Poems. Volume 2 - George Meredith 2 стр.

Rich labour is the struggle to be wise,
While we make sure the struggle cannot cease.
Else better were it in some bower of peace
Slothful to swing, contending with the flies.
You point at Wisdom fixed on lofty skies,
As mid barbarian hordes a sculptured Greece:
She falls.  To live and shine, she grows her fleece,
Is shorn, and rubs with follies and with lies.
So following her, your hewing may attain
The right to speak unto the mute, and shun
That sly temptation of the illumined brain,
Deliveries oracular, self-spun.
Who sweats not with the flock will seek in vain
To shed the words which are ripe fruit of sun.

Rub thou thy battered lamp: nor claim nor beg
Honours from aught about thee.  Light the young.
Thy frame is as a dusty mantle hung,
O grey one! pendant on a loosened peg.
Thou art for this our life an ancient egg,
Or a tough bird: thou hast a rudderless tongue,
Turning dead trifles, like the cock of dung,
Which runs, Times contrast to thy halting leg.
Nature, it is most sure, not thee admires.
But hast thou in thy season set her fires
To burn from Self to Spirit through the lash,
Honoured the sons of Earth shall hold thee high:
Yea, to spread light when thy proud letter I
Drops prone and void as any thoughtless dash.

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 Bellonas 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 inebriates 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 minds ascent: our worlds 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 Natures lap
Of gentlemen the happy nursery.
That Garden would on light supremest verge,
Were the long drawing of an equal breath
Healthful for Wisdoms 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 Natures 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 Muses 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 Natures, 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 noons nap.
You scratched an insect-slaughtering thunder-clap
With that between the fingers and the thumb.
It seemeth mad to quit the Olympian couch,
Which bade our public gobble or reject.
O spectacle of Peter, shrewdly pecked,
Piper, by his own pepper from his pouch!
What of the sneer, the jeer, the voice austere,
You dealt?the voice austere, the jeer, the sneer.

Oracle of the market! thence you drew
The taste which stamped you guide of the inept.
A North-sea pilot, Hildebrand yclept,
A sturdy and a briny, once men knew.
He loved small beer, and for that copious brew,
To roll ingurgitation till he slept,
Rations exchanged with flavour for the adept:
And merrily plied him captain, mate and crew.
At last this dancer to the Polar star
Sank, washed out within, and overboard was pitched,
To drink the sea and pilot him to land.
O captain-critic! printed, neatly stitched,
Know while the pillory-eggs fly fast, they are
Not eggs, but the drowned soul of Hildebrand.

Oracle of the market! thence you drew
The taste which stamped you guide of the inept.
A North-sea pilot, Hildebrand yclept,
A sturdy and a briny, once men knew.
He loved small beer, and for that copious brew,
To roll ingurgitation till he slept,
Rations exchanged with flavour for the adept:
And merrily plied him captain, mate and crew.
At last this dancer to the Polar star
Sank, washed out within, and overboard was pitched,
To drink the sea and pilot him to land.
O captain-critic! printed, neatly stitched,
Know while the pillory-eggs fly fast, they are
Not eggs, but the drowned soul of Hildebrand.

Of me and of my theme think what thou wilt:
The song of gladness one straight bolt can check.
But I have never stood at Fortunes beck:
Were she and her light crew to run atilt
At my poor holding little would be spilt;
Small were the praise for singing oer that wreck.
Who courts her dooms to strife his bended neck;
He grasps a blade, not always by the hilt.
Nathless she strikes at random, can be fell
With other than those votaries she deals
The black or brilliant from her thunder-rift.
I say but that this love of Earth reveals
A soul beside our own to quicken, quell,
Irradiate, and through ruinous floods uplift.

Tis true the wisdom that my mind exacts
Through contemplation from a heart unbent
By many tempests may be stained and rent:
The summer flies it mightily attracts.
Yet they seem choicer than your sons of facts,
Which scarce give breathing of the stys content
For their diurnal carnal nourishment:
Which treat with Nature in official pacts.
The deader body Nature could proclaim.
Much life have neither.  Let the heavens of wrath
Rattle, then both scud scattering to froth.
But during calms the flies of idle aim
Less put the spirit out, less baffle thirst
For light than swinish grunters, blest or curst.

Avert, High Wisdom, never vainly wooed,
This threat of War, that shows a land brain-sick.
When nations gain the pitch where rhetoric
Seems reason they are ripe for cannons food.
Dark looms the issue though the cause be good,
But with the doubt tis our old devils trick.
O now the down-slope of the lunatic
Illumine lest we redden of that brood.
For not since man in his first view of thee
Ascended to the heavens giving sign
Within him of deep sky and sounded sea,
Did he unforfeiting thy laws transgress;
In peril of his blood his ears incline
To drums whose loudness is their emptiness.

I, wakeful for the skylark voice in men,
Or straining for the angel of the light,
Rebuked am I by hungry ear and sight,
When I behold one lamp that through our fen
Goes hourly where most noisome; hear again
A tongue that loathsomeness will not affright
From speaking to the soul of us forthright
What things our craven senses keep from ken.
This is the doing of the Christ; the way
He went on earth; the service above guile
To prop a tyrant creed: it sings, it shines;
Cries to the Mammonites: Allay, allay
Such misery as by these present signs
Brings vengeance down; nor them who rouse revile.

An English heart, my commandant,
A soldiers eye you have, awake
To right and left; with looks askant
On bulwarks not of adamant,
Where white our Channel waters break.

Where Grisnez winks at Dungeness
Across the ruffled strip of salt,
You look, and like the prospect less.
On men and guns would you lay stress,
To bid the Islands foemen halt.

While loud the Year is raising cry
At birth to know if it must bear
In history the bloody dye,
An English heart, a soldiers eye,
For the old country first will care.

And how stands she, artillerist,
Among the vapours waxing dense,
With cannon charged?  Tis hist! and hist!
And now she screws a gouty fist,
And now she counts to clutch her pence.

With shudders chill as aconite,
The couchant chewer of the cud
Will start at times in pussy fright
Before the dogs, when reads her sprite
The streaks predicting streams of blood.

She thinks they may mean something; thinks
They may mean nothing: haply both.
Where darkness all her daylight drinks,
She fain would find a leader lynx,
Not too much taxing mental sloth.

Cleft like the fated house in twain,
One half is, Arm! and one, Retrench!
Gambettas word on dull MacMahon:
The cow that sees a passing train:
So spies she Russian, German, French.

She? no, her weakness: she unbraced
Among those athletes fronting storms!
The muscles less of steel than paste,
Why, they of nature feel distaste
For flash, much more for push, of arms.

The poet sings, and well know we,
That iron draws men after it.
But towering wealth may seem the tree
Which bears the fruit Indemnity,
And draw as fast as battles fit,

If feeble be the hand on guard,
Alas, alas!  And nations are
Still the mad forces, though the scarred.
Should they once deem our emblem Pard
Wagger of tail for all save war;

Mechanically screwed to flail
His flanks by Presses conjuring fear;
A money-bag with head and tail;
Too late may valour then avail!
As you beheld, my cannonier,

When with the staff of Benedek,
On the plateau of Königgrätz,
You saw below that wedgeing speck;
Foresaw proud Austria rammed to wreck,
Where Chlum drove deep in smoky jets.

Strike not thy dog with a stick!
   I did it yesterday:
Not to undo though I gained
The Paradise: heavy it rained
   On Kobolds flanks, and he lay.

Little Bruno, our long-ear pup,
   From his hunt had come back to my heel.
I heard a sharp worrying sound,
And Bruno foamed on the ground,
   With Koby as making a meal.

I did what I could not undo
   Were the gates of the Paradise shut
Behind me: I deemed it was just.
I left Koby crouched in the dust,
   Some yards from the woodmans hut.

He bewhimpered his welting, and I
   Scarce thought it enough for him: so,
By degrees, through the upper box-grove,
Within me an old story hove,
   Of a man and a dog: you shall know.

The dog was of novel breed,
   The Shannon retriever, untried:
His master, an old Irish lord,
In an oaken armchair snored
   At midnight, whisky beside.

Perched up a desolate tower,
   Where the black storm-wind was a whip
To set it nigh spinning, these two
Were alone, like the last of a crew,
   Outworn in a wave-beaten ship.

The dog lifted muzzle, and sniffed;
   He quitted his couch on the rug,
Nose to floor, nose aloft; whined, barked;
And, finding the signals unmarked,
   Caught a hand in a death-grapple tug.

He pulled till his master jumped
   For fury of wrath, and laid on
With the length of a tough knotted staff,
Fit to drive the life flying like chaff,
   And leave a sheer carcase anon.

That done, he sat, panted, and cursed
   The vile cross of this brute: nevermore
Would he house it to rear such a cur!
The dog dragged his legs, pained to stir,
   Eyed his master, dropped, barked at the door.

Then his master raised head too, and sniffed:
   It struck him the dog had a sense
That honoured both dam and sire.
You have guessed how the tower was afire.
   The Shannon retriever dates thence.

I mused: saw the pup ease his heart
   Of his instinct for chasing, and sink
Overwrought by excitement so new:
A scene that for Koby to view
   Was the seizure of nerves in a link.

And part sympathetic, and part
   Imitatively, raged my poor brute;
And I, not thinking of ill,
Doing eviller: nerves are still
   Our savage too quick at the root.

They spring us: I proved it, albeit
   I played executioner then
For discipline, justice, the like.
Yon stick I had handy to strike
   Should have warned of the tyrant in men.

You read in your History books,
   How the Prince in his youth had a mind
For governing gently his land.
Ah, the use of that weapon at hand,
   When the temper is other than kind!

At home all was well; Kobys ribs
   Not so sore as my thoughts: if, beguiled,
He forgives me, his criminal air
Throws a shade of Llewellyns despair
   For the hound slain for saving his child.