Poems. Volume 3. George Meredith

      Sword of Common Sense!—

      Our surest gift: the sacred chain

      Of man to man: firm earth for trust

      In structures vowed to permanence:—

      Thou guardian issue of the harvest brain!

      Implacable perforce of just;

      With that good treasure in defence,

      Which is our gold crushed out of joy and pain

      Since first men planted foot and hand was king:

      Bright, nimble of the marrow-nerve

      To wield thy double edge, retort

      Or hold the deadlier reserve,

      And through thy victim’s weapon sting:

      Thine is the service, thine the sport

      This shifty heart of ours to hunt

      Across its webs and round the many a ring

      Where fox it is, or snake, or mingled seeds

      Occasion heats to shape, or the poor smoke

      Struck from a puff-ball, or the troughster’s grunt;—

      Once lion of our desert’s trodden weeds;

      And but for thy straight finger at the yoke,

      Again to be the lordly paw,

      Naming his appetites his needs,

      Behind a decorative cloak:

      Thou, of the highest, the unwritten Law

      We read upon that building’s architrave

      In the mind’s firmament, by men upraised

      With sweat of blood when they had quitted cave

      For fellowship, and rearward looked amazed,

      Where the prime motive gapes a lurid jaw,

      Thou, soul of wakened heads, art armed to warn,

      Restrain, lest we backslide on whence we sprang,

      Scarce better than our dwarf beginning shoot,

      Of every gathered pearl and blossom shorn;

      Through thee, in novel wiles to win disguise,

      Seen are the pits of the disruptor, seen

      His rebel agitation at our root:

      Thou hast him out of hawking eyes;

      Nor ever morning of the clang

      Young Echo sped on hill from horn

      In forest blown when scent was keen

      Off earthy dews besprinkling blades

      Of covert grass more merrily rang

      The yelp of chase down alleys green,

      Forth of the headlong-pouring glades,

      Over the dappled fallows wild away,

      Than thy fine unaccented scorn

      At sight of man’s old secret brute,

      Devout for pasture on his prey,

      Advancing, yawning to devour;

      With step of deer, with voice of flute,

      Haply with visage of the lily flower.

      Let the cock crow and ruddy morn

      His handmaiden appear!  Youth claims his hour.

      The generously ludicrous

      Espouses it.  But see we sons of day,

      Off whom Life leans for guidance in our fight,

      Accept the throb for lord of us;

      For lord, for the main central light

      That gives direction, not the eclipse;

      Or dost thou look where niggard Age,

      Demanding reverence for wrinkles, whips

      A tumbled top to grind a wolf’s worn tooth;—

      Hoar despot on our final stage,

      In dotage of a stunted Youth;—

      Or it may be some venerable sage,

      Not having thee awake in him, compact

      Of wisdom else, the breast’s old tempter trips;

      Or see we ceremonial state,

      Robing the gilded beast, exact

      Abjection, while the crackskull name of Fate

      Is used to stamp and hallow printed fact;

      A cruel corner lengthens up thy lips;

      These are thy game wherever men engage:

      These and, majestic in a borrowed shape,

      The major and the minor potentate,

      Creative of their various ape;—

      The tiptoe mortals triumphing to write

      Upon a perishable page

      An inch above their fellows’ height;—

      The criers of foregone wisdom, who impose

      Its slough on live conditions, much for the greed

      Of our first hungry figure wide agape;—

      Call up thy hounds of laughter to their run.

      These, that would have men still of men be foes,

      Eternal fox to prowl and pike to feed;

      Would keep our life the whirly pool

      Of turbid stuff dishonouring History;

      The herd the drover’s herd, the fool the fool,

      Ourself our slavish self’s infernal sun:

      These are the children of the heart untaught

      By thy quick founts to beat abroad, by thee

      Untamed to tone its passions under thought,

      The rich humaneness reading in thy fun.

      Of them a world of coltish heels for school

      We have; a world with driving wrecks bestrewn.

      ’Tis written of the Gods of human mould,

      Those Nectar Gods, of glorious stature hewn

      To quicken hymns, that they did hear, incensed,

      Satiric comments overbold,

      From one whose part was by decree

      The jester’s; but they boiled to feel him bite.

      Better for them had they with Reason fenced

      Or smiled corrected!  They in the great Gods’ might

      Their