Poems by George Meredith Volume Iii Part 2

We need much patience, well she knew, And out and out, and through and through, When we would gentlefolk address, However we may seek to bless: At times they hide them like the beasts From sacred beams; and mostly priests.

x.x.x

He gave no sign of making bare, Nor she of faintness or despair.

Inflamed with hope that she might win, If she but coaxed him to begin, She used all arts for making fain; The mother with her babe was Jane.

x.x.xI

Now stamped the Squire, and knowing not Her business, waved her from the spot.

Encircled by the men of might, The head of Jane, like flickering light, As in a charger, they beheld Ere she was from the park expelled.

x.x.xII

Her grief, in jumps of earthly weight, Did Jane around communicate: For that the moment when began The holy but mistaken man, In view of light, to take his lift, They cut him from her charm adrift!

x.x.xIII

And he was lost: a banished face For ever from the ways of grace, Unless pinched hard by dreams in fright.

They saw the Bishop's wavering sprite Within her look, at come and go, Long after he had caused her woe.

x.x.xIV

Her greying eyes (until she sank At Fredsham on the wayside bank, Like cinder heaps that whitened lie From coals that shot the flame to sky) Had gla.s.sy vacancies, which yearned For one in memory discerned.

x.x.xV

May those who ply the tongue that cheats, And those who rush to beer and meats, And those whose mean ambition aims At palaces and t.i.tled names, Depart in such a cheerful strain As did our Jump-to-glory Jane!

x.x.xVI

Her end was beautiful: one sigh.

She jumped a foot when it was nigh.

A lily in a linen clout She looked when they had laid her out.

It is a lily-light she bears For England up the ladder-stairs.

THE RIDDLE FOR MEN

I

This Riddle rede or die, Says History since our Flood, To warn her sons of power:- It can be truth, it can be lie; Be parasite to twist awry; The drouthy vampire for your blood; The fountain of the silver flower; A brand, a lure, a web, a crest; Supple of wax or tempered steel; The spur to honour, snake in nest: 'Tis as you will with it to deal; To wear upon the breast, Or trample under heel.

II

And rede you not aright, Says Nature, still in red Shall History's tale be writ!

For solely thus you lead to light The trailing chapters she must write, And pa.s.s my fiery test of dead Or living through the furnace-pit: Dislinked from who the softer hold In grip of brute, and brute remain: Of whom the woeful tale is told, How for one short Sultanic reign, Their bodies lapse to mould, Their souls behowl the plain.

THE SAGE ENAMOURED AND THE HONEST LADY

I

One fairest of the ripe unwedded left Her shadow on the Sage's path; he found, By common signs, that she had done a theft.

He could have made the sovereign heights resound With questions of the wherefore of her state: He on far other but an hour before Intent. And was it man, or was it mate, That she disdained? or was there haply more?

About her mouth a placid humour slipped The dimple, as you see smooth lakes at eve Spread melting rings where late a swallow dipped.

The surface was attentive to receive, The secret underneath enfolded fast.

She had the step of the unconquered, brave, Not arrogant; and if the vessel's mast Waved liberty, no challenge did it wave.

Her eyes were the sweet world desired of souls, With something of a wavering line unspelt.

They hold the look whose tenderness condoles For what the sister in the look has dealt Of fatal beyond healing; and her tones A woman's honeyed amorous outvied, As when in a dropped viol the wood-throb moans Among the sobbing strings, that plain and chide Like infants for themselves, less deep to thrill Than those rich mother-notes for them breathed round.

Those voices are not magic of the will To strike love's wound, but of love's wound give sound, Conveying it; the yearnings, pains and dreams.

They waft to the moist tropics after storm, When out of pa.s.sion spent thick incense steams, And jewel-belted clouds the wreck transform.

Was never hand on brush or lyre to paint Her gracious manners, where the nuptial ring Of melody clasped motion in restraint: The reed-blade with the breeze thereof may sing.

With such endowments armed was she and decked To make her spoken thoughts eclipse her kind; Surpa.s.sing many a giant intellect, The marvel of that cradled infant mind.

It clenched the tiny fist, it curled the toe; Cherubic laughed, enticed, dispensed, absorbed; And promised in fair feminine to grow A Sage's match and mate, more heavenly orbed.

II

Across his path the spouseless Lady cast Her shadow, and the man that thing became.

His youth uprising called his age the Past.

This was the strong grey head of laurelled name, And in his bosom an inverted Sage Mistook for light of morn the light which sank.

But who while veins run blood shall know the page Succeeding ere we turn upon our blank?

Comes Beauty with her tale of moon and cloud, Her silvered rims of mystery pointing in To hollows of the half-veiled unavowed, Where beats her secret life, grey heads will spin Quick as the young, and spell those hieroglyphs Of phosph.o.r.escent dusk, devoutly bent; They drink a cup to whirl on dizzier cliffs For their shamed fall, which asks, why was she sent!

Why, and of whom, and whence; and tell they truth, The legends of her mission to beguile?

Hard likeness to the toilful apes of youth He bore at times, and tempted the sly smile; And not on her soft lips was it descried.

She stepped her way benevolently grave: Nor sign that Beauty fed her worm of pride, By tossing victim to the courtier knave, Let peep, nor of the naughty pride gave sign.

Rather 'twas humbleness in being pursued, As pilgrim to the temple of a shrine.

Had he not wits to pierce the mask he wooed?

All wisdom's armoury this man could wield; And if the cynic in the Sage it pleased Traverse her woman's curtain and poor s.h.i.+eld, For new example of a world diseased; Showing her shrineless, not a temple, bare; A curtain ripped to tatters by the blast; Yet she most surely to this man stood fair: He wors.h.i.+pped like the young enthusiast, Named simpleton or poet. Did he read Right through, and with the voice she held reserved Amid her vacant ruins jointly plead?

Compa.s.sion for the man thus n.o.ble nerved The pity for herself she felt in him, To wreak a deed of sacrifice, and save; At least, be worthy. That our soul may swim, We sink our heart down bubbling under wave.

It bubbles till it drops among the wrecks.

But, ah! confession of a woman's breast: She eminent, she honoured of her s.e.x!

Truth speaks, and takes the spots of the confessed, To veil them. None of women, save their vile, Plays traitor to an army in the field.

The cries most vindicating most defile.

How shall a cause to Nature be appealed, When, under pressure of their common foe, Her sisters shun the Mother and disown, On pain of his intolerable crow Above the fiction, built for him, o'erthrown?

Irrational he is, irrational Must they be, though not Reason's light shall wane In them with ever Nature at close call, Behind the fiction torturing to sustain; Who hear her in the milk, and sometimes make A tongueless answer, s.h.i.+vered on a sigh: Whereat men dread their lofty structure's quake Once more, and in their hosts for tocsin ply The crazy roar of peril, leonine For injured majesty. That sigh of dames Is rare and soon suppressed. Not they combine To shake the structure sheltering them, which tames Their l.u.s.tier if not wilder: fixed are they, In elegancy scarce denoting ease; And do they breathe, it is not to betray The martyr in the caryatides.

Yet here and there along the graceful row Is one who fetches breath from deeps, who deems, Moved by a desperate craving, their old foe May yield a trustier friend than woman seems, And aid to bear the sculptured floral weight Ma.s.sed upon heads not utterly of stone: May stamp endurance by expounding fate.

She turned to him, and, This you seek is gone; Look in, she said, as pants the furnace, brief, Frost-white. She gave his hearing sight to view The silent chamber of a brown curled leaf: Thing that had throbbed ere shot black lightning through.

No further sign of heart could he discern: The picture of her speech was winter sky; A headless figure folding a cleft urn, Where tears once at the overflow were dry.