Poems of George Meredith, vol 3 | Page 8

believes it stabler if the soft?Are whipped to show the face repentance wears.?Then hear it, in a moan of atheist gloom,?Deplore the weedy growth of hypocrites;?Count Nature devilish, and accept for doom?The chasm between our passions and our wits!
Affecting lunar whiteness, patent snows,?It trembles at betrayal of a sore.?Hers is the glacier-conscience, to expose?Impurities for clearness at the core.
She to her hungered thundering in breast,?YE SHALL NOT STARVE, not feebly designates?The world repressing as a life repressed,?Judged by the wasted martyrs it creates.?How Sin, amid the shades Cimmerian,?Repents, she points for sight: and she avers,?The hoofed half-angel in the Puritan?Nigh reads her when no brutish wrath deters.
Sin against immaturity, the sin?Of ravenous excess, what deed divides?Man from vitality; these bleed within;?Bleed in the crippled relic that abides.?Perpetually they bleed; a limb is lost,?A piece of life, the very spirit maimed.?But culprit who the law of man has crossed?With Nature's dubiously within is blamed;?Despite our cry at cutting of the whip,?Our shiver in the night when numbers frown,?We but bewail a broken fellowship,?A sting, an isolation, a fall'n crown.
Abject of sinners is that sensitive,?The flesh, amenable to stripes, miscalled?Incorrigible: such title do we give?To the poor shrinking stuff wherewith we are walled;?And, taking it for Nature, place in ban?Our Mother, as a Power wanton-willed,?The shame and baffler of the soul of man,?The recreant, reptilious. Do thou build?Thy mind on her foundations in earth's bed;?Behold man's mind the child of her keen rod,?For teaching how the wits and passions wed?To rear that temple of the credible God;?Sacred the letters of her laws, and plain,?Will shine, to guide thy feet and hold thee firm:?Then, as a pathway through a field of grain,?Man's laws appear the blind progressive worm,?That moves by touch, and thrust of linking rings?The which to endow with vision, lift from mud?To level of their nature's aims and springs,?Must those, the twain beside our vital flood,?Now on opposing banks, the twain at strife?(Whom the so rosy ferryman invites?To junction, and mid-channel over Life,?Unmasked to the ghostly, much asunder smites)?Instruct in deeper than Convenience,?In higher than the harvest of a year.?Only the rooted knowledge to high sense?Of heavenly can mount, and feel the spur?For fruitfullest advancement, eye a mark?Beyond the path with grain on either hand,?Help to the steering of our social Ark?Over the barbarous waters unto land.
For us the double conscience and its war,?The serving of two masters, false to both,?Until those twain, who spring the root and are?The knowledge in division, plight a troth?Of equal hands: nor longer circulate?A pious token for their current coin,?To growl at the exchange; they, mate and mate,?Fair feminine and masculine shall join?Upon an upper plane, still common mould,?Where stamped religion and reflective pace?A statelier measure, and the hoop of gold?Rounds to horizon for their soul's embrace.?Then shall those noblest of the earth and sun?Inmix unlike to waves on savage sea.?But not till Nature's laws and man's are one,?Can marriage of the man and woman be.
V
He passed her through the sermon's dull defile.?Down under billowy vapour-gorges heaved?The city and the vale and mountain-pile.?She felt strange push of shuttle-threads that weaved.
A new land in an old beneath her lay;?And forth to meet it did her spirit rush,?As bride who without shame has come to say,?Husband, in his dear face that caused her blush.
A natural woman's heart, not more than clad?By station and bright raiment, gathers heat?From nakedness in trusted hands: she had?The joy of those who feel the world's heart beat,?After long doubt of it as fire or ice;?Because one man had helped her to breathe free;?Surprised to faith in something of a price?Past the old charity in chivalry:-?Our first wild step to right the loaded scales?Displaying women shamefully outweighed.?The wisdom of humaneness best avails?For serving justice till that fraud is brayed.?Her buried body fed the life she drank.?And not another stripping of her wound!?The startled thought on black delirium sank,?While with her gentle surgeon she communed,?And woman's prospect of the yoke repelled.?Her buried body gave her flowers and food;?The peace, the homely skies, the springs that welled;?Love, the large love that folds the multitude.?Soul's chastity in honesty, and this?With beauty, made the dower to men refused.?And little do they know the prize they miss;?Which is their happy fortune! Thus he mused
For him, the cynic in the Sage had play?A hazy moment, by a breath dispersed;?To think, of all alive most wedded they,?Whom time disjoined! He needed her quick thirst?For renovated earth: on earth she gazed,?With humble aim to foot beside the wise.?Lo, where the eyelashes of night are raised?Yet lowly over morning's pure grey eyes.
'LOVE IS WINGED FOR TWO'
Love is winged for two,?In the worst he weathers,?When their hearts are tied;?But if they divide,?O too true!?Cracks a globe, and feathers, feathers,?Feathers all the ground bestrew.
I was breast of morning sea,?Rosy plume on forest dun,?I the