Читать книгу Poems. Volume 3 - George Meredith - Страница 12

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 prober crushed, as fingers flea.

Crumbled Olympus when the sovereign sire

His fatal kick to Momus gave, albeit

Men could behold the sacred Mount aspire,

The Satirist pass by on limping feet.

Those Gods who saw the ejected laugh alight

Below had then their last of airy glee;

They in the cup sought Laughter’s drownèd sprite,

Fed to dire fatness off uncurbed conceit.

Eyes under saw them waddle on their Mount,

And drew them down; to flattest earth they rolled.

This know we veritable.  O Sage of Mirth!

Can it be true, the story men recount

Of the fall’n plight of the great Gods on earth?

How they being deathless, though of human mould,

With human cravings, undecaying frames,

Must labour for subsistence; are a band

Whom a loose-cheeked, wide-lipped gay cripple leads

At haunts of holiday on summer sand:

And lightly he will hint to one that heeds

Names in pained designation of them, names

Ensphered on blue skies and on black, which twirl

Our hearing madly from our seeing dazed,

Add Bacchus unto both; and he entreats

(His baby dimples in maternal chaps

Running wild labyrinths of line and curl)

Compassion for his masterful Trombone,

Whose thunder is the brass of how he blazed

Of old: for him of the mountain-muscle feats,

Who guts a drum to fetch a snappish groan:

For his fierce bugler horning onset, whom

A truncheon-battered helmet caps . . .

The creature is of earnest mien

To plead a sorrow darker than the tomb.

His Harp and Triangle, in tone subdued,

He names; they are a rayless red and white;

The dawn-hued libertine, the gibbous prude.

And, if we recognize his Tambourine,

He asks; exhausted names her: she has become

A globe in cupolas; the blowziest queen

Of overflowing dome on dome;

Redundancy contending with the tight,

Leaping the dam!  He fondly calls, his girl,

The buxom tripper with the goblet-smile,

Refreshful.  O but now his brows are dun,

Bunched are his lips, as when distilling guile,

To drop his venomous: the Dame of dames,

Flower of the world, that honey one,

She of the earthly rose in the sea-pearl,

To whom the world ran ocean for her kiss;

He names her, as a worshipper he names,

And indicates with a contemptuous thumb.

The lady meanwhile lures the mob, alike

Ogles the bursters of the horn and drum.

Curtain her close! her open arms

Have suckers for beholders: she to this?

For that she could not, save in fury, hear

A sharp corrective utterance flick

Her idle manners, for the laugh to strike

Beauty so breeding beauty, without peer

Above the snows, among the flowers?  She reaps

This mouldy garner of the fatal kick?

Gross with the sacrifice of Circe-swarms,

Astarte of vile sweets that slay, malign,

From Greek resplendent to Phoenician foul,

The trader in attractions sinks, all brine

To thoughts of taste; is ’t love?—bark, dog! hoot, owl!

And she is blushless: ancient worship weeps.

Suicide Graces dangle down the charms

Sprawling like gourds on outer garden-heaps.

She stands in her unholy oily leer

A statue losing feature, weather-sick

Mid draggled creepers of twined ivy sere.

The curtain cried for magnifies to see!—

We cannot quench our one corrupting glance:

The vision of the rumour will not flee.

Doth the Boy own such Mother?—shoot his dart

To bring her, countless as the crested deeps,

Her subjects of the uncorrected heart?

False is that vision, shrieks the devotee;

Incredible, we echo; and anew

Like a far growling lightning-cloud it leaps.

Low humourist this leader seems; perchance

Pitched from his University career,

Adept at classic fooling.  Yet of mould

Human those Gods were: deathless too:

On high they not as meditatives paced:

Prodigiously they did the deeds of flesh:

Descending, they would touch the lowest here:

And she, that lighted form of blue and gold,

Whom the seas gave, all earth, all earth embraced;

Exulting in the great hauls of her mesh;

Desired and hated, desperately dear;

Most human of them was.  No more pursue!

Enough that the black story can be told.

It preaches to the eminently placed:

For whom disastrous wreckage is nigh due,

Paints omen.  Truly they our throbber had;

The passions plumping, passions playing leech,

Cunning to trick us for the day’s good cheer.

Our uncorrected human heart will swell

To notions monstrous, doings mad

As billows on a foam-lashed beach;

Borne on the tides of alternating heats,

Will drug the brain, will doom the soul as well;

Call the closed mouth of that harsh final Power

To speak in judgement: Nemesis, the fell:

Of those bright Gods assembled, offspring sour;

The last surviving on the upper seats;

As with men Reason when their hearts rebel.

Ah, what a fruitless breeder is this heart,

Full of the mingled seeds, each eating each.

Not wiser of our mark than at the start,

It surges like the wrath-faced father Sea

To countering winds; a force blind-eyed,

On endless rounds of aimless reach;

Emotion for the source of pride,

The grounds of faith in fixity

Above our flesh; its cravings urging speech,

Inspiring prayer; by turns a lump

Swung on a time-piece, and by turns

A quivering energy to jump

For seats angelical: it shrinks, it yearns,

Loves, loathes; is flame or cinders; lastly cloud

Capping a sullen crater: and mankind

We see cloud-capped, an army of the dark,

Because of thy straight leadership declined;

At heels of this or that delusive spark:

Now when the multitudinous races press

Elbow to elbow hourly more,

A thickened host; when now we hear aloud

Life for the very life implore

A signal of a visioned mark;

Light of the mind, the mind’s discourse,

The rational in graciousness,

Thee by acknowledgement enthroned,

To tame and lead that blind-eyed force

In harmony of harness with the crowd,

For payment of their dues; as yet disowned,

Save where some dutiful lone creature, vowed

To holy work, deems it the heart’s intent;

Or where a silken circle views it cowled,

The seeming figure of concordance, bent

On satiating tyrant lust

Or barren fits of sentiment.

Thou wilt not have our paths befouled

By simulation; are we vile to view,

The heavens shall see us clean of our own dust,

Beneath thy breezy flitting wing:

They make their mirror upon faces true;

And where they win reflection, lucid heave

The under tides of this hot heart seen through.

Beneficently wilt thou clip

All oversteppings of the plumed,

The puffed, and bid the masker strip,

And into the crowned windbag thrust,

Tearing the mortal from the vital thing,

A lightning o’er the half-illumed,

Who to base brute-dominion cleave,

Yet mark effects, and shun the flash,

Till their drowsed wits a beam conceive,