Poems. Volume 3. George Meredith

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 glassed.

      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 God of old time will act Satan of new,

      If we keep him not straight at the higher God 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 overgrassed 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 bestial 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.

      Precedents icily written on high

      Challenge the Tentatives hot to rebel.

      Our Mother, who speeds her bloomful quick

      For the march, reads which the impediment well.

      She smiles when of sapience is their boast.

      O loose of the tug between blood run dry

      And blood running flame may our offspring run!

      May brain democratic be king of the host!

      Less then shall the volumes of History tell

      Of the stop in progression, the slip in relapse,

      That counts us a sand-slack inch hard won

      Beneath an oppressive incumbent perhaps.

      Let the senile lords in a parchment sky,

      And the generous turbulents drunken of morn,

         Their battle of instincts put by,

         A moment examine this field:

      On a Roman street cast thoughtful eye,

      Along to the mounts from the bog-forest weald.

      It merits a glance at our history’s maps,

      To see across Britain’s old shaggy unshorn,

      Through the Parties in strife internecine, foot

      The ruler’s close-reckoned direct to the mark.

      From the head ran the vanquisher’s orderly route,

      In the stride of his forts through the tangle and dark.

      From the head runs the paved firm way for advance,

      And we shoulder, we wrangle!  The light on us shed

      Shows dense beetle blackness in swarm, lurid Chance,

      The Goddess of gamblers, above.  From the head,

      Then when it worked for the birth of a star

      Fraternal with heaven’s in beauty and ray,

      Sprang the Acropolis.  Ask what crown

      Comes of our tides of the blood at war,

      For men to bequeath generations down!

      And ask what thou wast when the Purse was brimmed:

      What high-bounding ball for the Gods at play:

      A Conservative youth! who the cream-bowl skimmed,

      Desiring affairs to be left as they are.

      So, thou takest Youth’s natural place in the fray,

         As a Tentative, combating Peace,

         Our lullaby word for decay.—

         There will come an immediate decree

      In thy mind for the opposite party’s decease,

         If he bends not an instant knee.

      Expunge