Читать книгу A Reading of Life, with Other Poems - George Meredith - Страница 3

Who murmurs, hither, hither: who

Where nought is audible so fills the ear?

Where nought is visible can make appear

A 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 desire

To clasp and strike a slackened lyre,

Till over smiles of hyacinth seas,

Flame in a crystal vessel sails

Beneath a dome of jewelled spray,

For land that drops the rosy day

On 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 more

Behold than tracks along a startled shore,

With brightened edges of dark leaves that feign

An ambush hoped, as heartless night remain.

More closely, warmly: hither, hither! she,

The very she called forth by ripened blood

For 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 mate

Unmated; she, our hunger and our fruit

Untasted; she our written fate

Unread; Life’s flowering, Life’s root:

Unread, divined; unseen, beheld;

The evanescent, ever-present she,

Great Nature’s stern necessity

In radiance clothed, to softness quelled;

With a sword’s edge of sweetness keen to take

Our 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 receive

The 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 face

Is planetary; reddens to shore sea-shell

Around such whiteness the enamoured air

Of noon that clothes her, never there.

Daughter of light, the joyful light,

She stands unveiled to nuptial sight,

Sweet in her disregard of aid

Divine to conquer or persuade.

A fountain jets from moss; a flower

Bends gently where her sunset tresses shower.

By guerdon of her brilliance may be seen

With eyelids unabashed the passion’s Queen.

Shorn of attendant Graces she can use

Her natural snares to make her will supreme.

A simple nymph it is, inclined to muse

Before the leader foot shall dip in stream:

One arm at curve along a rounded thigh;

Her firm new breasts each pointing its own way

A knee half bent to shade its fellow shy,

Where innocence, not nature, signals nay.

The bud of fresh virginity awaits

The 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 believe

It holds her as a body strained to breast,

Down on the underworld’s perpetual eve

She 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, heard

Through 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 beam

The glorious Goddess, and we dared desire.

Thereat are shown reproachful eyes, and lips

Of upward curl to meanings half obscure;

And glancing where a wood-nymph lightly skips

She 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 arm

Her 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 breathes

For couples crowned with flowers that burn in dew.

Comes there a tremor of night’s forest horn

Across 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 bring

Dead on her heart her crimsoned flower of Spring.

These, the irreverent of Life’s design,

Division between natural and divine

Would 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 knows

What 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 surge

Her forces mixed of craft and passion urge

For the one whelming wave to spring aloof.

She, tenderness, is pitiless to them

Resisting 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 designed

To 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 things

Not vocable, whose mysteries

Are inmost Love’s, Life’s reach of Life extend.

Is it an anguish overflowing shame

And 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 tenderness

Maternal, and she has a sister’s tones

Benign to soothe intemperate distress,

Divide despair from hope, and sighs from moans.

Her gentleness imparts exhaling ease

To those of her milk-bearer votaries

As warm of bosom-earth as she; of the source

Direct; 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 voice

In 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 poise

Above the bird, his plaintive song enjoys.

She reads him when his humbled manhood weeps

To her invoked: distraction is implored.

A smile, and he is up on godlike leaps

Above, 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 enclose

A queenlier gem than woman’s wayside rose.

She bends, he quickens; she breathes low, he springs

Enraptured; low she laughs, his woes disperse;

Aloud she laughs and sweeps his varied strings.

’Tis taught him how for touch of mournful verse

Rarely the music made of two ascends,

And Beauty’s Queen some other way is won.

Or it may solve the riddle, that she lends

Herself to all, and yields herself to none,

Save heavenliest: though claims by men are raised

In hot assurance under shade of doubt:

And numerous are the images bepraised

As Beauty’s Queen, should passion head the rout.

Be sure the ruddy hue is Love’s: to woo

Love’s Fountain we must mount the ruddy hue.

That is her garden’s precept, seen where shines

Her 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 feast

Their 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 lent

To 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 woe

He lifts for pity, limp his offspring show.

For him requiring woman’s arts to please

Infantile tastes with babe reluctances,

No race of giants!  In the woman’s veins

Persuasion 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, submiss

In her high Lady’s mandate, yields the kiss;

And is it needed that Love’s daintier brute

Be snared as hunter, she will tempt pursuit.

She is great Nature’s ever intimate

In 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 dower

Of the transcendent beauty, gained repute

For meditated guile.  She laughs to hear

A charge her garden’s labyrinths scarce confute,

Her garden’s histories tell of to all near.

Let it be said, But less upon her guile

Doth she rely for her immortal smile.

Still let the rumour spread, and terror screens

To push her conquests by the simplest means.

While man abjures not lustihead, nor swerves

From earth’s good labours, Beauty’s Queen he serves.

Her spacious garden and her garden’s grant

She offers in reward for handsome cheer:

Choice of the nymphs whose looks will slant

The secret down a dewy leer

Of corner eyelids into haze:

Many a fair Aphrosyne

Like flower-bell to honey-bee:

And here they flicker round the maze

Bewildering 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 waves

The 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 held

He wins the fairest ever welled

From Nature’s founts: she whispers it: Even I

Not 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 crowned

The 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 Necessity

From Joy, between the Queen of Beauty’s breasts

A sword is driven; for those most glorious twain

Present her; armed to bless and to constrain.

Of this he perishes; not she, the throned

On rocks that spout their springs to the sacred mounts.

A loftier Reason out of deeper founts

Earth’s chosen Goddess bears: by none disowned

While 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 smites

Within us; or benignly clear

To vision; or as the iris lights

On fluctuant waters; she is ours

Till set of man: the dreamed, the seen;

Flushing the world with odorous flowers:

A soft compulsion on terrene

By heavenly: and the world is hers

While hunger after Beauty spurs.

So is it sung in any space

She fills, with laugh at shallow laws

Forbidding love’s devised embrace,

The music Beauty from it draws.