Poems of George Meredith, vol 3 | Page 8

some sacrificial smoke
They
passed, and were the dearer for their dead.
He learnt how much we gain who make no claims.
A nightcap on his
flicker of grey fire
Was thought of her sharp shudder in the flames,

Confessing; and its conjured image dire,
Of love, the torrent on the
valley dashed;
The whirlwind swathing tremulous peaks; young force,

Visioned to hold corrected and abashed
Our senile emulous; which
rolls its course

Proud to the shattering end; with these few last
Hot
quintessential drops of bryony juice,
Squeezed out in anguish: all of
that once vast!
And still, though having skin for man's abuse,

Though no more glorying in the beauteous wreath
Shot skyward from
a blood at passionate jet,
Repenting but in words, that stand as teeth

Between the vivid lips; a vassal set;
And numb, of formal value.

Are we true
In nature, never natural thing repents;
Albeit receiving
punishment for due,
Among the group of this world's penitents;

Albeit remorsefully regretting, oft
Cravenly, while the scourge no
shudder spares.
Our world 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