George Meredith Poems

I

How sweet on sunny afternoons,
For those who journey light and well,
...

Avert, High Wisdom, never vainly wooed,
This threat of War, that shows a land brain-sick.
When nations gain the pitch where rhetoric
...

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
...

As Puritans they prominently wax,
And none more kindly gives and takes hard knocks.
Strong psalmic chanting, like to nasal cocks,
...

Never, O never,
Since dewy sweet Flora
Was ravished by Zephyr,
Was such a thing heard
...

I

She can be as wise as we,
And wiser when she wishes;
...

The silence of preluded song -
AEolian silence charms the woods;
Each tree a harp, whose foliaged strings
Are waiting for the master's touch
...

The old coach-road through a common of furze,
With knolls of pine, ran white;
Berries of autumn, with thistles, and burrs,
...

I

Young captain of a crazy bark!
O tameless heart in battered frame!
...

Their sense is with their senses all mixed in,
Destroyed by subleties these women are!
More brain, O Lord, more brain! or we shall mar
Utterly this fair garden we might win.
...