Poems by George Meredith Volume Iii Part 10

My daisy better knows her G.o.d of beams Than doth an eagle that to mount him seems.

She hath the secret never fieriest reach Of wing shall master till men hear her teach.

- Liker the clod flaked by the driving plough, My semblance when I have you not as now.

The quiet creatures who escape mishap Bear likeness to pure growths of the green sap: A picture of the settled peace desired By cowards shunning strife or strivers tired.

I listen at their b.r.e.a.s.t.s: is there no jar Of wrestlings and of stranglings, dead they are, And such a picture as the piercing mind Ranks beneath vegetation. Not resigned Are my true pupils while the world is brute.

What edict of the stronger keeps me mute, Stronger impels the motion of my heart.

I am not Resignation's counterpart.

If that I teach, 'tis little the dry word, Content, but how to savour hope deferred.

We come of earth, and rich of earth may be; Soon carrion if very earth are we!

The coursing veins, the constant breath, the use Of sleep, declare that strife allows short truce; Unless we clasp decay, accept defeat, And pa.s.s despised; 'a-cold for lack of heat,'

Like other corpses, but without death's plea.

- My sister calls for battle; is it she?

- Rather a world of pressing men in arms, Than stagnant, where the sensual piper charms Each drowsy malady and coiling vice With dreams of ease whereof the soul pays price!

No home is here for peace while evil breeds, While error governs, none; and must the seeds You sow, you that for long have reaped disdain, Lie barren at the doorway of the brain, Let stout contention drive deep furrows, blood Moisten, and make new channels of its flood!

- My sober little maid, when we meet first, Drinks of me ever with an eager thirst.

So can I not of her till circ.u.mstance Drugs cravings. Here we see how men advance A doubtful foot, but circle if much stirred, Like dead weeds on whipped waters. Shout the word Prompting their hungers, and they grandly march, As to band-music under Victory's arch.

Thus was it, and thus is it; save that then The beauty of frank animals had men.

- Observe them, and down rearward for a term, Gaze to the primal twistings of the worm.

Thence look this way, across the fields that show Men's early form of speech for Yes and No.

My sister a bruised infant's utterance had; And issuing stronger, to mankind 'twas mad.

I knew my home where I had choice to feel The toad beneath a harrow or a heel.

- Speak of this Age.

- When you it shall discern Bright as you are, to me the Age will turn.

- For neither of us has it any care; Its learning is through Science to despair.

- Despair lies down and grovels, grapples not With evil, casts the burden of its lot.

This Age climbs earth.

-To challenge heaven.

- Not less The lower deeps. It laughs at Happiness!

That know I, though the echoes of it wail, For one step upward on the crags you scale.

Brave is the Age wherein the word will rust, Which means our soul asleep or body's l.u.s.t, Until from warmth of many b.r.e.a.s.t.s, that beat A temperate common music, sunlike heat The happiness not predatory sheds!

- But your fierce Yes and No of b.u.t.ting heads Now rages to outdo a h.o.r.n.y Past.

Shades of a wild Destroyer on the vast Are thrown by every novel light upraised.

The world's whole round smokes ominously, amazed And trembling as its pregnant Aetna swells.

Combustibles on hot combustibles Run piling, for one spark to roll in fire The mountain-torrent of infernal ire And leave the track of devils where men built.

Perceptive of a doom, the sinner's guilt Confesses in a cry for help shrill loud, If drops the chillness of a pa.s.sing cloud, To conscience, reason, human love; in vain: None save they but the souls which them contain.

No extramural G.o.d, the G.o.d within Alone gives aid to city charged with sin.

A world that for the spur of fool and knave Sweats in its laboratory what shall save?

But men who ply their wits in such a school Must pray the mercy of the knave and fool.

- Much have I studied hard Necessity!

To know her Wisdom's mother, and that we May deem the harshness of her later cries In labour a sure goad to p.r.i.c.k the wise, If men among the warnings which convulse Can gravely dread without the craven's pulse.

Long ere the rising of this age of ours, The knave and fool were stamped as monstrous Powers.

Of human l.u.s.ts and la.s.situdes they spring, And are as lasting as the parent thing.

Yet numbering locust hosts, bent they to drill, They might o'ermatch and have mankind at will.

Behold such army gathering; ours the spur, No scattered foe to face, but Lucifer.

Not fool or knave is now the enemy O'ershadowing men, 'tis Folly, Knavery!

A sea; nor stays that sea the bastioned beach.

Now must the brother soul alive in each His traitorous individual devildom Hold subject lest the grand destruction come.

Dimly men see it menacing apace To overthrow, perchance uproot, the race.

Within, without, they are a field of tares: Fruitfuller for them when the contest squares, And wherefore warrior service they must yield, s.h.i.+nes visible as life on either field.

That is my comfort, following shock on shock, Which sets faith quaking on their firmest rock.

Since with his weapons, all the arms of Night, Frail men have challenged Lucifer to fight, Have matched in hostile ranks, enrolled, erect, The human and Satanic intellect, Determined for their uses to control What forces on the earth and under roll, Their granite rock runs igneous; now they stand Pledged to the heavens for safety of their land.

They cannot learn save grossly, gross that are: Through fear they learn whose aid is good in war.

- My sister, as I read them in my gla.s.s, Their field of tares they take for pasture gra.s.s.

How waken them that have not any bent Save browsing--the concrete indifferent!

Friend Lucifer supplies them solid stuff: They fear not for the race when full the trough.

They have much fear of giving up the ghost; And these are of mankind the unnumbered host.

- If I could see with you, and did not faint In beating wing, the future I would paint.

Those ma.s.sed indifferents will learn to quake: Now meanwhile is another ma.s.s awake, Once denser than the grunters of the sty.

If I could see with you! Could I but fly!

- The length of days that you with them have housed, An outcast else, approves their cause espoused.

- O true, they have a cause, and woe for us, While still they have a cause too piteous!

Yet, happy for us when, their cause defined, They walk no longer with a stumbler blind, And quicken in the virtue of their cause, To think me a poor mouther of old saws!

I wait the issue of a battling Age; The toilers with your 'troughsters' now engage; Instructing them, through their acutest sense, How close the dangers of indifference!

Already have my people shown their worth, More love they light, which folds the love of Earth.

That love to love of labour leads: thence love Of humankind--earth's incense flung above.

- Admit some other features: Faithless, mean; Encased in matter; vowed to G.o.ds obscene; Contemptuous of the impalpable, it swells On Doubt; for pastime swallows miracles; And if I bid it face what I observe, Declares me hoodwinked by my optic nerve!

- Oft has your prophet, for reward of toil, Seen nests of seeming c.o.c.katrices coil: Disowned them as the unholiest of Time, Which were his offspring, born of flame on slime.

Nor him, their sire, have known the filial fry: As little as Time's earliest knew the sky.

Perchance among them shoots a l.u.s.trous flame At intervals, in proof of whom they came.

To strengthen our foundations is the task Of this tough Age; not in your beams to bask, Though, lighted by your beams, down mining caves The rock it blasts, the h.o.a.rded foulness braves.

My sister sees no round beyond her mood; To hawk this Age has dressed her head in hood.

Out of the course of ancient ruts and grooves, It moves: O much for me to say it moves!

About his AEthiop Highlands Nile is Nile, Though not the stream of the paternal smile: And where his tide of nourishment he drives, An Abyssinian wantonness revives.

Calm as his lotus-leaf to-day he swims; He is the yellow crops, the rounded limbs, The Past yet flowing, the fair time that fills; Breath of all mouths and grist of many mills.

To-morrow, warning none with tempest-showers, He is the vast Insensate who devours His golden promise over leagues of seed, Then sits in a smooth lake upon the deed.

The races which on barbarous force begin Inherit onward of their origin, And cancelled blessings will the current length Reveal till they know need of shaping strength.

'Tis not in men to recognize the need Before they clash in hosts, in hosts they bleed.

Then may sharp suffering their nature grind; Of rabble pa.s.sions grow the chieftain Mind.

Yet mark where still broad Nile boasts thousands fed, For tens up the safe mountains at his head.