Читать книгу Poems. Volume 3 - George Meredith - Страница 4

One fairest of the ripe unwedded left

Her shadow on the Sage’s path; he found,

By common signs, that she had done a theft.

He could have made the sovereign heights resound

With questions of the wherefore of her state:

He on far other but an hour before

Intent.  And was it man, or was it mate,

That she disdained? or was there haply more?

About her mouth a placid humour slipped

The dimple, as you see smooth lakes at eve

Spread melting rings where late a swallow dipped.

The surface was attentive to receive,

The secret underneath enfolded fast.

She had the step of the unconquered, brave,

Not arrogant; and if the vessel’s mast

Waved liberty, no challenge did it wave.

Her eyes were the sweet world desired of souls,

With something of a wavering line unspelt.

They hold the look whose tenderness condoles

For what the sister in the look has dealt

Of fatal beyond healing; and her tones

A woman’s honeyed amorous outvied,

As when in a dropped viol the wood-throb moans

Among the sobbing strings, that plain and chide

Like infants for themselves, less deep to thrill

Than those rich mother-notes for them breathed round.

Those voices are not magic of the will

To strike love’s wound, but of love’s wound give sound,

Conveying it; the yearnings, pains and dreams.

They waft to the moist tropics after storm,

When out of passion spent thick incense steams,

And jewel-belted clouds the wreck transform.

Was never hand on brush or lyre to paint

Her gracious manners, where the nuptial ring

Of melody clasped motion in restraint:

The reed-blade with the breeze thereof may sing.

With such endowments armed was she and decked

To make her spoken thoughts eclipse her kind;

Surpassing many a giant intellect,

The marvel of that cradled infant mind.

It clenched the tiny fist, it curled the toe;

Cherubic laughed, enticed, dispensed, absorbed;

And promised in fair feminine to grow

A Sage’s match and mate, more heavenly orbed.

Across his path the spouseless Lady cast

Her shadow, and the man that thing became.

His youth uprising called his age the Past.

This was the strong grey head of laurelled name,

And in his bosom an inverted Sage

Mistook for light of morn the light which sank.

But who while veins run blood shall know the page

Succeeding ere we turn upon our blank?

Comes Beauty with her tale of moon and cloud,

Her silvered rims of mystery pointing in

To hollows of the half-veiled unavowed,

Where beats her secret life, grey heads will spin

Quick as the young, and spell those hieroglyphs

Of phosphorescent dusk, devoutly bent;

They drink a cup to whirl on dizzier cliffs

For their shamed fall, which asks, why was she sent!

Why, and of whom, and whence; and tell they truth,

The legends of her mission to beguile?

Hard likeness to the toilful apes of youth

He bore at times, and tempted the sly smile;

And not on her soft lips was it descried.

She stepped her way benevolently grave:

Nor sign that Beauty fed her worm of pride,

By tossing victim to the courtier knave,

Let peep, nor of the naughty pride gave sign.

Rather ’twas humbleness in being pursued,

As pilgrim to the temple of a shrine.

Had he not wits to pierce the mask he wooed?

All wisdom’s armoury this man could wield;

And if the cynic in the Sage it pleased

Traverse her woman’s curtain and poor shield,

For new example of a world diseased;

Showing her shrineless, not a temple, bare;

A curtain ripped to tatters by the blast;

Yet she most surely to this man stood fair:

He worshipped like the young enthusiast,

Named simpleton or poet.  Did he read

Right through, and with the voice she held reserved

Amid her vacant ruins jointly plead?

Compassion for the man thus noble nerved

The pity for herself she felt in him,

To wreak a deed of sacrifice, and save;

At least, be worthy.  That our soul may swim,

We sink our heart down bubbling under wave.

It bubbles till it drops among the wrecks.

But, ah! confession of a woman’s breast:

She eminent, she honoured of her sex!

Truth speaks, and takes the spots of the confessed,

To veil them.  None of women, save their vile,

Plays traitor to an army in the field.

The cries most vindicating most defile.

How shall a cause to Nature be appealed,

When, under pressure of their common foe,

Her sisters shun the Mother and disown,

On pain of his intolerable crow

Above the fiction, built for him, o’erthrown?

Irrational he is, irrational

Must they be, though not Reason’s light shall wane

In them with ever Nature at close call,

Behind the fiction torturing to sustain;

Who hear her in the milk, and sometimes make

A tongueless answer, shivered on a sigh:

Whereat men dread their lofty structure’s quake

Once more, and in their hosts for tocsin ply

The crazy roar of peril, leonine

For injured majesty.  That sigh of dames

Is rare and soon suppressed.  Not they combine

To shake the structure sheltering them, which tames

Their lustier if not wilder: fixed are they,

In elegancy scarce denoting ease;

And do they breathe, it is not to betray

The martyr in the caryatides.

Yet here and there along the graceful row

Is one who fetches breath from deeps, who deems,

Moved by a desperate craving, their old foe

May yield a trustier friend than woman seems,

And aid to bear the sculptured floral weight

Massed upon heads not utterly of stone:

May stamp endurance by expounding fate.

She turned to him, and, This you seek is gone;

Look in, she said, as pants the furnace, brief,

Frost-white.  She gave his hearing sight to view

The silent chamber of a brown curled leaf:

Thing that had throbbed ere shot black lightning through.

No further sign of heart could he discern:

The picture of her speech was winter sky;

A headless figure folding a cleft urn,

Where tears once at the overflow were dry.

So spake she her first utterance on the rack.

It softened torment, in the funeral hues

Round wan Romance at ebb, but drove her back

To listen to herself, herself accuse

Harshly as Love’s imperial cause allowed.

She meant to grovel, and her lover praised

So high o’er the condemnatory crowd,

That she perforce a fellow phoenix blazed.

The picture was of hand fast joined to hand,

Both pushed from angry skies, their grasp more pledged

Under the threatened flash of a bright brand

At arm’s length up, for severing action edged.

Why, then Love’s Court of Honour contemplate;

And two drowned shorecasts, who, for the life esteemed

Above their lost, invoke an advocate

In Passion’s purity, thereby redeemed.

Redeemed, uplifted, glimmering on a throne,

The woman stricken by an arrow falls.

His advocate she can be, not her own,

If, Traitress to thy sex! one sister calls.

Have we such scenes of drapery’s mournfulness

On Beauty’s revelations, witched we plant,

Over the fair shape humbled to confess,

An angel’s buckler, with loud choiric chant.

No knightly sword to serve, nor harp of bard,

The lady’s hand in her physician’s knew.

She had not hoped for them as her award,

When zig-zag on the tongue electric flew

Her charge of counter-motives, none impure:

But muteness whipped her skin.  She could have said,

Her free confession was to work his cure,

Show proofs for why she could not love or wed.

Were they not shown?  His muteness shook in thrall

Her body on the verge of that black pit

Sheer from the treacherous confessional,

Demanding further, while perusing it.

Slave is the open mouth beneath the closed.

She sank; she snatched at colours; they were peel

Of fruit past savour, in derision rosed.

For the dark downward then her soul did reel.

A press of hideous impulse urged to speak:

A novel dread of man enchained her dumb.

She felt the silence thicken, heard it shriek,

Heard Life subsiding on the eternal hum:

Welcome to women, when, between man’s laws

And Nature’s thirsts, they, soul from body torn,

Give suck at breast to a celestial cause,

Named by the mouth infernal, and forsworn.

Nathless her forehead twitched a sad content,

To think the cure so manifest, so frail

Her charm remaining.  Was the curtain’s rent

Too wide? he but a man of that herd male?

She saw him as that herd of the forked head

Butting the woman harrowed on her knees,

Clothed only in life’s last devouring red.

Confession at her fearful instant sees

Judicial Silence write the devil fact

In letters of the skeleton: at once,

Swayed on the supplication of her act,

The rabble reading, roaring to denounce,

She joins.  No longer colouring, with skips

At tangles, picture that for eyes in tears

Might swim the sequence, she addressed her lips

To do the scaffold’s office at his ears.

Into the bitter judgement of that herd

On women, she, deeming it present, fell.

Her frenzy of abasement hugged the word

They stone with, and so pile their citadel

To launch at outcasts the foul levin bolt.

As had he flung it, in her breast it burned.

Face and reflect it did her hot revolt

From hardness, to the writhing rebel turned;

Because the golden buckler was withheld,

She to herself applies the powder-spark,

For joy of one wild demon burst ere quelled,

Perishing to astound the tyrant Dark.

She had the Scriptural word so scored on brain,

It rang through air to sky, and rocked a world

That danced down shades the scarlet dance profane;

Most women! see! by the man’s view dustward hurled,

Impenitent, submissive, torn in two.

They sink upon their nature, the unnamed,

And sops of nourishment may get some few,

In place of understanding, scourged and shamed.

Barely have seasoned women understood

The great Irrational, who thunders power,

Drives Nature to her primitive wild wood,

And courts her in the covert’s dewy hour;

Returning to his fortress nigh night’s end,

With execration of her daughters’ lures.

They help him the proud fortress to defend,

Nor see what front it wears, what life immures,

The murder it commits; nor that its base

Is shifty as a huckster’s opening deal

For bargain under smoothest market face,

While Gentleness bids frigid Justice feel,

Justice protests that Reason is her seat;

Elect Convenience, as Reason masked,

Hears calmly cramped Humanity entreat;

Until a sentient world is overtasked,

And rouses Reason’s fountain-self: she calls

On Nature; Nature answers: Share your guilt

In common when contention cracks the walls

Of the big house which not on me is built.

The Lady said as much as breath will bear;

To happier sisters inconceivable:

Contemptible to veterans of the fair,

Who show for a convolving pearly shell,

A treasure of the shore, their written book.

As much as woman’s breath will bear and live

Shaped she to words beneath a knotted look,

That held as if for grain the summing sieve.

Her judge now brightened without pause, as wakes

Our homely daylight after dread of spells.

Lips sugared to let loose the little snakes

Of slimy lustres ringing elfin bells

About a story of the naked flesh,

Intending but to put some garment on,

Should learn, that in the subject they enmesh,

A traitor lurks and will be known anon.

Delusion heating pricks the torpid doubt,

Stationed for index down an ancient track:

And ware of it was he while she poured out

A broken moon on forest-waters black.

Though past the stage where midway men are skilled

To scan their senses wriggling under plough,

When yet to the charmed seed of speech distilled,

Their hearts are fallow, he, and witless how,

Loathing, had yielded, like bruised limb to leech,

Not handsomely; but now beholding bleed

Soul of the woman in her prostrate speech,

The valour of that rawness he could read.

Thence flashed it, as the crimson currents ran

From senses up to thoughts, how she had read

Maternally the warm remainder man

Beneath his crust, and Nature’s pity shed,

In shedding dearer than heart’s blood to light

His vision of the path mild Wisdom walks.

Therewith he could espy Confession’s fright;

Her need of him: these flowers grow on stalks;

They suck from soil, and have their urgencies

Beside and with the lovely face mid leaves.

Veins of divergencies, convergencies,

Our botanist in womankind perceives;

And if he hugs no wound, the man can prize

That splendid consummation and sure proof

Of more than heart in her, who might despise,

Who drowns herself, for pity up aloof

To soar and be like Nature’s pity: she

Instinctive of what virtue in young days

Had served him for his pilot-star on sea,

To trouble him in haven.  Thus his gaze

Came out of rust, and more than the schooled tongue

Was gifted to encourage and assure.

He gave her of the deep well she had sprung;

And name it gratitude, the word is poor.

But name it gratitude, is aught as rare

From sex to sex?  And let it have survived

Their conflict, comes the peace between the pair,

Unknown to thousands husbanded and wived:

Unknown to Passion, generous for prey:

Unknown to Love, too blissful in a truce.

Their tenderest of self did each one slay;

His cloak of dignity, her fleur de luce;

Her lily flower, and his abolla cloak,

Things living, slew they, and no artery bled.

A moment of some sacrificial smoke

They passed, and were the dearer for their dead.

He learnt how much we gain who make no claims.

A nightcap on his flicker of grey fire

Was thought of her sharp shudder in the flames,

Confessing; and its conjured image dire,

Of love, the torrent on the valley dashed;

The whirlwind swathing tremulous peaks; young force,

Visioned to hold corrected and abashed

Our senile emulous; which rolls its course

Proud to the shattering end; with these few last

Hot quintessential drops of bryony juice,

Squeezed out in anguish: all of that once vast!

And still, though having skin for man’s abuse,

Though no more glorying in the beauteous wreath

Shot skyward from a blood at passionate jet,

Repenting but in words, that stand as teeth

Between the vivid lips; a vassal set;

And numb, of formal value.  Are we true

In nature, never natural thing repents;

Albeit receiving punishment for due,

Among the group of this world’s penitents;

Albeit remorsefully regretting, oft

Cravenly, while the scourge no shudder spares.

Our world believes it stabler if the soft

Are whipped to show the face repentance wears.

Then hear it, in a moan of atheist gloom,

Deplore the weedy growth of hypocrites;

Count Nature devilish, and accept for doom

The chasm between our passions and our wits!

Affecting lunar whiteness, patent snows,

It trembles at betrayal of a sore.

Hers is the glacier-conscience, to expose

Impurities for clearness at the core.

She to her hungered thundering in breast,

Ye shall not starve, not feebly designates

The world repressing as a life repressed,

Judged by the wasted martyrs it creates.

How Sin, amid the shades Cimmerian,

Repents, she points for sight: and she avers,

The hoofed half-angel in the Puritan

Nigh reads her when no brutish wrath deters.

Sin against immaturity, the sin

Of ravenous excess, what deed divides

Man from vitality; these bleed within;

Bleed in the crippled relic that abides.

Perpetually they bleed; a limb is lost,

A piece of life, the very spirit maimed.

But culprit who the law of man has crossed

With Nature’s dubiously within is blamed;

Despite our cry at cutting of the whip,

Our shiver in the night when numbers frown,

We but bewail a broken fellowship,

A sting, an isolation, a fall’n crown.

Abject of sinners is that sensitive,

The flesh, amenable to stripes, miscalled

Incorrigible: such title do we give

To the poor shrinking stuff wherewith we are walled;

And, taking it for Nature, place in ban

Our Mother, as a Power wanton-willed,

The shame and baffler of the soul of man,

The recreant, reptilious.  Do thou build

Thy mind on her foundations in earth’s bed;

Behold man’s mind the child of her keen rod,

For teaching how the wits and passions wed

To rear that temple of the credible God;

Sacred the letters of her laws, and plain,

Will shine, to guide thy feet and hold thee firm:

Then, as a pathway through a field of grain,

Man’s laws appear the blind progressive worm,

That moves by touch, and thrust of linking rings

The which to endow with vision, lift from mud

To level of their nature’s aims and springs,

Must those, the twain beside our vital flood,

Now on opposing banks, the twain at strife

(Whom the so rosy ferryman invites

To junction, and mid-channel over Life,

Unmasked to the ghostly, much asunder smites)

Instruct in deeper than Convenience,

In higher than the harvest of a year.

Only the rooted knowledge to high sense

Of heavenly can mount, and feel the spur

For fruitfullest advancement, eye a mark

Beyond the path with grain on either hand,

Help to the steering of our social Ark

Over the barbarous waters unto land.

For us the double conscience and its war,

The serving of two masters, false to both,

Until those twain, who spring the root and are

The knowledge in division, plight a troth

Of equal hands: nor longer circulate

A pious token for their current coin,

To growl at the exchange; they, mate and mate,

Fair feminine and masculine shall join

Upon an upper plane, still common mould,

Where stamped religion and reflective pace

A statelier measure, and the hoop of gold

Rounds to horizon for their soul’s embrace.

Then shall those noblest of the earth and sun

Inmix unlike to waves on savage sea.

But not till Nature’s laws and man’s are one,

Can marriage of the man and woman be.

He passed her through the sermon’s dull defile.

Down under billowy vapour-gorges heaved

The city and the vale and mountain-pile.

She felt strange push of shuttle-threads that weaved.

A new land in an old beneath her lay;

And forth to meet it did her spirit rush,

As bride who without shame has come to say,

Husband, in his dear face that caused her blush.

A natural woman’s heart, not more than clad

By station and bright raiment, gathers heat

From nakedness in trusted hands: she had

The joy of those who feel the world’s heart beat,

After long doubt of it as fire or ice;

Because one man had helped her to breathe free;

Surprised to faith in something of a price

Past the old charity in chivalry:—

Our first wild step to right the loaded scales

Displaying women shamefully outweighed.

The wisdom of humaneness best avails

For serving justice till that fraud is brayed.

Her buried body fed the life she drank.

And not another stripping of her wound!

The startled thought on black delirium sank,

While with her gentle surgeon she communed,

And woman’s prospect of the yoke repelled.

Her buried body gave her flowers and food;

The peace, the homely skies, the springs that welled;

Love, the large love that folds the multitude.

Soul’s chastity in honesty, and this

With beauty, made the dower to men refused.

And little do they know the prize they miss;

Which is their happy fortune!  Thus he mused

For him, the cynic in the Sage had play

A hazy moment, by a breath dispersed;

To think, of all alive most wedded they,

Whom time disjoined!  He needed her quick thirst

For renovated earth: on earth she gazed,

With humble aim to foot beside the wise.

Lo, where the eyelashes of night are raised

Yet lowly over morning’s pure grey eyes.