Poems of George Meredith, vol 2 | Page 5

are my masters: purely fed?By their sustainment I likewise shall scale?Some rocky steps between the mount and vale;?Meanwhile the mark I have and I will wed.?So that I draw the breath of finer air,?Station is nought, nor footways laurel-strewn,?Nor rivals tightly belted for the race.?Good speed to them! My place is here or there;?My pride is that among them I have place:?And thus I keep this instrument in tune.
GRACE AND LOVE
Two flower-enfolding crystal vases she?I love fills daily, mindful but of one:?And close behind pale morn she, like the sun?Priming our world with light, pours, sweet to see,?Clear water in the cup, and into me?The image of herself: and that being done,?Choice of what blooms round her fair garden run?In climbers or in creepers or the tree?She ranges with unerring fingers fine,?To harmony so vivid that through sight?I hear, I have her heavenliness to fold?Beyond the senses, where such love as mine,?Such grace as hers, should the strange Fates withhold?Their starry more from her and me, unite.
APPRECIATION
Earth was not Earth before her sons appeared,?Nor Beauty Beauty ere young Love was born:?And thou when I lay hidden wast as morn?At city-windows, touching eyelids bleared;?To none by her fresh wingedness endeared;?Unwelcome unto revellers outworn.?I the last echoes of Diana's horn?In woodland heard, and saw thee come, and cheered.?No longer wast thou then mere light, fair soul!?And more than simple duty moved thy feet.?New colours rose in thee, from fear, from shame,?From hope, effused: though not less pure a scroll?May men read on the heart I taught to beat:?That change in thee, if not thyself, I claim.
THE DISCIPLINE OF WISDOM
Rich labour is the struggle to be wise,?While we make sure the struggle cannot cease.?Else better were it in some bower of peace?Slothful to swing, contending with the flies.?You point at Wisdom fixed on lofty skies,?As mid barbarian hordes a sculptured Greece:?She falls. To live and shine, she grows her fleece,?Is shorn, and rubs with follies and with lies.?So following her, your hewing may attain?The right to speak unto the mute, and shun?That sly temptation of the illumined brain,?Deliveries oracular, self-spun.?Who sweats not with the flock will seek in vain?To shed the words which are ripe fruit of sun.
THE STATE OF AGE
Rub thou thy battered lamp: nor claim nor beg?Honours from aught about thee. Light the young.?Thy frame is as a dusty mantle hung,?O grey one! pendant on a loosened peg.?Thou art for this our life an ancient egg,?Or a tough bird: thou hast a rudderless tongue,?Turning dead trifles, like the cock of dung,?Which runs, Time's contrast to thy halting leg.?Nature, it is most sure, not thee admires.?But hast thou in thy season set her fires?To burn from Self to Spirit through the lash,?Honoured the sons of Earth shall hold thee high:?Yea, to spread light when thy proud letter I?Drops prone and void as any thoughtless dash.
PROGRESS
In Progress you have little faith, say you:?Men will maintain dear interests, wreak base hates,?By force, and gentle women choose their mates?Most amorously from the gilded fighting crew:?The human heart Bellona's mad halloo?Will ever fire to dicing with the Fates.?'Now at this time,' says History, 'those two States?Stood ready their past wrestling to renew.?They sharpened arms and showed them, like the brutes?Whose haunches quiver. But a yellow blight?Fell on their waxing harvests. They deferred?The bloody settlement of their disputes?Till God should bless them better.' They did right.?And naming Progress, both shall have the word.
THE WORLD'S ADVANCE
Judge mildly the tasked world; and disincline?To brand it, for it bears a heavy pack.?You have perchance observed the inebriate's track?At night when he has quitted the inn-sign:?He plays diversions on the homeward line,?Still that way bent albeit his legs are slack:?A hedge may take him, but he turns not back,?Nor turns this burdened world, of curving spine.?'Spiral,' the memorable Lady terms?Our mind's ascent: our world's advance presents?That figure on a flat; the way of worms.?Cherish the promise of its good intents,?And warn it, not one instinct to efface?Ere Reason ripens for the vacant place.
A CERTAIN PEOPLE
As Puritans they prominently wax,?And none more kindly gives and takes hard knocks.?Strong psalmic chanting, like to nasal cocks,?They join to thunderings of their hearty thwacks.?But naughtiness, with hoggery, not lacks?When Peace another door in them unlocks,?Where conscience shows the eyeing of an ox?Grown dully apprehensive of an Axe.?Graceless they are when gone to frivolousness,?Fearing the God they flout, the God they glut.?They need their pious exercises less?Than schooling in the Pleasures: fair belief?That these are devilish only to their thief,?Charged with an Axe nigh on the occiput.
THE GARDEN OF EPICURUS
That Garden of sedate Philosophy?Once flourished, fenced from passion and mishap,?A shining spot upon a shaggy map;?Where mind and body, in fair junction free,?Luted their joyful concord; like the tree?From root to flowering twigs a flowing sap.?Clear Wisdom found in tended Nature's lap?Of gentlemen the happy nursery.?That