Poems. Volume 2. George Meredith

they to her attached

      Feel the trunk a spring of fire,

      And ascend to heights unmatched,

      Whence the tidal world is viewed

      As a sea of windy wheat,

      Momently black, barren, rude;

      Golden-brown, for harvest meet,

      Dragon-reaped from folly-sown;

      Bride-like to the sickle-blade:

      Quick it varies, while the moan,

      Moan of a sad creature strayed,

      Chiefly is its voice.  So flesh

      Conjures tempest-flails to thresh

      Good from worthless.  Some clear lamps

      Light it; more of dead marsh-damps.

      Monster is it still, and blind,

      Fit but to be led by Pain.

      Glance we at the paths behind,

      Fruitful sight has Westermain.

      There we laboured, and in turn

      Forward our blown lamps discern,

      As you see on the dark deep

      Far the loftier billows leap,

         Foam for beacon bear.

      Hither, hither, if you will,

      Drink instruction, or instil,

      Run the woods like vernal sap,

      Crying, hail to luminousness!

         But have care.

      In yourself may lurk the trap:

      On conditions they caress.

      Here you meet the light invoked

      Here is never secret cloaked.

      Doubt you with the monster’s fry

      All his orbit may exclude;

      Are you of the stiff, the dry,

      Cursing the not understood;

      Grasp you with the monster’s claws;

      Govern with his truncheon-saws;

      Hate, the shadow of a grain;

      You are lost in Westermain:

      Earthward swoops a vulture sun,

      Nighted upon carrion:

      Straightway venom wine-cups shout

      Toasts to One whose eyes are out:

      Flowers along the reeling floor

      Drip henbane and hellebore:

      Beauty, of her tresses shorn,

      Shrieks as nature’s maniac:

      Hideousness on hoof and horn

      Tumbles, yapping in her track:

      Haggard Wisdom, stately once,

      Leers fantastical and trips:

      Allegory drums the sconce,

      Impiousness nibblenips.

      Imp that dances, imp that flits,

      Imp o’ the demon-growing girl,

      Maddest! whirl with imp o’ the pits

      Round you, and with them you whirl

      Fast where pours the fountain-rout

      Out of Him whose eyes are out:

      Multitudes on multitudes,

      Drenched in wallowing devilry:

      And you ask where you may be,

         In what reek of a lair

      Given to bones and ogre-broods:

         And they yell you Where.

      Enter these enchanted woods,

         You who dare.

      A BALLAD OF PAST MERIDIAN

I

      Last night returning from my twilight walk

      I met the grey mist Death, whose eyeless brow

      Was bent on me, and from his hand of chalk

      He reached me flowers as from a withered bough:

      O Death, what bitter nosegays givest thou!

II

      Death said, I gather, and pursued his way.

      Another stood by me, a shape in stone,

      Sword-hacked and iron-stained, with breasts of clay,

      And metal veins that sometimes fiery shone:

      O Life, how naked and how hard when known!

III

      Life said, As thou hast carved me, such am I.

      Then memory, like the nightjar on the pine,

      And sightless hope, a woodlark in night sky,

      Joined notes of Death and Life till night’s decline

      Of Death, of Life, those inwound notes are mine.

      THE DAY OF THE DAUGHTER OF HADES

I

      He who has looked upon Earth

      Deeper than flower and fruit,

      Losing some hue of his mirth,

      As the tree striking rock at the root,

      Unto him shall the marvellous tale

      Of Callistes more humanly come

      With the touch on his breast than a hail

      From the markets that hum.

II

      Now the youth footed swift to the dawn.

      ’Twas the season when wintertide,

      In the higher rock-hollows updrawn,

      Leaves meadows to bud, and he spied,

      By light throwing shallow shade,

      Between the beam and the gloom,

      Sicilian Enna, whose Maid

      Such aspect wears in her bloom

      Underneath since the Charioteer

      Of Darkness whirled her away,

      On a reaped afternoon of the year,

      Nigh the poppy-droop of Day.

      O and naked of her, all dust,

      The majestic Mother and Nurse,

      Ringing cries to the God, the Just,

      Curled the land with the blight of her curse:

      Recollected of this glad isle

      Still quaking.  But now more fair,

      And momently fraying the while

      The veil of the shadows there,

      Soft Enna that prostrate grief

      Sang through, and revealed round the vines,

      Bronze-orange, the crisp young leaf,

      The wheat-blades tripping in lines,

      A hue unillumined by sun

      Of the flowers flooding grass as from founts:

      All the penetrable dun

         Of the morn ere she mounts.

III

      Nor had saffron and sapphire and red

      Waved aloft to their sisters below,

      When gaped by the rock-channel head

      Of the lake, black, a cave at one blow,

      Reverberant over the plain:

      A