Poems of George Meredith, vol 3 | Page 6

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 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