The soul she yet lacks—the illumination 110
Immortal!—it strikes me like inspiration,
She must get her that soul by wedding the cabman!
Don’t ask me why:—when instinct speaks,
Old Mother Reason is not at home.
But how gladly would dance the days and the weeks!
And the sky, what a mirth-embracing dome!
If round sweet Poesy’s waist were curl’d
The arm of him who drives the World!
Could she claim a higher conquest, she?
And a different presence his would be! 120
I see him lifting his double chin
On his threefold comforter, sniffing and smirking,
And showing us all that the man within
Has had his ideas of her secretly lurking.
Confess that the sight were as fine—ay, as fair!
As if from a fire-ball in mid-air
She glow’d before you woman, spreading
With hands the hair her foot was treading!
’Twere an effort for Nature both ways, and which
The mightier I can’t aver: 130
If we screw ourselves up to a certain pitch,
She meets us—that I know of her.
She is ready to meet the grim cabman half-way!
Now! and where better than here, where, with thunder
Of waters, she might bathe his clay,
And enter him by the gate of wonder?
It takes him doubtless long to peel,
Who wears at least a dozen capes:
Yet if but once she makes him feel,
The man comes of his multiform shapes. 140
To make him feel, friend, is not easy.
I once did nourish that ambition:
But there he goes, purple, and greasy, and wheezy,
And waits a greater and truer magician!
Hark to the wild Rosanna cheering!
Never droops she, while changing clime
At every leap, the levels nearing:
Faith in ourselves is faith in Time!
And faith in Nature keeps the force
We have in us for daily wear. 150
Come from thy keen Alp down, and, hoarse,
Tell the valleys the tale I hear,
O River!
Now, my friend, adieu!
In contrast, and in likeness, you
Have risen before me from the tide,
Whose channel is narrow, whose noise is wide;
Whose rage is that of your native seas;
Buzzing of battle like myriad bees,
Which you have heard on the Euxine shore12 160
Sounding in earnest. Here have I placed
The delicate spirit with which you adore
Dame Nature in lone haunts embraced.
Have I affrighted it, frail thing, aghast?
I have shown it the way to live and last!
How often will those long links of foam
Cry to me in my English home,
To nerve me, whenever I hear them bellow,
Like the smack of the hand of a gallant fellow!
I give them my meaning here, and they 170
Will give me theirs when far away.
And the snowy points, and the ash-pale peaks,
Will bring a trembling to my cheeks,
The leap of the white-fleck’d, clear light, green
Sudden the length of its course be seen,
As, swift it launches an emerald shoulder,
And, thundering ever of the mountain,
Slaps in sport some giant boulder,
And tops it in a silver fountain.
Notes
1. “By the Rosanna” first appeared in Once a Week (19 October 1861). Lines 21–179 were cut from the version that appeared in the Edition de Luxe.
2. F. M.: Meredith’s long-time friend, Frederick A. Maxse. On 26 July 1861, Meredith wrote to Maxse: “The Rosanna, by the way, put me in mind of you—nay, sang of you with a mountain voice. . . . Perhaps because it is both hearty and gallant, subtle and sea-green.” Letters, I.106.
3. Stanzer Thal, Tyrol: Meredith, his son Arthur, and Bonaparte Wyse vacationed in the low Alpine valley of Stanzer Thal in Austria, Tyrol, in the summer of 1861.
4. old grey Alp: Mount Hoher Riffler
5. Arcadian: ideally rural or rustic
6. lymph: literally, a clear bodily fluid; figuratively, as here, pure water
7. Season-Beauty: In Victorian society, the London social season, roughly during the months of May, June, and July, was when socially and politically connected families attended exclusive balls, dinner parties, and charity events. It was also the time when debutants (or, as Meredith calls them here, Season-Beauties) were presented to the queen—a social ritual known as “coming out.”
8. She: the Nymph
9. fox-glove: a common ornamental flowering plant
10. Porter with Montepulciano!: Porter is a dark-brown, bitter beer; Montepulciano is an Italian red wine. Francesco Redi called Montepulciano “the king of all wine” in his “Bacco in Toscana,” a popular Italian poem translated into English by Leigh Hunt after a wine-soaked trip to Italy in the 1820s.
11. buon’ mano: Italian; literally, “good hand”; normally means a tip, but in this context, a handout
12. Euxine shore: the shore of the Black Sea, where Maxse fought in the Crimean War
Ode to the Spirit of Earth in Autumn
Fair mother Earth lay on her back last night,
To gaze her fill on Autumn’s sunset skies,
When at a waving of the fallen light,
Sprang realms of rosy fruitage o’er her eyes.
A lustrous heavenly orchard hung the West,
Wherein the blood of Eden bloom’d again.
Red were the myriad cherub mouths that press’d
Among the clusters, rich with song, full fain,
But dumb,1 because that overmastering spell
Of rapture held them dumb, then, here and there, 10
A golden harp lost strings; a crimson shell
Burnt grey; and sheaves of lustre fell to air.
The illimitable eagerness of hue
Bronzed, and the beamy winged bloom that flew
’Mid those bunch’d fruits and thronging figures, fail’d.
A green-edged lake of saffron2 touch’d the blue,
With isles of fireless purple lying thro’:
And Fancy on that lake to seek lost treasures sail’d.
. . .
Not long the silence follow’d:
The voice that issues from the breast, 20
O, glorious South-West,
Along the gloom-horizon holloa’d;
Warning the valleys with a mellow roar
Thro’ flapping wings; then, sharp the woodland bore
A shudder, and a noise of hands:
A thousand horns from some far vale
In ambush sounding on the gale.
Forth from the cloven sky came bands
Of revel-gathering spirits; trooping down,
Some rode the tree-tops; some, on torn cloud-strips, 30
Burst screaming thro’ the lighted town:
And scudding seaward, some fell on big ships:
Or mounting the sea-horses blew
Bright foam-flakes on the black review
Of heaving hulls and burying beaks.
Still on the farthest line, with outpuff’d cheeks,
’Twixt dark and utter dark, the great wind drew
From heaven that disenchanted harmony
To join earth’s laughter in the midnight blind:3
Booming a distant chorus to the shrieks 40
Preluding him: then he,
His mantle streaming thunderingly behind,
Across the yellow realm of stiffen’d Day,
Shot thro’ the woodland alleys signals three;
And with the pressure of a sea,
Plunged broad upon the vale
that under lay.
Night on the rolling foliage fell:
But I, who love old hymning night,
And know the Dryad4 voices well,
Discerned them as their leaves took flight, 50
Like souls to wander after death:
Great armies in imperial dyes,
And mad to tread the air, and rise,
The savage freedom of the skies
To taste before they rot. And here,
Like frail white-bodied girls in fear,
The birches swung from shrieks to sighs;
The aspens, laughers at a breath,
In showering spray-falls mixed their cries,
Or raked a savage ocean-strand 60
With one incessant drowning screech.
Here, stood a solitary beech,
That gave its gold with open hand,
And all its branches, toning chill,
Did seem to shut their teeth right fast,
To shriek more mercilessly shrill,
And match the fierceness of the blast.
But heard I a low swell that noised
Of far-off ocean, I was ’ware
Of pines upon their old roots poised, 70
Whom never madness in the air
Can draw to more than loftier stress
Of mournfulness not mournfulness,
Not mournfulness, but Joy’s excess
That singing, on the lap of sorrow faints:
And Peace, as in the hearts of saints
Who chant unto the Lord their God,
Deep Peace below upon the muffled sod,
The stillness of the sea’s unswaying floor.
Could I be sole there not to see 80
The life within the life awake;
The spirit bursting from the tree,
And rising from the troubled lake?
Pour, let the wines of Heaven pour!
The Golden Harp is struck once more,
And all its music is for me!
Pour, let the wines of Heaven pour!
And, ho, for a night of Pagan glee!
There is a curtain o’er us.
For once, good souls, we’ll not pretend 90
To be aught better than her who bore us,5
And is our only visible friend.6
Hark to her laughter! who laughs like this,
Can she be dead, or rooted in pain?
She has been slain by the narrow brain,
But for us who love her she lives again.
Can she die? O, take her kiss!
The crimson-footed nymph is panting up the glade,
With the wine-jar at her arm-pit, and the drunken ivy-braid
Round her forehead, breast, and thighs: starts a Satyr, and they speed: 100
Hear the crushing of the leaves: hear the cracking of the bough!
And the whistling of the bramble, the piping of the weed!7
But the bull-voiced oak is battling now!
The storm has seized him half asleep,
And round him the wild woodland throngs
To hear the fury of his songs,
The uproar of an outraged deep.
He wakes to find a wrestling giant
Trunk to trunk and limb to limb,
And on his rooted force reliant, 110
He laughs and grasps the broaden’d giant,
And twist and roll the Anakim;8
And multitudes acclaiming to the cloud,
Cry which is breaking, which is bowed.
Away, for the cymbals clash aloft
In the circle of pines, on the moss-floor soft.
The nymphs of the woodland are gathering there.
They huddle the leaves, and trample, and toss;
They swing in the branches, they roll in the moss,
They blow the seed on the air. 120
Back to back they stand and blow
The winged seed9 on the cradling air,
A fountain of leaves over bosom and back!
The pipe of the Faun10 comes on their track,
And the weltering alleys overflow
With musical shrieks and wind-wedded hair.
The riotous companies melt to a pair.
Bless them, mother of kindness!
A star has nodded thro’
The depths of the flying blue. 130
Time only to plant the light
Of a memory in the blindness.
But time to show me the sight
Of my life thro’ the curtain of night.
Shining a moment, and mix’d
With the onward-hurrying stream,
Whose pressure is darkness to me,
Behind the curtain, fix’d,
Beams with endless beam,
That star on the changing sea! 140
Oh, mother Nature! teach me, like thee,
To kiss the season, and shun regrets.
And am I more than the mother who bore,
Mock me not with thy harmony!
Teach me to blot regrets,
Great mother! me inspire
With faith that forward sets
But feeds the living fire.
Faith that never frets
For vagueness in the form. 150
In life, O keep me warm!
For, what is human grief?
And what do men desire?
Teach me to feel myself the tree,
And not the wither’d leaf.
Fix’d am I and await the dark to-be!
And O, green bounteous earth!
Bacchante11 Mother! stern to those
Who live not in thy heart of mirth;
Death shall I shrink from, loving thee? 160
Into the breast that gives the rose,
Shall I with shuddering fall?
Earth, the mother of all,
Moves on her steadfast way,
Gathering, flinging, sowing.
Mortals, we live in her day,
She in her children is growing.
She can lead us, only she,
Unto God’s footstool, whither she reaches:
Loved, enjoy’d, her gifts must be; 170
Reverenced the truths she teaches,
Ere a man may hope that he
Ever can attain the glee
Of things without a destiny!
Hark to her laughter! And would you wonder
To hear amazing laughter thunder
From one who contemplateth man?—
Knowing the plan!
The great procession of the Comedy,
Passes before her. Let the curtain down! 180
For she must laugh to shake her starry crown,
To mark the strange perversions that are we;
Who hoist our shoulders confident of wings,
When we have named her Ashes, dug her ditch;
Who do regard her as a damnëd witch,
Fair to the eye, but full of foulest things.
We, pious humpback mountebanks12 meanwhile,
Break off our antics to stand forth, white-eyed,
And fondly hope for our Creator’s smile,
By telling him that his prime work is vile, 190
Whom, through our noses, we’ve renounced, denied.
Good friends of mine, who love her,
And would not see her bleeding:
The light that is above her,
From eyesight is receding,
As ever we grow older,
And blood is waxing colder.
But grasp in spirit tightly,
That she is no pretender,
While still the eye sees brightly,— 200
Then darkness knows her splendour,
And coldness feels her glory.
As in yon cloud-scud hoary,13
From gloom to gloom swift winging,
The sunset beams have found me:
I hear the sunset singing
In this blank roar around me!
Friends! we are yet in the warmth of our blood,
And s
wift as the tides upon which we are borne.
There’s a long blue rift in the speeding scud, 210
That shows like a boat on a sea forlorn,
With stars to man it! That boat is ours,
And we are the mariners on the great flood
Of the shifting slopes and the drifting flowers,
That oar unresting towards the morn!
And are we the children of Heaven and earth,
We’ll be true to the mother with whom we are,
So to be worthy of Him who afar,
Beckons us on to a brighter birth.
She knows not loss: 220
She feels but her need,
Who the winged seed
With the leaf doth toss.
And may not men to this attain?
That the joy of motion, the rapture of being,
Shall throw strong light when their season is fleeing,
Nor quicken aged blood in vain,
At the gates of the vault, on the verge of the plain?
Life thoroughly lived is a fact in the brain,
While eyes are left for seeing. 230
Behold, in yon stripp’d Autumn, shivering gray,
Earth knows no desolation.
She smells regeneration
In the moist breath of decay.
. . .
Prophetic of the coming joy and strife,
Like the wild western war-chief sinking
Calm to the end he eyes unblinking,
Her voice is jubilant in ebbing life.
He for his happy hunting-fields
Forgets the droning chant, and yields 240
His number’d breaths to exultation
In the proud anticipation:
Shouting the glories of his nation,
Shouting the grandeur of his race,
Shouting his own great deeds of daring!
And when at last death grasps his face,
And stiffen’d on the ground in peace
He lies with all his painted terrors glaring;
Hush’d are the tribe to hear a threading cry:
Not from the dead man; 250
Not from the standers-by:
The spirit of the red man
Is welcomed by his fathers up on high.
Notes
1. dumb: silent
2. saffron: dried crocus stamens, bright orange-yellow in color, used as a spice
3. blind: here, a drunken bout or orgy
4. Dryad: wood nymph
5. her who bore us: Nature
6. visible friend: Nature; Meredith uses the same epithet in Sonnet XIII of “Modern Love.”
7. piping of the weed!: playing the panpipes
8. Anakim: biblical giants whom Joshua sent from Israel into Gaza, Gath, and Ashdod (see Numbers, Deuteronomy, and Joshua)
9. winged seed: cf. Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind,” I.1–14
10. the Faun: Pan, the reed-pipe-playing Greek god connected with nature, spring, fertility, and lust
Modern Love and Poems of the English Roadside, with Poems and Ballads Page 14
