Poem by George Meredith

My Theme

Of me and of my theme think what thou wilt:
The song of gladness one straight bolt can check.
But I have never stood at Fortune's beck:
Were she and her light crew to run atilt
At my poor holding little would be spilt;
Small were the praise for singing o'er that wreck.
Who courts her dooms to strife his bended neck;
He grasps a blade, not always by the hilt.
Nathless she strikes at random, can be fell
With other than those votaries she deals
The black or brilliant from her thunder-rift.
I say but that this love of Earth reveals
A soul beside our own to quicken, quell,
Irradiate, and through ruinous floods uplift.

1. Modern Love. Sonnet 38. Give to Imagination
2. Empdeocles
3. Unknown Fair Faces
4. Modern Love. Sonnet 40. I Bade my Lady Think what She Might Mean
5. Modern Love. Sonnet 16. In our Old Shipwrecked Days

Print

1224 Views

Last Poems

To Russian version