Chapter 585

- My sister, as I read them in my glass, Their field of tares they take for pasture grass. How waken them that have not any bent Save browsing - the concrete indifferent! Friend Lucifer supplies them solid stuff: They fear not for the race when full the trough. They have much fear of giving up the ghost; And these are of mankind the unnumbered host.

- If I could see with you, and did not faint In beating wing, the future I would paint. Those massed indifferents will learn to quake: Now meanwhile is another mass awake, Once denser than the grunters of the sty. If I could see with you! Could I but fly!

- The length of days that you with them have housed, An outcast else, approves their cause espoused.

- O true, they have a cause, and woe for us, While still they have a cause too piteous! Yet, happy for us when, their cause defined, They walk no longer with a stumbler blind, And quicken in the virtue of their cause, To think me a poor mouther of old saws! I wait the issue of a battling Age; The toilers with your "troughsters" now engage; Instructing them through their acutest sense, How close the dangers of indifference! Already have my people shown their worth, More love they light, which folds the love of Earth. That love to love of labour leads: thence love Of humankind - earth's incense flung above.

- Admit some other features: Faithless, mean; Encased in matter; vowed to Gods obscene; Contemptuous of the impalpable, it swells On Doubt; for pastime swallows miracles; And if I bid it face what I observe, Declares me hoodwinked by my optic nerve!

- Oft has your prophet, for reward of toil, Seen nests of seeming cockatrices coil: Disowned them as the unholiest of Time, Which were his offspring, born of flame on slime. Nor him, their sire, have known the filial fry: As little as Time's earliest knew the sky. Perchance among them shoots a lustrous flame At intervals, in proof of whom they came. To strengthen our foundations is the task Of this tough Age; not in your beams to bask, Though, lighted by your beams, down mining caves The rock it blasts, the hoarded foulness braves. My sister sees no round beyond her mood; To hawk this Age has dressed her head in hood. Out of the course of ancient ruts and grooves, It moves: O much for me to say it moves! About his AEthiop Highlands Nile is Nile, Though not the stream of the paternal smile: And where his tide of nourishment he drives, An Abyssinian wantonness revives. Calm as his lotus-leaf to-day he swims; He is the yellow crops, the rounded limbs, The Past yet flowing, the fair time that fills; Breath of all mouths and grist of many mills.

To-morrow, warning none with tempest-showers, He is the vast Insensate who devours His golden promise over leagues of seed, Then sits in a smooth lake upon the deed. The races which on barbarous force begin, Inherit onward of their origin, And cancelled blessings will the current length Reveal till they know need of shaping strength. 'Tis not in men to recognize the need Before they clash in hosts, in hosts they bleed. Then may sharp suffering their nature grind; Of rabble passions grow the chieftain Mind. Yet mark where still broad Nile boasts thousands fed, For tens up the safe mountains at his head. Few would be fed, not far his course prolong, Save for the troublous blood which makes him strong.

- That rings of truth! More do your people thrive; Your Many are more merrily alive Than erewhile when I gloried in the page Of radiant singer and anointed sage. Greece was my lamp: burnt out for lack of oil; Rome, Python Rome, prey of its robber spoil! All structures built upon a narrow space Must fall, from having not your hosts for base. O thrice must one be you, to see them shift Along their desert flats, here dash, there drift; With faith, that of privations and spilt blood, Comes Reason armed to clear or bank the flood! And thrice must one be you, to wait release From duress in the swamp of their increase. At which oppressive scene, beyond arrest, A darkness not with stars of heaven dressed, Philosophers behold; desponding view. Your Many nourished, starved my brilliant few; Then flinging heels, as charioteers the reins, Dive down the fumy AEtna of their brains. Belated vessels on a rising sea, They seem: they pass!

- But not Philosophy!

- Ay, be we faithful to ourselves: despise Nought but the coward in us! That way lies The wisdom making passage through our slough. Am I not heard, my head to Earth shall bow; Like her, shall wait to see, and seeing wait. Philosophy is Life's one match for Fate. That photosphere of our high fountain One, Our spirit's Lord and Reason's fostering sun, Philosophy, shall light us in the shade, Warm in the frost, make Good our aim and aid. Companioned by the sweetest, ay renewed, Unconquerable, whose aim for aid is Good! Advantage to the Many: that we name God's voice; have there the surety in our aim. This thought unto my sister do I owe, And irony and satire off me throw. They crack a childish whip, drive puny herds, Where numbers crave their sustenance in words. Now let the perils thicken: clearer seen, Your Chieftain Mind mounts over them serene. Who never yet of scattered lamps was born To speed a world, a marching world to warn, But sunward from the vivid Many springs, Counts conquest but a step, and through disaster sings.

Fragments of the Iliad in English Hexameter Verse

Poem: The Invective Of Achilles

[Iliad, B. I. V. 149]

"Heigh me! brazen of front, thou glutton for plunder, how can one, Servant here to thy mandates, heed thee among our Achaians, Either the mission hie on or stoutly do fight with the foemen? I, not hither I fared on account of the spear-armed Trojans, Pledged to the combat; they unto me have in nowise a harm done; Never have they, of a truth, come lifting my horses or oxen; Never in deep-soiled Phthia, the nurser of heroes, my harvests Ravaged, they; for between us is numbered full many a darksome Mountain, ay, therewith too the stretch of the windy sea-waters. O hugely shameless! thee did we follow to hearten thee, justice Pluck from the Dardans for him, Menelaos, thee too, thou dog-eyed! Whereof little thy thought is, nought whatever thou reckest. Worse, it is thou whose threat 'tis to ravish my prize from me, portion Won with much labour, the which my gift from the sons of Achaia. Never, in sooth, have I known my prize equal thine when Achaians Gave some flourishing populous Trojan town up to pillage. Nay, sure, mine were the hands did most in the storm of the combat, Yet when came peradventure share of the booty amongst us, Bigger to thee went the prize, while I some small blessed thing bore Off to the ships, my share of reward for my toil in the bloodshed! So now go I to Phthia, for better by much it beseems me Homeward go with my beaked ships now, and I hold not in prospect, I being outraged, thou mayst gather here plunder and wealth-store."

Poem: The Invective of Achilles - V. 225.

"Bibber besotted, with scowl of a cur, having heart of a deer, thou! Never to join to thy warriors armed for the press of the conflict, Never for ambush forth with the princeliest sons of Achaia Dared thy soul, for to thee that thing would have looked as a death-stroke. Sooth, more easy it seems, down the lengthened array of Achaians, Snatch at the prize of the one whose voice has been lifted against thee. Ravening king of the folk, for that thou hast thy rule over abjects; Else, son of Atreus, now were this outrage on me thy last one. Nay, but I tell thee, and I do swear a big oath on it likewise: Yea, by the sceptre here, and it surely bears branches and leaf- buds Never again, since first it was lopped from its trunk on the mountains, No more sprouting; for round it all clean has the sharp metal clipped off Leaves and the bark; ay, verify now do the sons of Achaia, Guardian hands of the counsels of Zeus, pronouncing the judgement, Hold it aloft; so now unto thee shall the oath have its portent; Loud will the cry for Achilles burst from the sons of Achaia Throughout the army, and thou chafe powerless, though in an anguish, How to give succour when vast crops down under man-slaying Hector Tumble expiring; and thou deep in thee shalt tear at thy heart- strings, Rage-wrung, thou, that in nought thou didst honour the flower of Achaians."

Poem: Marshalling Of The Achaians

[Iliad, B. II V. 455]

Like as a terrible fire feeds fast on a forest enormous, Up on a mountain height, and the blaze of it radiates round far, So on the bright blest arms of the host in their march did the splendour Gleam wide round through the circle of air right up to the sky- vault. They, now, as when swarm thick in the air multitudinous winged flocks, Be it of geese or of cranes or the long-necked troops of the wild- swans, Off that Asian mead, by the flow of the waters of Kaistros; Hither and yon fly they, and rejoicing in pride of their pinions, Clamour, shaped to their ranks, and the mead all about them resoundeth; So those numerous tribes from their ships and their shelterings poured forth On that plain of Scamander, and horrible rumbled beneath them Earth to the quick-paced feet of the men and the tramp of the horse-hooves. Stopped they then on the fair-flower'd field of Scamander, their thousands Many as leaves and the blossoms born of the flowerful season. Even as countless hot-pressed flies in their multitudes traverse, Clouds of them, under some herdsman's wonning, where then are the milk-pails Also, full of their milk, in the bountiful season of spring-time; Even so thickly the long-haired sons of Achaia the plain held, Prompt for the dash at the Trojan host, with the passion to crush them. Those, likewise, as the goatherds, eyeing their vast flocks of goats, know Easily one from the other when all get mixed o'er the pasture, So did the chieftains rank them here there in their places for onslaught, Hard on the push of the fray; and among them King Agamemnon, He, for his eyes and his head, as when Zeus glows glad in his thunder, He with the girdle of Ares, he with the breast of Poseidon.

Poem: Agamemnon In The Fight

[Iliad, B. XI. V. 148]

These, then, he left, and away where ranks were now clashing the thickest, Onward rushed, and with him rushed all of the bright-greaved Achaians. Foot then footmen slew, that were flying from direful compulsion, Horse at the horsemen (up from off under them mounted the dust- cloud, Up off the plain, raised up cloud-thick by the thundering horse- hooves) Hewed with the sword's sharp edge; and so meanwhile Lord Agamemnon Followed, chasing and slaughtering aye, on-urgeing the Argives.

Now, as when fire voracious catches the unclipped wood-land, This way bears it and that the great whirl of the wind, and the scrubwood Stretches uptorn, flung forward alength by the fire's fury rageing, So beneath Atreides Agamemnon heads of the scattered Trojans fell; and in numbers amany the horses, neck-stiffened, Rattled their vacant cars down the roadway gaps of the war-field, Missing the blameless charioteers, but, for these, they were outstretched Flat upon earth, far dearer to vultures than to their home-mates.

Poem: Paris And Diomedes

[Iliad; B. XI V. 378]

So he, with a clear shout of laughter, Forth of his ambush leapt, and he vaunted him, uttering thiswise: "Hit thou art! not in vain flew the shaft; how by rights it had pierced thee Into the undermost gut, therewith to have rived thee of life- breath! Following that had the Trojans plucked a new breath from their direst, They all frighted of thee, as the goats bleat in flight from a lion." Then unto him untroubled made answer stout Diomedes: "Bow-puller, jiber, thy bow for thy glorying, spyer at virgins! If that thou dared'st face me here out in the open with weapons, Nothing then would avail thee thy bow and thy thick shot of arrows. Now thou plumest thee vainly because of a graze of my footsole; Reck I as were that stroke from a woman or some pettish infant. Aye flies blunted the dart of the man that's emasculate, noughtworth! Otherwise hits, forth flying from me, and but strikes it the slightest, My keen shaft, and it numbers a man of the dead fallen straightway. Torn, troth, then are the cheeks of the wife of that man fallen slaughtered, Orphans his babes, full surely he reddens the earth with his blood- drops, Rotting, round him the birds, more numerous they than the women."

Poem: Hypnos On Ida

[Iliad, B. XIV. V. 283]

They then to fountain-abundant Ida, mother of wild beasts, Came, and they first left ocean to fare over mainland at Lektos, Where underneath of their feet waved loftiest growths of the woodland. There hung Hypnos fast, ere the vision of Zeus was observant, Mounted upon a tall pine-tree, tallest of pines that on Ida Lustily spring off soil for the shoot up aloft into aether. There did he sit well-cloaked by the wide-branched pine for concealment, That loud bird, in his form like, that perched high up in the mountains, Chalkis is named by the Gods, but of mortals known as Kymindis.

Poem: Clash In Arms Of The Achaians And Trojans

[Iliad, B. XIV. V. 394]

Not the sea-wave so bellows abroad when it bursts upon shingle, Whipped from the sea's deeps up by the terrible blast of the Northwind; Nay, nor is ever the roar of the fierce fire's rush so arousing, Down along mountain-glades, when it surges to kindle a woodland; Nay, nor so tonant thunders the stress of the gale in the oak- trees' Foliage-tresses high, when it rages to raveing its utmost; As rose then stupendous the Trojan's cry and Achaians', Dread upshouting as one when together they clashed in the conflict.

Poem: The Horses Of Achilles

[Iliad, B. XVII. V. 426]

So now the horses of Aiakides, off wide of the war-ground, Wept, since first they were ware of their charioteer overthrown there, Cast down low in the whirl of the dust under man-slaying Hector. Sooth, meanwhile, then did Automedon, brave son of Diores, Oft, on the one hand, urge them with flicks of the swift whip, and oft, too, Coax entreatingly, hurriedly; whiles did he angrily threaten. Vainly, for these would not to the ships, to the Hellespont spacious, Backward turn, nor be whipped to the battle among the Achaians. Nay, as a pillar remains immovable, fixed on the tombstone, Haply, of some dead man or it may be a woman there-under; Even like hard stood they there attached to the glorious war-car, Earthward bowed with their heads; and of them so lamenting incessant Ran the hot teardrops downward on to the earth from their eyelids, Mourning their charioteer; all their lustrous manes dusty-clotted, Right side and left of the yoke-ring tossed, to the breadth of the yoke-bow. Now when the issue of Kronos beheld that sorrow, his head shook Pitying them for their grief, these words then he spake in his bosom; "Why, ye hapless, gave we to Peleus you, to a mortal Master; ye that are ageless both, ye both of you deathless! Was it that ye among men most wretched should come to have heart- grief? 'Tis most true, than the race of these men is there wretcheder nowhere Aught over earth's range found that is gifted with breath and has movement."

Poem: The Mares Of The Camargue

[From the MIREIO of Mistral]

A hundred mares, all white! their manes Like mace-reed of the marshy plains Thick-tufted, wavy, free o' the shears: And when the fiery squadron rears Bursting at speed, each mane appears Even as the white scarf of a fay Floating upon their necks along the heavens away.

O race of humankind, take shame! For never yet a hand could tame, Nor bitter spur that rips the flanks subdue The mares of the Camargue. I have known, By treason snared, some captives shown; Expatriate from their native Rhone, Led off, their saline pastures far from view:

And on a day, with prompt rebound, They have flung their riders to the ground, And at a single gallop, scouring free, Wide-nostril'd to the wind, twice ten Of long marsh-leagues devour'd, and then, Back to the Vacares again, After ten years of slavery just to breathe salt sea

For of this savage race unbent, The ocean is the element. Of old escaped from Neptune's car, full sure, Still with the white foam fleck'd are they, And when the sea puffs black from grey, And ships part cables, loudly neigh The stallions of Camargue, all joyful in the roar;

And keen as a whip they lash and crack Their tails that drag the dust, and back Scratch up the earth, and feel, entering their flesh, where he, The God, drives deep his trident teeth, Who in one horror, above, beneath, Bids storm and watery deluge seethe, And shatters to their depths the abysses of the sea.

Cant. iv.

Poems by George Meredith--Volume 1

[This etext was prepared from the 1912 Times Book Club "Surrey Edition" by David Price]

CHILLIANWALLAH

Chillanwallah, Chillanwallah! Where our brothers fought and bled, O thy name is natural music And a dirge above the dead! Though we have not been defeated, Though we can't be overcome, Still, whene'er thou art repeated, I would fain that grief were dumb.

Chillianwallah, Chillianwallah! 'Tis a name so sad and strange, Like a breeze through midnight harpstrings Ringing many a mournful change; But the wildness and the sorrow Have a meaning of their own - Oh, whereof no glad to-morrow Can relieve the dismal tone!

Chillianwallah, Chillianwallah! 'Tis a village dark and low, By the bloody Jhelum river Bridged by the foreboding foe; And across the wintry water He is ready to retreat, When the carnage and the slaughter Shall have paid for his defeat.

Chillianwallah, Chillianwallah! 'Tis a wild and dreary plain, Strewn with plots of thickest jungle, Matted with the gory stain. There the murder-mouthed artillery, In the deadly ambuscade, Wrought the thunder of its treachery On the skeleton brigade.

Chillianwallah, Chillianwallah! When the night set in with rain, Came the savage plundering devils To their work among the slain; And the wounded and the dying In cold blood did share the doom Of their comrades round them lying, Stiff in the dead skyless gloom.

Chillianwallah, Chillianwallah! Thou wilt be a doleful chord, And a mystic note of mourning That will need no chiming word; And that heart will leap with anguish Who may understand thee best; But the hopes of all will languish Till thy memory is at rest.

THE DOE: A FRAGMENT (From 'WANDERING WILLIE')

And--'Yonder look! yoho! yoho! Nancy is off!' the farmer cried, Advancing by the river side, Red-kerchieft and brown-coated;--'So, My girl, who else could leap like that? So neatly! like a lady! 'Zounds! Look at her how she leads the hounds!' And waving his dusty beaver hat, He cheered across the chase-filled water, And clapt his arm about his daughter, And gave to Joan a courteous hug, And kiss that, like a stubborn plug From generous vats in vastness rounded, The inner wealth and spirit sounded: Eagerly pointing South, where, lo, The daintiest, fleetest-footed doe Led o'er the fields and thro' the furze Beyond: her lively delicate ears Prickt up erect, and in her track A dappled lengthy-striding pack.

Scarce had they cast eyes upon her, When every heart was wagered on her, And half in dread, and half delight, They watched her lovely bounding flight; As now across the flashing green, And now beneath the stately trees, And now far distant in the dene, She headed on with graceful ease: Hanging aloft with doubled knees, At times athwart some hedge or gate; And slackening pace by slow degrees, As for the foremost foe to wait. Renewing her outstripping rate Whene'er the hot pursuers neared, By garden wall and paled estate, Where clambering gazers whooped and cheered. Here winding under elm and oak, And slanting up the sunny hill: Splashing the water here like smoke Among the mill-holms round the mill.

And--'Let her go; she shows her game, My Nancy girl, my pet and treasure!' The farmer sighed: his eyes with pleasure Brimming: ''Tis my daughter's name, My second daughter lying yonder.' And Willie's eye in search did wander, And caught at once, with moist regard, The white gleams of a grey churchyard. 'Three weeks before my girl had gone, And while upon her pillows propped, She lay at eve; the weakling fawn - For still it seems a fawn just dropt A se'nnight--to my Nancy's bed I brought to make my girl a gift: The mothers of them both were dead: And both to bless it was my drift, By giving each a friend; not thinking How rapidly my girl was sinking. And I remember how, to pat Its neck, she stretched her hand so weak, And its cold nose against her cheek Pressed fondly: and I fetched the mat To make it up a couch just by her, Where in the lone dark hours to lie: For neither dear old nurse nor I Would any single wish deny her. And there unto the last it lay; And in the pastures cared to play Little or nothing: there its meals And milk I brought: and even now The creature such affection feels For that old room that, when and how, 'Tis strange to mark, it slinks and steals To get there, and all day conceals. And once when nurse who, since that time, Keeps house for me, was very sick, Waking upon the midnight chime, And listening to the stair-clock's click, I heard a rustling, half uncertain, Close against the dark bed-curtain: And while I thrust my leg to kick, And feel the phantom with my feet, A loving tongue began to lick My left hand lying on the sheet; And warm sweet breath upon me blew, And that 'twas Nancy then I knew. So, for her love, I had good cause To have the creature "Nancy" christened.'