot on our final stage, In dotage of a stunted Youth; - Or it may be some venerable sage, Not having thee awake in him, compact Of wisdom else, the breast's old tempter trips; Or see we ceremonial state, Robing the gilded beast, exact Abjection, while the crackskull name of Fate Is used to stamp and hallow printed fact; A cruel corner lengthens up thy lips; These are thy game wherever men engage: These and, majestic in a borrowed shape, The major and the minor potentate, Creative of their various ape; - The tiptoe mortals triumphing to write Upon a perishable page An inch above their fellows' height; - The criers of foregone wisdom, who impose Its slough on live conditions, much for the greed Of our first hungry figure wide agape; - Call up thy hounds of laughter to their run.

These, that would have men still of men be foes, Eternal fox to prowl and pike to feed; Would keep our life the whirly pool Of turbid stuff dishonouring History; The herd the drover's herd, the fool the fool, Ourself our slavish self's infernal sun: These are the children of the heart untaught By thy quick founts to beat abroad, by thee Untamed to tone its pa.s.sions under thought, The rich humaneness reading in thy fun.

Of them a world of coltish heels for school We have; a world with driving wrecks bestrewn.

'Tis written of the G.o.ds of human mould, Those Nectar G.o.ds, of glorious stature hewn To quicken hymns, that they did hear, incensed, Satiric comments overbold, From one whose part was by decree The jester's; but they boiled to feel him bite.

Better for them had they with Reason fenced Or smiled corrected! They in the great G.o.ds' might Their prober crushed, as fingers flea.

Crumbled Olympus when the sovereign sire His fatal kick to Momus gave, albeit Men could behold the sacred Mount aspire, The Satirist pa.s.s by on limping feet.

Those G.o.ds who saw the ejected laugh alight Below had then their last of airy glee; They in the cup sought Laughter's drowned sprite, Fed to dire fatness off uncurbed conceit.

Eyes under saw them waddle on their Mount, And drew them down; to flattest earth they rolled.

This know we veritable. O Sage of Mirth!

Can it be true, the story men recount Of the fall'n plight of the great G.o.ds on earth?

How they being deathless, though of human mould, With human cravings, undecaying frames, Must labour for subsistence; are a band Whom a loose-cheeked, wide-lipped gay cripple leads At haunts of holiday on summer sand: And lightly he will hint to one that heeds Names in pained designation of them, names Ensphered on blue skies and on black, which twirl Our hearing madly from our seeing dazed, Add Bacchus unto both; and he entreats (His baby dimples in maternal chaps Running wild labyrinths of line and curl) Compa.s.sion for his masterful Trombone, Whose thunder is the bra.s.s of how he blazed Of old: for him of the mountain-muscle feats, Who guts a drum to fetch a snappish groan: For his fierce bugler horning onset, whom A truncheon-battered helmet caps . . .

The creature is of earnest mien To plead a sorrow darker than the tomb.

His Harp and Triangle, in tone subdued, He names; they are a rayless red and white; The dawn-hued libertine, the gibbous prude.

And, if we recognize his Tambourine, He asks; exhausted names her: she has become A globe in cupolas; the blowziest queen Of overflowing dome on dome; Redundancy contending with the tight, Leaping the dam! He fondly calls, his girl, The buxom tripper with the goblet-smile, Refreshful. O but now his brows are dun, Bunched are his lips, as when distilling guile, To drop his venomous: the Dame of dames, Flower of the world, that honey one, She of the earthly rose in the sea-pearl, To whom the world ran ocean for her kiss; He names her, as a worshipper he names, And indicates with a contemptuous thumb.

The lady meanwhile lures the mob, alike Ogles the bursters of the horn and drum.

Curtain her close! her open arms Have suckers for beholders: she to this?

For that she could not, save in fury, hear A sharp corrective utterance flick Her idle manners, for the laugh to strike Beauty so breeding beauty, without peer Above the snows, among the flowers? She reaps This mouldy garner of the fatal kick?

Gross with the sacrifice of Circe-swarms, Astarte of vile sweets that slay, malign, From Greek resplendent to Phoenician foul, The trader in attractions sinks, all brine To thoughts of taste; is 't love?--bark, dog! hoot, owl!

And she is blushless: ancient worship weeps.

Suicide Graces dangle down the charms Sprawling like gourds on outer garden-heaps.

She stands in her unholy oily leer A statue losing feature, weather-sick Mid draggled creepers of twined ivy sere.

The curtain cried for magnifies to see! - We cannot quench our one corrupting glance: The vision of the rumour will not flee.

Doth the Boy own such Mother?--shoot his dart To bring her, countless as the crested deeps, Her subjects of the uncorrected heart?

False is that vision, shrieks the devotee; Incredible, we echo; and anew Like a far growling lightning-cloud it leaps.

Low humourist this leader seems; perchance Pitched from his University career, Adept at cla.s.sic fooling. Yet of mould Human those G.o.ds were: deathless too: On high they not as meditatives paced: Prodigiously they did the deeds of flesh: Descending, they would touch the lowest here: And she, that lighted form of blue and gold, Whom the seas gave, all earth, all earth embraced; Exulting in the great hauls of her mesh; Desired and hated, desperately dear; Most human of them was. No more pursue!

Enough that the black story can be told.

It preaches to the eminently placed: For whom disastrous wreckage is nigh due, Paints omen. Truly they our throbber had; The pa.s.sions plumping, pa.s.sions playing leech, Cunning to trick us for the day's good cheer.

Our uncorrected human heart will swell To notions monstrous, doings mad As billows on a foam-lashed beach; Borne on the tides of alternating heats, Will drug the brain, will doom the soul as well; Call the closed mouth of that harsh final Power To speak in judgement: Nemesis, the fell: Of those bright G.o.ds a.s.sembled, offspring sour; The last surviving on the upper seats; As with men Reason when their hearts rebel.

Ah, what a fruitless breeder is this heart, Full of the mingled seeds, each eating each.

Not wiser of our mark than at the start, It surges like the wrath-faced father Sea To countering winds; a force blind-eyed, On endless rounds of aimless reach; Emotion for the source of pride, The grounds of faith in fixity Above our flesh; its cravings urging speech, Inspiring prayer; by turns a lump Swung on a time-piece, and by turns A quivering energy to jump For seats angelical: it shrinks, it yearns, Loves, loathes; is flame or cinders; lastly cloud Capping a sullen crater: and mankind We see cloud-capped, an army of the dark, Because of thy straight leadership declined; At heels of this or that delusive spark: Now when the mult.i.tudinous races press Elbow to elbow hourly more, A thickened host; when now we hear aloud Life for the very life implore A signal of a visioned mark; Light of the mind, the mind's discourse, The rational in graciousness, Thee by acknowledgement enthroned, To tame and lead that blind-eyed force In harmony of harness with the crowd, For payment of their dues; as yet disowned, Save where some dutiful lone creature, vowed To holy work, deems it the heart's intent; Or where a silken circle views it cowled, The seeming figure of concordance, bent On satiating tyrant l.u.s.t Or barren fits of sentiment.

Thou wilt not have our paths befouled By simulation; are we vile to view, The heavens shall see us clean of our own dust, Beneath thy breezy flitting wing: They make their mirror upon faces true; And where they win reflection, lucid heave The under tides of this hot heart seen through.

Beneficently wilt thou clip All oversteppings of the plumed, The puffed, and bid the masker strip, And into the crowned windbag thrust, Tearing the mortal from the vital thing, A lightning o'er the half-illumed, Who to base brute-dominion cleave, Yet mark effects, and shun the flash, Till their drowsed wits a beam conceive, To spy a wound without a gash, The magic in a turn of wrist, And how are wedded heart and head regaled When Wit o'er Folly blows the mort, And their high note of union spreads Wide from the timely word with conquest charged; Victorious laughter, of no loud report, If heard; derision as divinely veiled As terrible Immortals in rose-mist, Given to the vision of arrested men: Whereat they feel within them weave Community its closer threads, And are to our fraternal state enlarged; Like warm fresh blood is their enlivened ken: They learn that thou art not of alien sort, Speaking the tongue by vipers hissed, Or of the frosty heights unsealed, Or of the vain who simple speech distort, Or of the vapours pointing on to nought Along cold skies; though sharp and high thy pitch; As when sole homeward the belated treads, And hears aloft a clamour wailed, That once had seemed the broomstick witch Horridly violating cloud for drought: He, from the rub of minds dispersing fears, Hears migrants marshalling their midnight train; Homeliest order in black sky appears, Not less than in the lighted village steads.

So do those half-illumed wax clear to share A cry that is our common voice; the note Of fellowship upon a loftier plane, Above embattled castle-wall and moat; And toning drops as from pure heaven it sheds.

So thou for washing a phantasmal air, For thy sweet singing keynote of the wise, Laughter--the joy of Reason seeing fade Obstruction into Earth's renewing beds, Beneath the stroke of her good servant's blade - Thenceforth art as their earth-star hailed; Gain of the years, conjunction's prize.

The greater heart in thy appeal to heads They see, thou Captain of our civil Fort!

By more elusive savages a.s.sailed On each ascending stage; untired Both inner foe and outer to cut short, And blow to chaff pretenders void of grist: Showing old tiger's claws, old crocodile's Yard-grin of eager grinders, slim to sight, Like forms in running water, oft when smiles, When pearly tears, when fluent lips delight: But never with the slayer's malice fired: As little as informs an infant's fist Clenched at the sneeze! Thou wouldst but have us be Good sons of mother soil, whereby to grow Branching on fairer skies, one stately tree; Broad of the tilth for flowering at the Court: Which is the tree bound fast to wave its tress; Of strength controlled sheer beauty to bestow.

Ambrosial heights of possible acquist, Where souls of men with soul of man consort, And all look higher to new loveliness Begotten of the look: thy mark is there; While on our temporal ground alive, Rightly though fearfully thou wieldest sword Of finer temper now a numbered learn That they resisting thee themselves resist; And not thy bigger joy to smite and drive, Prompt the dense herd to b.u.t.t, and set the snare Witching them into pitfalls for hoa.r.s.e shouts.

More now, and hourly more, and of the Lord Thou lead'st to, doth this rebel heart discern, When pinched ascetic and red sensualist Alternately recurrent freeze or burn, And of its old religions it has doubts.

It fears thee less when thou hast shown it bare; Less hates, part understands, nor much resents, When the prized objects it has raised for prayer, For fitful prayer;--repentance dreading fire, Impelled by aches; the blindness which repents Like the poor trampled worm that writhes in mire; - Are sounded by thee, and thou darest probe Old inst.i.tutions and establishments, Once fortresses against the floods of sin, For what their worth; and questioningly prod For why they stand upon a racing globe, Impeding blocks, less useful than the clod; Their angel out of them, a demon in.

This half-enlightened heart, still doomed to fret, To hurl at vanities, to drift in shame Of gain or loss, bewailing the sure rod, Shall of predestination wed thee yet.

Something it gathers of what things should drop At entrance on new times; of how thrice broad The world of minds communicative; how A straggling Nature cla.s.sed in school, and scored With stripes admonishing, may yield to plough Fruitfullest furrows, nor for waxing tame Be feeble on an Earth whose gentler crop Is its most living, in the mind that steers, By Reason led, her way of tree and flame, Beyond the genuflexions and the tears; Upon an Earth that cannot stop, Where upward is the visible aim, And ever we espy the greater G.o.d, For simple pointing at a good adored: Proof of the closer neighbourhood. Head on, Sword of the many, light of the few! untwist Or cut our tangles till fair s.p.a.ce is won Beyond a briared wood of austere brow, Believed of discord by thy timely word At intervals refreshing life: for thou Art verify Keeper of the Muse's Key; Thyself no vacant melodist; On lower land elective even as she; Holding, as she, all dissonance abhorred; Advising to her measured steps in flow; And teaching how for being subjected free Past thought of freedom we may come to know The music of the meaning of Accord.

YOUTH IN MEMORY

Days, when the ball of our vision Had eagles that flew unabashed to sun; When the grasp on the bow was decision, And arrow and hand and eye were one; When the Pleasures, like waves to a swimmer, Came heaving for rapture ahead! - Invoke them, they dwindle, they glimmer As lights over mounds of the dead.

Behold the winged Olympus, off the mead, With thunder of wide pinions, lightning speed, Wafting the shepherd-boy through ether clear, To bear the golden nectar-cup.

So flies desire at view of its delight, When the young heart is tiptoe perched on sight.

We meanwhile who in hues of the sick year The Spring-time paint to p.r.i.c.k us for our lost, Mount but the fatal half way up - Whereon shut eyes! This is decreed, For Age that would to youthful heavens ascend, By pa.s.sion for the arms' possession tossed, It falls the way of sighs and hath their end; A spark gone out to more sepulchral night.

Good if the arrowy eagle of the height Be then the little bird that hops to feed.

Lame falls the cry to kindle days Of radiant orb and daring gaze.

It does but clank our mortal chain.

For Earth reads through her felon old The many-numbered of her fold, Who forward tottering backward strain, And would be thieves of treasure spent, With their grey season soured.

She could write out their history in their thirst To have again the much devoured, And be the bud at burst; In honey fancy join the flow, Where Youth swims on as once they went, All choiric for spontaneous glee Of active eager lungs and thews; They now bared roots beside the river bent; Whose privilege themselves to see; Their place in yonder tideway know; The current gla.s.s peruse; The depths intently sound; And sapped by each returning flood Accept for monitory nourishment Those worn roped features under crust of mud, Reflected in the silvery smooth around: Not less the branching and high singing tree, A home of nests, a landmark and a tent, Until their hour for losing hold on ground.

Even such good harvest of the things that flee Earth offers her subjected, and they choose Rather of Bacchic Youth one beam to drink, And warm slow marrow with the sensual wink.

So block they at her source the Mother of the Muse.

Who cheerfully the little bird becomes, Without a fall, and pipes for peck at crumbs, May have her dolings to the lightest touch; As where some cripple muses by his crutch, Unwitting that the spirit in him sings: 'When I had legs, then had I wings, As good as any born of eggs, To feed on all aerial things, When I had legs!'

And if not to embrace he sighs, She gives him breath of Youth awhile, Perspective of a breezy mile, Companionable hedgeways, lifting skies; Scenes where his nested dreams upon their h.o.a.rd Brooded, or up to empyrean soared: Enough to link him with a dotted line.

But cravings for an eagle's flight, To top white peaks and serve wild wine Among the rosy undecayed, Bring only flash of shade From her full throbbing breast of day in night.

By what they crave are they betrayed: And cavernous is that young dragon's jaw, Crimson for all the fiery reptile saw In time now coveted, for teeth to flay, Once more consume, were Life recurrent May.

They to their moment of drawn breath, Which is the life that makes the death, The death that makes ethereal life would bind: The death that breeds the spectre do they find.

Darkness is wedded and the waste regrets Beating as dead leaves on a fitful gust, By souls no longer dowered to climb Beneath their pack of dust, Whom envy of a l.u.s.trous prime, Eclipsed while yet invoked, besets, And dooms to sink and water sable flowers, That never gladdened eye or loaded bee.

Strain we the arms for Memory's hours, We are the seized Persephone.

Responsive never to the soft desire For one prized tune is this our chord of life.

'Tis clipped to deadness with a wanton knife, In wishes that for ecstasies aspire.

Yet have we glad companionship of Youth, Elysian meadows for the mind, Dare we to face deeds done, and in our tomb Filled with the parti-coloured bloom Of loved and hated, grasp all human truth Sowed by us down the mazy paths behind.

To feel that heaven must we that h.e.l.l sound through: Whence comes a line of continuity, That brings our middle station into view, Between those poles; a novel Earth we see, In likeness of us, made of banned and blest; The sower's bed, but not the reaper's rest: An Earth alive with meanings, wherein meet Buried, and breathing, and to be.

Then of the junction of the three, Even as a heart in brain, full sweet May sense of soul, the sum of music, beat.

Only the soul can walk the dusty track Where hangs our flowering under vapours black, And bear to see how these pervade, obscure, Quench recollection of a s.p.a.cious pure.

They take phantasmal forms, divide, convolve, Hard at each other point and gape, Horrible ghosts! in agony dissolve, To reappear with one they drape For criminal, and, Father! shrieking name, Who such distorted issue did beget.

Accept them, them and him, though hiss thy sweat Off brow on breast, whose furnace flame Has eaten, and old Self consumes.

Out of the purification will they leap, Thee renovating while new light illumes The dusky web of evil, known as pain, That heavily up healthward mounts the steep; Our fleshly road to beacon-fire of brain: Midway the tameless oceanic brute Below, whose heave is topped with foam for fruit, And the fair heaven reflecting inner peace On righteous warfare, that asks not to cease.

Forth of such pa.s.sage through black fire we win Clear hearing of the simple lute, Whereon, and not on other, Memory plays For them who can in quietness receive Her restorative airs: a ditty thin As note of hedgerow bird in ear of eve, Or wave at ebb, the shallow catching rays On a transparent sheet, where curves a gla.s.s To truer heavens than when the breaker neighs Loud at the plunge for bubbly wreck in roar.

Solidity and bulk and martial bra.s.s, Once tyrants of the senses, faintly score A mark on pebbled sand or fluid slime, While present in the spirit, vital there, Are things that seemed the phantoms of their time; Eternal as the recurrent cloud, as air Imperative, refreshful as dawn-dew.

Some evanescent hand on vapour scrawled Historic of the soul, and heats anew Its coloured lines where deeds of flesh stand bald.

True of the man, and of mankind 'tis true, Did we stout battle with the Shade, Despair, Our cowardice, it blooms; or haply warred Against the primal beast in us, and flung; Or cleaving mists of Sorrow, left it starred Above self-pity slain: or it was Prayer First taken for Life's cleanser; or the tongue Spake for the world against this heart; or rings Old laughter, from the founts of wisdom sprung; Or clap of wing of joy, that was a throb From breast of Earth, and did no creature rob: These quickening live. But deepest at her springs, Most filial, is an eye to love her young.

And had we it, to see with it, alive Is our lost garden, flower, bird and hive.

Blood of her blood, aim of her aim, are then The green-robed and grey-crested sons of men: She tributary to her aged restores The living in the dead; she will inspire Faith homelier than on the Yonder sh.o.r.es, Abhorring these as mire, Uncertain steps, in dimness gropes, With mortal tremours p.r.i.c.king hopes, And, by the final Bacchic of the l.u.s.ts Propelled, the Bacchic of the spirit trusts: A fervour drunk from mystic hierophants; Not utterly misled, though blindly led, Led round fermenting eddies. Faith she plants In her own firmness as our midway road: Which rightly Youth has read, though blindly read; Her essence reading in her toothsome goad; Spur of bright dreams experience disenchants.

But love we well the young, her road midway The darknesses runs consecrated clay.