Poems and Lyrics of the Joy of Earth. George Meredith

Forward our blown lamps discern,

       As you see on the dark deep

       Far the loftier billows leap,

      ​

      Foam for beacon bear.

       Hither, hither, if you will,

       Drink instruction, or instil,

       Run the woods like vernal sap,

       Crying, hail to luminousness!

      But have care.

       In yourself may lurk the trap:

       On conditions they caress.

       Here you meet the light invoked:

       Here is never secret cloaked.

       Doubt you with the monster's fry

       All his orbit may exclude;

       Are you of the stiff, the dry,

       Cursing the not understood;

       Grasp you with the monster's claws;

       Govern with his truncheon-saws;

       Hate, the shadow of a grain;

       You are lost in Westermain:

       Earthward swoops a vulture sun,

      ​

      Nighted upon carrion:

       Straightway venom winecups shout

       Toasts to One whose eyes are out:

       Flowers along the reeling floor

       Drip henbane and hellebore:

       Beauty, of her tresses shorn,

       Shrieks as nature's maniac:

       Hideousness on hoof and horn

       Tumbles, yapping in her track:

       Haggard Wisdom, stately once,

       Leers fantastical and trips:

       Allegory drums the sconce,

       Impiousness nibblenips.

       Imp that dances, imp that flits,

       Imp o' the demon-growing girl,

       Maddest! whirl with imp o' the pits

       Round you, and with them you whirl

       Fast where pours the fountain-rout

       Out of Him whose eyes are out:

      ​

      Multitudes on multitudes,

       Drenched in wallowing devilry:

       And you ask where you may be,

      In what reek of a lair

       Given to bones and ogre-broods:

      And they yell you Where.

       Enter these enchanted woods,

      You who dare.

      ​

      A BALLAD OF PAST MERIDIAN.

       Table of Contents

      I.

      Last night returning from my twilight walk

       I met the gray mist Death, whose eyeless brow

       Was bent on me, and from his hand of chalk

       He reached me flowers as from a withered bough:

       O Death, what bitter nosegays givest thou!

      II.

      Death said, I gather, and pursued his way.

       Another stood by me, a shape in stone,

       Sword-hacked and iron-stained, with breasts of clay,

       And metal veins that sometimes fiery shone:

       O Life, how naked and how hard when known!

      ​

      III.

      Life said, As thou hast carved me, such am I.

       Then memory, like the nightjar on the pine,

       And sightless hope, a woodlark in night sky,

       Joined notes of Death and Life till night's decline:

       Of Death, of Life, those inwound notes are mine.