Poems. Volume 3. George Meredith

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      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 passion 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;

      Surpassing 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 phosphorescent 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 shield,

      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 worshipped 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?

      Compassion for the man thus noble 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 sex!

      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, shivered 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 lustier 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

      Massed upon heads not utterly of stone:

      May stamp endurance by expounding fate.

      She