VII.
The Cross was of bones; the priest that read,
A spectacled necromancer:8
But at the fourth word, the bride I led,
Changed to an Opera dancer.
VIII.
A young ballet beauty who perk’d in her place,
A darling of pink and spangles;
One fair foot level with her face,
And the hearts of men at her ankles.
IX.
She whirl’d, she twirl’d; the mock-priest grinn’d,
And quickly his mask unriddled;
’Twas Adrian! loud his old laughter dinn’d;
Then he seized a fiddle, and fiddled.
X.
He fiddled, he glow’d with the bottomless fire,
Like Sathanas9 in feature:
All thro’ me he fiddled a wolfish desire
To dance with that bright creature.
XI.
And gathering courage I said to my soul,
Throttle the thing that hinders!
When the three cowl’d monks, from black as coal,
Wax’d hot as furnace-cinders.
XII.
They caught her up, twirling; they leapt between-whiles:
The fiddler flicker’d with laughter:
Profanely they flew down the awful aisles,
Where I went sliding after.
XIII.
Down the awful aisles, by the fretted walls,
Beneath the Gothic arches:—
King Skull in the black confessionals
Sat rub-a-dub-dubbing his marches.
XIV.
Then the silent cold stone warriors frown’d,
The pictured saints strode forward:
A whirlwind swept them from holy ground;
A tempest puff ’d them nor’ward.
XV.
They shot through the great cathedral door;
Like mallards they traversed ocean:
And gazing below, on its boiling floor,
I mark’d a horrid commotion.
XVI.
Down a forest’s long alleys they spun like tops:
It seem’d that for ages and ages,
Thro’ the Book of Life bereft of stops,
They waltz’d continuous pages.
XVII.
And ages after, scarce awake,
And my blood with the fever fretting,
I stood alone by a forest-lake,10
Whose shadows the moon were netting.
XVIII.
Lilies, golden and white, by the curls
Of their broad flat leaves hung swaying.
A wreath of languid twining girls
Stream’d upward, long locks disarraying.
XIX.
Their cheeks had the satin frost-glow of the moon;
Their eyes the fire of Sirius.11
They circled, and droned a monotonous tune,
Abandon’d to love delirious.
XX.
Like lengths of convolvulus12 torn from the hedge,
And trailing the highway over,
The dreamy-eyed mistresses circled the sedge,13
And call’d for a lover, a lover!
XXI.
I sank, I rose through seas of eyes,
In odorous swathes delicious:
They fann’d me with impetuous sighs,
They bit me with kisses vicious.
XXII.
My ears were spell’d, my neck was coil’d,
And I with their fury was glowing,
When the marbly waters bubbled and boil’d
At a watery noise of crowing.
XXIII.
They dragg’d me low and low to the lake:
Their kisses more stormily shower’d;
On the emerald brink, in the white moon’s wake,
An earthly damsel cower’d.
XXIV.
Fresh heart-sobs shook her knitted hands
Beneath a tiny suckling,
As one by one of the doleful bands
Dived like a fairy duckling.
XXV.
And now my turn had come—O me!
What wisdom was mine that second!
I dropp’d on the adorer’s knee;
To that sweet figure I beckon’d.
XXVI.
Save me! save me! for now I know
The powers that nature gave me,
And the value of honest love I know:—
My village lily! save me!
XXVII.
Come ’twixt me and the sisterhood,
While the passion-born phantoms are fleeing!
Oh, he that is true to flesh and blood
Is true to his own being!
XXVIII.
And he that is false to flesh and blood,
Is false to the star within him:
And the mad and hungry sisterhood
All under the tides shall win him!
XXIX.
My village lily! save me! save!
For strength is with the holy:—
Already I shudder’d to feel the wave,
As I kept sinking slowly:—
XXX.
I felt the cold wave and the under-tug
Of the Brides, when—starting and shrinking—
Lo, Adrian tilts the water-jug!
And Bruges with morn is blinking.
XXXI.
Merrily sparkles sunny prime
On gabled peak and arbour:
Merrily rattles belfry-chime
The song of Sevilla’s Barber.
Notes
1. Originally published in Once a Week (23 November 1861).
2. According to Slavic folklore, the Wili (or Wilis) are mischievous female spirits who can use their powers to help humans or to lure them into danger. Meredith may have become familiar with them through the ballet Giselle, ou Les Wilis (first performed in Paris in 1841 and in London in 1842) or through Heinrich Heine, a German poet and essayist who was extremely popular among mid-Victorian authors—including Meredith.
3. cynical Adrian: likely a reference to Meredith’s friend, Maurice Fitzgerald, the model for Adrian (the “wise youth”) in Meredith’s novel The Ordeal of Richard Feverel
4. old dead city: Bruges
5. rock-reflecting river: Carl Ketcham identifies this as the Rhine, and suggests that the description of the speaker’s journey here may have been based on Meredith’s journey with his son Arthur to the Swiss Alps. Carl H. Ketcham, “Meredith and the Wilis,” Victorian Poetry 1, no. 4 (November 1963): 241–48.
6. green-eyed wine: perhaps wine in a Bocksbeutel, a squat green bottle used in Franconia
7. Beguine: a name for members of certain lay sisterhoods that began in the Low Countries in the twelfth century; they devoted themselves to a religious life but did not bind themselves by strict vows and were able to leave their societies for marriage.
8. necromancer: sorcerer
9. Sathanas: Satan
10. I stood . . . forest-lake: The second act of Giselle takes place on the shores of a lake.
11. Sirius: the chief star of the constellation Canis Major or Great Dog, and the brightest in the heavens; the Dog Star
12. convolvulus: a plant with slender twining stems and trumpet-shaped flowers
13. sedge: a name for various coarse grassy plants growing in wet places
Shemselnihar1
I.
O my lover: the night like a broad smooth wave
Bears us onward, and morn, a black rock, shines wet.
How I shudder’d!—I knew not that I was a slave,
Till I look’d on thy face:—then I writhed in the net.
Then I felt like a thing caught by fire, that her star
Glow’d dark on the bosom of Shemselnihar.
II.
And he came, whose I am: O my lover! he came:
And his slave, still so envied of women, was I:
And I turned as a hissing leaf spits from the flame,
> Yes, I shrivell’d to dust from him, haggard and dry.
O forgive her:—she was but as dead lilies are:
The life of her heart fled from Shemselnihar.
III.
Yet with thee like a full throbbing rose how I bloom!
Like a rose by the fountain whose showering we hear,
As we lie, O my lover! in this rich gloom,
Smelling faint the cool breath of the lemon-groves near.
As we lie gazing out on that glowing great star—
Ah! dark on the bosom of Shemselnihar.
IV.
Yet with thee am I not as an arm of the vine,
Firm to bind thee, to cherish thee, feed thee sweet?
Swear an oath on my lip to let none disentwine
The fair life that here fawns to give warmth to thy feet.
I on thine, thus! no more shall that jewelled Head jar
The music thou breathest on Shemselnihar.
V.
Far away, far away, where the wandering scents
Of all flowers are sweetest, white mountains among,
There my kindred abide in their green and blue tents:
Bear me to them, my lover! they lost me so young.
Let us slip down the stream and leap steed till afar
None question thy claim upon Shemselnihar.
VI.
O that long note the bulbul2 gave out—meaning love!
O my lover, hark to him and think it my voice:
The blue night like a great bell-flower from above
Drooping low and gold-eyed: O, but hear him rejoice!
Can it be? ’twas a flash! that accurst scimitàr3
In thought even cuts thee from Shemselnihar.
VII.
Yes, I would that, less generous, he would oppress,
He would chain me, upbraid me, burn deep brands for hate,
Than with this mask of freedom, and gorgeousness,
Spangle over my slavery, mock my strange fate.
Would, would, would, O my lover, he knew—dared debar
Thy coming, and earn curse of Shemselnihar!
Notes
1. Shemselnihar, a character from one of Meredith’s favorite books, the Arabian Nights, is a concubine belonging to the Prince of the Faithful, the Caliph. Her lover is Ali the son of Becar. Upon meeting, the two fall violently in love. When the Caliph hears that Shemselnihar loves another, he refuses to believe it and, in fact, begins to love her all the more. In the story, Shemselnihar and Ali are essentially killed by their susceptibility to poetry and the force of their passion for each other.
2. bulbul: a species of bird belonging to the thrush family, much admired in the East for its song; sometimes called the “nightingale” of the East
3. scimitàr: a short, curved, single-edged sword, used especially by Turks and Persians
[A roar thro’ the tall twin elm-trees]
A roar thro’ the tall twin elm-trees
The mustering storm betray’d:
The south-wind seiz’d the willow
That over the water sway’d.
Then fell the steady deluge
In which I strove to doze,
Hearing all night at my window
The knock of the winter rose.
The rainy rose of winter!
An outcast it must pine. 10
And from thy bosom outcast
Am I, dear lady mine.
[When I would image her features]1
When I would image her features,
Comes up a shrouded head:
I touch the outlines, shrinking;
She seems of the wandering dead.
But when love asks for nothing,
And lies on his bed of snow,
The face slips under my eyelids,
All in its living glow.
Like a dark cathedral city
Whose spires, and domes, and towers, 10
Quiver in violet lightnings,
My soul basks on for hours.
Notes
1. Section LXX of Tennyson’s In Memoriam (“I cannot see the features right”) offers a compelling antecedent to this poem.
[I chafe at darkness in the night]
I chafe at darkness in the night;
But when ’tis light,
Hope shuts her eyes: the clouds are pale;
The fields stretch cold into a distance hard:
I wish again to draw the veil
Thousand-starr’d.
Am I of them whose blooms are shed,
Whose fruits are spent,
Who from dead eyes see Life half dead;—
Because desire is feeble discontent? 10
Ah, no! desire and hope should die,
Thus were I.
But in me something clipp’d of wing,
Within its ring
Frets; for I have lost what made
The dawn-breeze magic, and the twilight beam
A hand with tidings o’er the glade
Waving, seem.
By the Rosanna1
TO F. M.2
Stanzer Thal, Tyrol 3
The old grey Alp4 has caught the cloud,
And the torrent river sings aloud;
The glacier-green Rosanna sings
An organ song of its upper springs.
Foaming under the tiers of pine,
I see it dash down the dark ravine,
And it tumbles the rocks in boisterous play,
With an earnest will to find its way.
Sharp it throws out an emerald shoulder,
And, thundering ever of the mountain, 10
Slaps in sport some giant boulder,
And tops it in a silver fountain.
A chain of foam from end to end,
And a solitude so deep, my friend,
You may forget that man abides
Beyond the great mute mountain-sides.
Yet to me, in this high-walled solitude
Of river and rock and forest rude,
The roaring voice through the long white chain,
Is the voice of the world of bubble and brain. 20
I find it where I sought it least;
I sought the mountain and the beast,
The young thin air that knits the nerves,
The chamois ledge, the snowy curves;
Earth in her whiteness looking bold
To Heaven for ever as of old.
And lo, if I translate the sound
Now thundering in my ears around,
’Tis London rushing down a hill:
Life, or London; which you will! 30
And men with brain who follow the bubble,
And hosts without, who hurry and eddy,
And still press on: joy, passion, and trouble!
Necessity’s instinct; true, though unsteady.
Yea, letting alone the roar and the strife,
This On-on-on is so like life!
Here’s devil take the hindmost, too;
And an amorous wave has a beauty in view;
And lips of others are kissing the rocks:
Here’s chasing of bubbles, and wooing of blocks. 40
And through the resonant monotone
I catch wild laughter mix’d with shrieks;
And a wretched creature’s stifled moan,
Whom Time, the terrible usurer, tweaks.
Is it enough to profane your mood,
Arcadian5 dreamer, who think it sad
If a breath of the world on your haunts intrude,
Though in London you’re hunting the bubble like mad?
For you are one who raise the Nymph
Wherever Nature sits alone; 50
Who pitch your delight in a region of lymph,6
Rejoiced that its arms evade your own.
I see you lying here, and wistfully
Watching the dim shape, tender and fresh:
Your Season-Beauty7 faithless, or kiss’d fully,
You’re just a little tired of f
lesh.
She8 dances, and gleams, now under the wave,
Now on a fern-branch, or fox-glove9 bell;
Thro’ a wreath of the bramble she eyes me grave;
She has a secret she will not tell. 60
But if I follow her more and more,
If I hold her sacred to each lone spot,
She’ll tell me—what I knew before;
For the secret is, that she can’t be caught!
She lives, I swear! We join hands there.
But what’s her use? Can you declare?
If she serves no purpose, she must take wing:
Art stamps her for an ugly thing.
Will she fly with the old gods, or join with the new?
Is she made of the stuff for a thorough alliance? 70
Or, standing alone, does she dare to go thro’
The ordeal of a scrutiny of Science?
What say you, if, in this retreat,
While she poises tiptoe on yon granite slab, man,
I introduce her, shy and sweet,
To a short-neck’d, many-caped, London cabman?
You gasp!—she totters! And is it too much?
Mayn’t he take off his hat to her? hope for a touch?
Get one kind curtsey of aërial grace
For his most liberal grimace? 80
It would do him a world of good, poor devil!
And Science makes equal on this level:
Remember that!—and his friend, the popular
Mr. Professor, the learned and jocular,
Were he to inspect her and call her a foam-bow,
I very much fear it would prove a home-blow.
We couldn’t save her!—she’d vanish, fly;
Tho’ she’s more than that, as we know right well;
But who shall expound to a hard cold eye,
The infinite impalpable? 90
A Queen on sufferance must not act
My Lady Scornful:—thus presuming,
If Sentiment won’t wed with Fact,
Poor Sentiment soon needs perfuming.
Let her curtsey with becoming tact
To cabman caped and poet blooming!—
No, I wouldn’t mix Porter with Montepulciano!10
I ask you merely, without demanding,
To give a poor beggar his buon’ mano:—11
Make my meaning large with your understanding! 100
The cicada sits spinning his wheel on the tree;
The little green lizard slips over the stone
Like water: the waters flash, and the cone
Drops at my feet. Say, how shall it be?
Your Nymph is on trial. Will she own
Her parentage Humanity?
Of her essence these things but form a part;
Her heart comes out of the human heart.
Tremendous thought, which I scarce dare blab, man!
Modern Love and Poems of the English Roadside, with Poems and Ballads Page 13
