Poems of George Meredith, vol 3 | Page 6

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 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.
III
So spake she her first utterance on the rack.?It softened torment, in the funeral hues?Round wan Romance at ebb, but drove her back?To listen to herself, herself accuse?Harshly as Love's imperial cause allowed.?She meant to grovel, and her lover praised?So high o'er the condemnatory crowd,?That she perforce a fellow phoenix blazed.
The picture was of hand fast joined to hand,?Both pushed from angry skies, their grasp more pledged?Under the threatened flash of a bright brand?At arm's length up, for severing action edged.?Why, then Love's Court of Honour contemplate;?And two drowned shorecasts, who, for the life esteemed?Above their lost, invoke an advocate?In Passion's purity, thereby redeemed.
Redeemed, uplifted, glimmering on a throne,?The woman stricken by an arrow falls.?His advocate she can be, not her own,?If, Traitress to thy sex! one sister calls.?Have we such scenes of drapery's mournfulness?On Beauty's revelations, witched we plant,?Over the fair shape humbled to confess,?An angel's buckler, with loud choiric chant.
IV
No knightly sword to serve, nor harp of bard,?The lady's hand in her physician's knew.?She had not hoped for them as her award,?When zig-zag on the tongue electric flew?Her charge of counter-motives, none impure:?But muteness whipped her skin. She could have said,?Her free confession was to work his cure,?Show proofs for why she could not love or wed.?Were they not shown? His muteness shook in thrall?Her body on the verge of that black pit?Sheer from the treacherous confessional,?Demanding further, while perusing it.
Slave is the open mouth beneath the closed.?She sank; she snatched at colours; they were peel?Of fruit past savour, in derision rosed.?For the dark downward then her soul did reel.?A press of hideous impulse urged to speak:?A novel dread of man enchained her dumb.?She felt the silence thicken, heard it shriek,?Heard Life subsiding on the eternal hum:?Welcome to women, when, between man's laws?And Nature's thirsts, they, soul from body torn,?Give suck at breast to a celestial cause,?Named by the mouth infernal, and forsworn.?Nathless her forehead twitched a sad content,?To think the cure so manifest, so frail?Her charm remaining. Was the curtain's rent?Too wide? he but a man of that herd male??She saw him as that herd of the forked head?Butting the woman harrowed on her knees,?Clothed only in life's last devouring red.?Confession at her fearful instant sees?Judicial Silence write the devil fact?In letters of the skeleton: at once,?Swayed on the supplication of her act,?The rabble reading, roaring to denounce,?She joins. No longer colouring, with skips?At tangles, picture that for eyes in tears?Might swim the sequence, she addressed her lips?To do the scaffold's office at his ears.
Into the bitter judgement of that herd?On women, she,