Poems. Volume 2. George Meredith

      In Progress you have little faith, say you:

      Men will maintain dear interests, wreak base hates,

      By force, and gentle women choose their mates

      Most amorously from the gilded fighting crew:

      The human heart Bellona’s mad halloo

      Will ever fire to dicing with the Fates.

      ‘Now at this time,’ says History, ‘those two States

      Stood ready their past wrestling to renew.

      They sharpened arms and showed them, like the brutes

      Whose haunches quiver.  But a yellow blight

      Fell on their waxing harvests.  They deferred

      The bloody settlement of their disputes

      Till God should bless them better.’  They did right.

      And naming Progress, both shall have the word.

      Judge mildly the tasked world; and disincline

      To brand it, for it bears a heavy pack.

      You have perchance observed the inebriate’s track

      At night when he has quitted the inn-sign:

      He plays diversions on the homeward line,

      Still that way bent albeit his legs are slack:

      A hedge may take him, but he turns not back,

      Nor turns this burdened world, of curving spine.

      ‘Spiral,’ the memorable Lady terms

      Our mind’s ascent: our world’s advance presents

      That figure on a flat; the way of worms.

      Cherish the promise of its good intents,

      And warn it, not one instinct to efface

      Ere Reason ripens for the vacant place.

      As Puritans they prominently wax,

      And none more kindly gives and takes hard knocks.

      Strong psalmic chanting, like to nasal cocks,

      They join to thunderings of their hearty thwacks.

      But naughtiness, with hoggery, not lacks

      When Peace another door in them unlocks,

      Where conscience shows the eyeing of an ox

      Grown dully apprehensive of an Axe.

      Graceless they are when gone to frivolousness,

      Fearing the God they flout, the God they glut.

      They need their pious exercises less

      Than schooling in the Pleasures: fair belief

      That these are devilish only to their thief,

      Charged with an Axe nigh on the occiput.

      That Garden of sedate Philosophy

      Once flourished, fenced from passion and mishap,

      A shining spot upon a shaggy map;

      Where mind and body, in fair junction free,

      Luted their joyful concord; like the tree

      From root to flowering twigs a flowing sap.

      Clear Wisdom found in tended Nature’s lap

      Of gentlemen the happy nursery.

      That Garden would on light supremest verge,

      Were the long drawing of an equal breath

      Healthful for Wisdom’s head, her heart, her aims.

      Our world which for its Babels wants a scourge,

      And for its wilds a husbandman, acclaims

      The crucifix that came of Nazareth.

      An inspiration caught from dubious hues

      Filled him, and mystic wrynesses he chased;

      For they lead farther than the single-faced,

      Wave subtler promise when desire pursues.

      The moon of cloud discoloured was his Muse,

      His pipe the reed of the old moaning waste.

      Love was to him with anguish fast enlaced,

      And Beauty where she walked blood-shot the dews.

      Men railed at such a singer; women thrilled

      Responsively: he sang not Nature’s own

      Divinest, but his lyric had a tone,

      As ’twere a forest-echo of her voice:

      What barrenly they yearn for seemed distilled

      From what they dread, who do through tears rejoice.

      Her son, albeit the Muse’s livery

      And measured courtly paces rouse his taunts,

      Naked and hairy in his savage haunts,

      To Nature only will he bend the knee;

      Spouting the founts of her distillery

      Like rough rock-sources; and his woes and wants

      Being Nature’s, civil limitation daunts

      His utterance never; the nymphs blush, not he.

      Him, when he blows of Earth, and Man, and Fate,

      The Muse will hearken to with graver ear

      Than many of her train can waken: him

      Would fain have taught what fruitful things and dear

      Must sink beneath the tidewaves, of their weight,

      If in no vessel built for sea they swim.

      Unhappy poets of a sunken prime!

      You to reviewers are as ball to bat.

      They shadow you with Homer, knock you flat

      With Shakespeare: bludgeons brainingly sublime

      On you the excommunicates of Rhyme,

      Because you sing not in the living Fat.

      The wiry whizz of an intrusive gnat

      Is verse that shuns their self-producing time.

      Sound them their clocks, with loud alarum trump,

      Or watches ticking temporal at their fobs,

      You win their pleased attention.  But, bright God

      O’ the lyre, what bully-drawlers they applaud!

      Rather for us a tavern-catch, and bump

      Chorus where Lumpkin with his Giles hobnobs.

      What say you, critic, now you have become

      An author and maternal?—in this trap

      (To quote you) of poor hollow folk who rap

      On instruments as like as drum to drum.

      You snarled tut-tut for welcome to tum-tum,

      So like the nose fly-teased in its noon’s nap.

      You scratched an insect-slaughtering thunder-clap

      With