Poems. Volume 3. George Meredith

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      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.

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