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A Reading of Life, with Other Poems
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George Meredith
A Reading of Life, with Other Poems
A READING OF LIFE
THE VITAL CHOICE
IOr shall we run with ArtemisOr yield the breast to Aphrodite?Both are mighty;Both give bliss;Each can torture if divided;Each claims worship undivided,In her wake would have us wallow.IIYouth must offer on bent kneesHomage unto one or other;Earth, the mother,This decrees;And unto the pallid ScytherEither points us shun we eitherShun or too devoutly follow.WITH THE HUNTRESS
Through the water-eye of night,Midway between eve and dawn,See the chase, the rout, the flightIn deep forest; oread, faun,Goat-foot, antlers laid on neck;Ravenous all the line for speed.See yon wavy sparkle beckSign of the Virgin Lady’s lead.Down her course a serpent starCoils and shatters at her heels;Peals the horn exulting, pealsPlaintive, is it near or far.Huntress, arrowy to pursue,In and out of woody glen,Under cliffs that tear the blue,Over torrent, over fen,She and forest, where she skimsFeathery, darken and relume:Those are her white-lightning limbsCleaving loads of leafy gloom.Mountains hear her and call back,Shrewd with night: a frosty wailDistant: her the emerald valeFolds, and wonders in her track.Now her retinue is lean,Many rearward; streams the chaseEager forth of covert; seenOne hot tide the rapturous race.Quiver-charged and crescent-crowned,Up on a flash the lighted moundLeaps she, bow to shoulder, shaftStrung to barb with archer’s craft,Legs like plaited lyre-chords, feetSongs to see, past pitch of sweet.Fearful swiftness they outrun,Shaggy wildness, grey or dun,Challenge, charge of tusks elude:Theirs the dance to tame the rude;Beast, and beast in manhood tame,Follow we their silver flame.Pride of flesh from bondage free,Reaping vigour of its waste,Marks her servitors, and sheSanctifies the unembraced.Nought of perilous she reeks;Valour clothes her open breast;Sweet beyond the thrill of sex;Hallowed by the sex confessed.Huntress arrowy to pursue,Colder she than sunless dew,She, that breath of upper air;Ay, but never lyrist sang,Draught of Bacchus never sprangBlood the bliss of Gods to share,High o’er sweep of eagle wings,Like the run with her, when ringsClear her rally, and her dart,In the forest’s cavern heart,Tells of her victorious aim.Then is pause and chatter, cheer,Laughter at some satyr lame,Looks upon the fallen deer,Measuring his noble crest;Here a favourite in her train,Foremost mid her nymphs, caressed;All applauded. Shall she reignWorshipped? O to be with her there!She, that breath of nimble air,Lifts the breast to giant power.Maid and man, and man and maid,Who each other would devourElsewhere, by the chase betrayed,There are comrades, led by her,Maid-preserver, man-maker.WITH THE PERSUADER
Who murmurs, hither, hither: whoWhere nought is audible so fills the ear?Where nought is visible can make appearA veil with eyes that waver through,Like twilight’s pledge of blessed night to come,Or day most golden? All unseen and dumb,She breathes, she moves, inviting flees,Is lost, and leaves the thrilled desireTo clasp and strike a slackened lyre,Till over smiles of hyacinth seas,Flame in a crystal vessel sailsBeneath a dome of jewelled spray,For land that drops the rosy dayOn nights of throbbing nightingales.Landward did the wonder flit,Or heart’s desire of her, all earth in it.We saw the heavens fling down their rose;On rapturous waves we saw her glide;The pearly sea-shell half enclose;The shoal of sea-nymphs flush the tide;And we, afire to kiss her feet, no moreBehold than tracks along a startled shore,With brightened edges of dark leaves that feignAn ambush hoped, as heartless night remain.More closely, warmly: hither, hither! she,The very she called forth by ripened bloodFor its next breath of being, murmurs; she,Allurement; she, fulfilment; she,The stream within us urged to flood;Man’s cry, earth’s answer, heaven’s consent; O she,Maid, woman and divinity;Our over-earthly, inner-earthly mateUnmated; she, our hunger and our fruitUntasted; she our written fateUnread; Life’s flowering, Life’s root:Unread, divined; unseen, beheld;The evanescent, ever-present she,Great Nature’s stern necessityIn radiance clothed, to softness quelled;With a sword’s edge of sweetness keen to takeOur breath for bliss, our hearts for fulness break.The murmur hushes down, the veil is rent.Man’s cry, earth’s answer, heaven’s consent,Her form is given to pardoned sight,And lets our mortal eyes receiveThe sovereign loveliness of celestial white;Adored by them who solitarily pace,In dusk of the underworld’s perpetual eve,The paths among the meadow asphodel,Remembering. Never there her faceIs planetary; reddens to shore sea-shellAround such whiteness the enamoured airOf noon that clothes her, never there.Daughter of light, the joyful light,She stands unveiled to nuptial sight,Sweet in her disregard of aidDivine to conquer or persuade.A fountain jets from moss; a flowerBends gently where her sunset tresses shower.By guerdon of her brilliance may be seenWith eyelids unabashed the passion’s Queen.Shorn of attendant Graces she can useHer natural snares to make her will supreme.A simple nymph it is, inclined to museBefore the leader foot shall dip in stream:One arm at curve along a rounded thigh;Her firm new breasts each pointing its own wayA knee half bent to shade its fellow shy,Where innocence, not nature, signals nay.The bud of fresh virginity awaitsThe wooer, and all roseate will she burst:She touches on the hour of happy mates;Still is she unaware she wakens thirst.And while commanding blissful sight believeIt holds her as a body strained to breast,Down on the underworld’s perpetual eveShe plunges the possessor dispossessed;And bids believe that image, heaving warm,Is lost to float like torch-smoke after flame;The phantom any breeze blows out of form;A thirst’s delusion, a defeated aim.The rapture shed the torture weaves;The direst blow on human heart she deals:The pain to know the seen deceives;Nought true but what insufferably feels.And stabs of her delicious note,That is as heavenly light to hearing, heardThrough shelter leaves, the laughter from her throat,We answer as the midnight’s morning’s bird.She laughs, she wakens gleeful cries;In her delicious laughter part revealed;Yet mother is she more of moans and sighs,For longings unappeased and wounds unhealed.Yet would she bless, it is her task to bless:Yon folded couples, passing under shade,Are her rich harvest; bidden caress, caress,Consume the fruit in bloom; not disobeyed.We dolorous complainers had a dream,Wrought on the vacant air from inner fire,We saw stand bare of her celestial beamThe glorious Goddess, and we dared desire.Thereat are shown reproachful eyes, and lipsOf upward curl to meanings half obscure;And glancing where a wood-nymph lightly skipsShe nods: at once that creature wears her lure.Blush of our being between birth and death:Sob of our ripened blood for its next breath:Her wily semblance nought of her denies;Seems it the Goddess runs, the Goddess hies,The generous Goddess yields. And she can armHer dwarfed and twisted with her secret charm;Benevolent as Earth to feed her own.Fully shall they be fed, if they beseech.But scorn she has for them that walk alone;Blanched men, starved women, whom no arts can pleach.The men as chief of criminals she disdains,And holds the reason in perceptive thought.More pitiable, like rivers lacking rains,Kissing cold stones, the women shrink for drought.Those faceless discords, out of nature strayed,Rank of the putrefaction ere decayed,In impious singles bear the thorny wreaths:Their lives are where harmonious Pleasure breathesFor couples crowned with flowers that burn in dew.Comes there a tremor of night’s forest hornAcross her garden from the insaner crew,She darkens to malignity of scorn.A shiver courses through her garden-grounds:Grunt of the tusky boar, the baying hounds,The hunter’s shouts, are heard afar, and bringDead on her heart her crimsoned flower of Spring.These, the irreverent of Life’s design,Division between natural and divineWould cast; these vaunting barrenness for best,In veins of gathered strength Life’s tide arrest;And these because the roses flood their cheeks,Vow them in nature wise as when Love speaks.With them is war; and well the Goddess knowsWhat undermines the race who mount the rose;How the ripe moment, lodged in slumberous hours,Enkindled by persuasion overpowers:Why weak as are her frailer trailing weeds,The strong when Beauty gleams o’er Nature’s needs,And timely guile unguarded finds them lie.They who her sway withstand a sea defy,At every point of juncture must be proof;Nor look for mercy from the incessant surgeHer forces mixed of craft and passion urgeFor the one whelming wave to spring aloof.She, tenderness, is pitiless to themResisting in her godhead nature’s truth.No flower their face shall be, but writhen stem;Their youth a frost, their age the dirge for youth.These miserably disinclined,The lamentably unembraced,Insult the Pleasures Earth designedTo people and beflower the waste.Wherefore the Pleasures pass them by:For death they live, in life they die.Her head the Goddess from them turns,As from grey mounds of ashes in bronze urns.She views her quivering couples unconsoled,And of her beauty mirror they become,Like orchard blossoms, apple, pear and plum,Free of the cloud, beneath the flood of gold.Crowned with wreaths that burn in dew,Her couples whirl, sun-satiated,Athirst for shade, they sigh, they wed,They play the music made of two:Oldest of earth, earth’s youngest till earth’s end:Cunninger than the numbered strings,For melodies, for harmonies,For mastered discords, and the thingsNot vocable, whose mysteriesAre inmost Love’s, Life’s reach of Life extend.Is it an anguish overflowing shameAnd the tongue’s pudency confides to her,With eyes of embers, breath of incense myrrh,The woman’s marrow in some dear youth’s name,Then is the Goddess tendernessMaternal, and she has a sister’s tonesBenign to soothe intemperate distress,Divide despair from hope, and sighs from moans.Her gentleness imparts exhaling easeTo those of her milk-bearer votariesAs warm of bosom-earth as she; of the sourceDirect; erratic but in heart’s excess;Being mortal and ill-matched for Love’s great force;Like green leaves caught with flames by his impress.And pray they under skies less overcast,That swiftly may her star of eve descend,Her lustrous morning star fly not too fast,To lengthen blissful night will she befriend.Unfailing her reply to woman’s voiceIn supplication instant. Is it man’s,She hears, approves his words, her garden scans,And him: the flowers are various, he has choice.Perchance his wound is deep; she listens long;Enjoys what music fills the plaintive song;And marks how he, who would be hawk at poiseAbove the bird, his plaintive song enjoys.She reads him when his humbled manhood weepsTo her invoked: distraction is implored.A smile, and he is up on godlike leapsAbove, with his bright Goddess owned the adored.His tales of her declare she condescends;Can share his fires, not always goads and rends:Moreover, quits a throne, and must encloseA queenlier gem than woman’s wayside rose.She bends, he quickens; she breathes low, he springsEnraptured; low she laughs, his woes disperse;Aloud she laughs and sweeps his varied strings.’Tis taught him how for touch of mournful verseRarely the music made of two ascends,And Beauty’s Queen some other way is won.Or it may solve the riddle, that she lendsHerself to all, and yields herself to none,Save heavenliest: though claims by men are raisedIn hot assurance under shade of doubt:And numerous are the images bepraisedAs Beauty’s Queen, should passion head the rout.Be sure the ruddy hue is Love’s: to wooLove’s Fountain we must mount the ruddy hue.That is her garden’s precept, seen where shinesHer blood-flower, and its unsought neighbour pines.Daughter of light, the joyful light,She bids her couples face full East,Reflecting radiance, even when from her feastTheir outstretched arms brown deserts disunite,The lion-haunted thickets hold apart.In love the ruddy hue declares great heart;High confidence in her whose aid is lentTo lovers lifting the tuned instrument,Not one of rippled strings and funeral tone.And doth the man pursue a tightened zone,Then be it as the Laurel God he runs,Confirmed to win, with countenance the Sun’s.Should pity bless the tremulous voice of woeHe lifts for pity, limp his offspring show.For him requiring woman’s arts to pleaseInfantile tastes with babe reluctances,No race of giants! In the woman’s veinsPersuasion ripely runs, through hers the pains.Her choice of him, should kind occasion nod,Aspiring blends the Titan with the God;Yet unto dwarf and mortal, she, submissIn her high Lady’s mandate, yields the kiss;And is it needed that Love’s daintier bruteBe snared as hunter, she will tempt pursuit.She is great Nature’s ever intimateIn breast, and doth as ready handmaid wait,Until perverted by her senseless male,She plays the winding snake, the shrinking snail,The flying deer, all tricks of evil fame,Elusive to allure, since he grew tame.Hence has the Goddess, Nature’s earliest Power,And greatest and most present, with her dowerOf the transcendent beauty, gained reputeFor meditated guile. She laughs to hearA charge her garden’s labyrinths scarce confute,Her garden’s histories tell of to all near.Let it be said, But less upon her guileDoth she rely for her immortal smile.Still let the rumour spread, and terror screensTo push her conquests by the simplest means.While man abjures not lustihead, nor swervesFrom earth’s good labours, Beauty’s Queen he serves.Her spacious garden and her garden’s grantShe offers in reward for handsome cheer:Choice of the nymphs whose looks will slantThe secret down a dewy leerOf corner eyelids into haze:Many a fair AphrosyneLike flower-bell to honey-bee:And here they flicker round the mazeBewildering him in heart and head:And here they wear the close demure,With subtle peeps to reassure:Others parade where love has bled,And of its crimson weave their mesh:Others to snap of fingers leap,As bearing breast with love asleep.These are her laughters in the flesh.Or would she fit a warrior mood,She lights her seeming unsubdued,And indicates the fortress-key.Or is it heart for heart that craves,She flecks along a run of wavesThe one to promise deeper sea.Bands of her limpid primitives,Or patterned in the curious braid,Are the blest man’s; and whatsoever he gives,For what he gives is he repaid.Good is it if by him ’tis heldHe wins the fairest ever welledFrom Nature’s founts: she whispers it: Even INot fairer! and forbids him to deny,Else little is he lover. Those he clasps,Intent as tempest, worshipful as prayer,—And be they doves or be they asps,—Must seem to him the sovereignty fair;Else counts he soon among life’s wholly tamed.Him whom from utter savage she reclaimed,Half savage must he stay, would he be crownedThe lover. Else, past ripeness, deathward bound,He reasons; and the totterer Earth detests,Love shuns, grim logic screws in grasp, is he.Doth man divide divine NecessityFrom Joy, between the Queen of Beauty’s breastsA sword is driven; for those most glorious twainPresent her; armed to bless and to constrain.Of this he perishes; not she, the thronedOn rocks that spout their springs to the sacred mounts.A loftier Reason out of deeper fountsEarth’s chosen Goddess bears: by none disownedWhile red blood runs to swell the pulse, she boasts,And Beauty, like her star, descends the sky;Earth’s answer, heaven’s consent unto man’s cry,Uplifted by the innumerable hosts.Quickened of Nature’s eye and ear,When the wild sap at high tide smitesWithin us; or benignly clearTo vision; or as the iris lightsOn fluctuant waters; she is oursTill set of man: the dreamed, the seen;Flushing the world with odorous flowers:A soft compulsion on terreneBy heavenly: and the world is hersWhile hunger after Beauty spurs.So is it sung in any spaceShe fills, with laugh at shallow lawsForbidding love’s devised embrace,The music Beauty from it draws.THE TEST OF MANHOOD
Like a flood river whirled at rocky banks,An army issues out of wilderness,With battle plucking round its ragged flanks;Obstruction in the van; insane excessOft at the heart; yet hard the onward stressUnto more spacious, where move ordered ranks,And rise hushed temples built of shapely stone,The work of hands not pledged to grind or slay.They gave our earth a dress of flesh on bone;A tongue to speak with answering heaven gave they.Then was the gracious birth of man’s new day;Divided from the haunted night it shone.That quiet dawn was Reverence; whereof sprangEthereal Beauty in full morningtide.Another sun had risen to clasp his bride:It was another earth unto him sang.Came Reverence from the Huntress on her heights?From the Persuader came it, in those valesWhereunto she melodiously invites,Her troops of eager servitors regales?Not far those two great Powers of Nature speedDisciple steps on earth when sole they lead;Nor either points for us the way of flame.From him predestined mightier it came;His task to hold them both in breast, and yieldTheir dues to each, and of their war be field.The foes that in repulsion never ceased,Must he, who once has been the goodly beastOf one or other, at whose beck he ran,Constrain to make him serviceable man;Offending neither, nor the natural claimEach pressed, denying, for his true man’s name.Ah, what a sweat of anguish in that strifeTo hold them fast conjoined within him still;Submissive to his willAlong the road of life!And marvel not he wavered if at whilesThe forward step met frowns, the backward smiles.For Pleasure witched him her sweet cup to drain;Repentance offered ecstasy in pain.Delicious licence called it Nature’s cry;Ascetic rigours crushed the fleshly sigh;A tread on shingle timed his lame advanceFlung as the die of Bacchanalian Chance,He of the troubled marching army leanedOn godhead visible, on godhead screened;The radiant roseate, the curtained white;Yet sharp his battle strained through day, through night.He drank of fictions, till celestial aidMight seem accorded when he fawned and prayed;Sagely the generous Giver circumspect,To choose for grants the egregious, his elect;And ever that imagined succour slewThe soul of brotherhood whence Reverence drew.In fellowship religion has its founts:The solitary his own God reveres:Ascend no sacred MountsOur hungers or our fears.As only for the numbers Nature’s careIs shown, and she the personal nothing heeds,So to Divinity the spring of prayerFrom brotherhood the one way upward leads.Like the sustaining airAre both for flowers and weeds.But he who claims in spirit to be flower,Will find them both an air that doth devour.Whereby he smelt his treason, who imploredExternal gifts bestowed but on the sword;Beheld himself, with less and less disguise,Through those blood-cataracts which dimmed his eyes,His army’s foe, condemned to strive and fail;See a black adversary’s ghost prevail;Never, though triumphs hailed him, hope to winWhile still the conflict tore his breast within.Out of that agony, misread for thoseImprisoned Powers warring unappeased,The ghost of his black adversary rose,To smother light, shut heaven, show earth diseased.And long with him was wrestling ere emergedA mind to read in him the reflex shadeOf its fierce torment; this way, that way urged;By craven compromises hourly swayed.Crouched as a nestling, still its wings untried,The man’s mind opened under weight of cloud.To penetrate the dark was it endowed;Stood day before a vision shooting wide.Whereat the spectral enemy lost form;The traversed wilderness exposed its track.He felt the far advance in looking back;Thence trust in his foot forward through the storm.Under the low-browed tempest’s eye of ire,That ere it lightened smote a coward heart,Earth nerved her chastened son to hail athwartAll ventures perilous his shrouded Sire;A stranger still, religiously divined;Not yet with understanding read aright.But when the mind, the cherishable mind,The multitude’s grave shepherd, took full flight,Himself as mirror raised among his kind,He saw, and first of brotherhood had sight:Knew that his force to fly, his will to see,His heart enlarged beyond its ribbed domain,Had come of many a grip in mastery,Which held conjoined the hostile rival twain,And of his bosom made him lord, to keepThe starry roof of his unruffled frameAwake to earth, to heaven, and plumb the deepBelow, above, aye with a wistful aim.The mastering mind in him, by tempests blown,By traitor inmates baited, upward burned;Perforce of growth, the Master mind discerned,The Great Unseen, nowise the Dark Unknown.To whom unwittingly did he aspireIn wilderness, where bitter was his need:To whom in blindness, as an earthy seedFor light and air, he struck through crimson mire.But not ere he upheld a forehead lamp,And viewed an army, once the seeming doomed,All choral in its fruitful garden camp,The spiritual the palpable illumed.This gift of penetration and embrace,His prize from tidal battles lost or won,Reveals the scheme to animate his race:How that it is a warfare but begun;Unending; with no Power to interpose;No prayer, save for strength to keep his ground,Heard of the Highest; never battle’s close,The victory complete and victor crowned:Nor solace in defeat, save from that senseOf strength well spent, which is the strength renewed.In manhood must he find his competence;In his clear mind the spiritual food:God being there while he his fight maintains;Throughout his mind the Master Mind being there,While he rejects the suicide despair;Accepts the spur of explicable pains;Obedient to Nature, not her slave:Her lord, if to her rigid laws he bows;Her dust, if with his conscience he plays knave,And bids the Passions on the Pleasures browse:—Whence Evil in a world unread before;That mystery to simple springs resolved.His God the Known, diviner to adore,Shows Nature’s savage riddles kindly solved.Inconscient, insensitive, she reignsIn iron laws, though rapturous fair her face.Back to the primal brute shall he retraceHis path, doth he permit to force her chainsA soft Persuader coursing through his veins,An icy Huntress stringing to the chase:What one the flash disdains;What one so gives it grace.But is he rightly manful in her eyes,A splendid bloodless knight to gain the skies,A blood-hot son of Earth by all her signs,Desireing and desireable he shines;As peaches, that have caught the sun’s upriseAnd kissed warm gold till noonday, even as vines.Earth fills him with her juices, without fearThat she will cast him drunken down the steeps.All woman is she to this man most dear;He sows for bread, and she in spirit reaps:She conscient, she sensitive, in him;With him enwound, his brave ambition hers:By him humaner made; by his keen spursPricked to race past the pride in giant limb,Her crazy adoration of big thews,Proud in her primal sons, when crags they hurled,Were thunder spitting lightnings on the worldIn daily deeds, and she their evening Muse.This man, this hero, works not to destroy;This godlike—as the rock in ocean stands;—He of the myriad eyes, the myriad handsCreative; in his edifice has joy.How strength may serve for purity is shownWhen he himself can scourge to make it clean.Withal his pitch of pride would not disownA sober world that walks the balanced meanBetween its tempters, rarely overthrown:And such at times his army’s march has been.Near is he to great Nature in the thoughtEach changing Season intimately saith,That nought save apparition knows the death;To the God-lighted mind of man ’tis nought.She counts not loss a word of any weight;It may befal his passions and his greedsTo lose their treasures, like the vein that bleeds,But life gone breathless will she reinstate.Close on the heart of Earth his bosom beats,When he the mandate lodged in it obeys,Alive to breast a future wrapped in haze,Strike camp, and onward, like the wind’s cloud-fleets.Unresting she, unresting he, from changeTo change, as rain of cloud, as fruit of rain;She feels her blood-tree throbbing in her grain,Yet skyward branched, with loftier mark and range.No miracle the sprout of wheat from clod,She knows, nor growth of man in grisly brute;But he, the flower at head and soil at root,Is miracle, guides he the brute to God.And that way seems he bound; that way the road,With his dark-lantern mind, unled, alone,Wearifully through forest-tracts unsown,He travels, urged by some internal goad.Dares he behold the thing he is, what thingHe would become is in his mind its child;Astir, demanding birth to light and wing;For battle prompt, by pleasure unbeguiled.So moves he forth in faith, if he has madeHis mind God’s temple, dedicate to truth.Earth’s nourishing delights, no more gainsaid,He tastes, as doth the bridegroom rich in youth.Then knows he Love, that beckons and controls;The star of sky upon his footway cast;Then match in him who holds his tempters fast,The body’s love and mind’s, whereof the soul’s.Then Earth her man for woman finds at last,To speed the pair unto her goal of goals.Or is’t the widowed’s dream of her new mate?Seen has she virulent days of heat in flood;The sly Persuader snaky in his blood;With her the barren Huntress alternate;His rough refractory off on kicking heelsTo rear; the man dragged rearward, shamed, amazed;And as a torrent stream where cattle grazed,His tumbled world. What, then, the faith she feels?May not his aspect, like her own so fairReflexively, the central force belie,And he, the once wild ocean storming sky,Be rebel at the core? What hope is there?’Tis that in each recovery he preserves,Between his upper and his nether wit,Sense of his march ahead, more brightly lit;He less the shaken thing of lusts and nerves;With such a grasp upon his brute as tellsOf wisdom from that vile relapsing spun.A Sun goes down in wasted fire, a SunResplendent springs, to faith refreshed compels.
