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<div style="background:#fff;border:#bbb dashed 1px;padding:5px"><a href="http://en.citatepedia.ro/comments.php?id=396693" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none"><div style="margin:10px 0"><strong>A Reading Of Life--The Test Of Manhood</strong></div><div style="margin:10px 0">Like a flood river whirled at rocky banks,<br>An army issues out of wilderness,<br>With battle plucking round its ragged flanks;<br>Obstruction in the van; insane excess<br>Oft at the heart; yet hard the onward stress<br>Unto more spacious, where move ordered ranks,<br>And rise hushed temples built of shapely stone,<br>The work of hands not pledged to grind or slay.<br>They gave our earth a dress of flesh on bone;<br>A tongue to speak with answering heaven gave they.<br>Then was the gracious birth of man's new day;<br>Divided from the haunted night it shone.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">That quiet dawn was Reverence; whereof sprang<br>Ethereal Beauty in full morningtide.<br>Another sun had risen to clasp his bride:<br>It was another earth unto him sang.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Came Reverence from the Huntress on her heights?<br>From the Persuader came it, in those vales<br>Whereunto she melodiously invites,<br>Her troops of eager servitors regales?<br>Not far those two great Powers of Nature speed<br>Disciple steps on earth when sole they lead;<br>Nor either points for us the way of flame.<br>From him predestined mightier it came;<br>His task to hold them both in breast, and yield<br>Their dues to each, and of their war be field.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">The foes that in repulsion never ceased,<br>Must he, who once has been the goodly beast<br>Of one or other, at whose beck he ran,<br>Constrain to make him serviceable man;<br>Offending neither, nor the natural claim<br>Each pressed, denying, for his true man's name.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Ah, what a sweat of anguish in that strife<br>To hold them fast conjoined within him still;<br>Submissive to his will<br>Along the road of life!<br>And marvel not he wavered if at whiles<br>The forward step met frowns, the backward smiles.<br>For Pleasure witched him her sweet cup to drain;<br>Repentance offered ecstasy in pain.<br>Delicious licence called it Nature's cry;<br>Ascetic rigours crushed the fleshly sigh;<br>A tread on shingle timed his lame advance<br>Flung as the die of Bacchanalian Chance,<br>He of the troubled marching army leaned<br>On godhead visible, on godhead screened;<br>The radiant roseate, the curtained white;<br>Yet sharp his battle strained through day, through night.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">He drank of fictions, till celestial aid<br>Might seem accorded when he fawned and prayed;<br>Sagely the generous Giver circumspect,<br>To choose for grants the egregious, his elect;<br>And ever that imagined succour slew<br>The soul of brotherhood whence Reverence drew.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">In fellowship religion has its founts:<br>The solitary his own God reveres:<br>Ascend no sacred Mounts<br>Our hungers or our fears.<br>As only for the numbers Nature's care<br>Is shown, and she the personal nothing heeds,<br>So to Divinity the spring of prayer<br>From brotherhood the one way upward leads.<br>Like the sustaining air<br>Are both for flowers and weeds.<br>But he who claims in spirit to be flower,<br>Will find them both an air that doth devour.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Whereby he smelt his treason, who implored<br>External gifts bestowed but on the sword;<br>Beheld himself, with less and less disguise,<br>Through those blood-cataracts which dimmed his eyes,<br>His army's foe, condemned to strive and fail;<br>See a black adversary's ghost prevail;<br>Never, though triumphs hailed him, hope to win<br>While still the conflict tore his breast within.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Out of that agony, misread for those<br>Imprisoned Powers warring unappeased,<br>The ghost of his black adversary rose,<br>To smother light, shut heaven, show earth diseased.<br>And long with him was wrestling ere emerged<br>A mind to read in him the reflex shade<br>Of its fierce torment; this way, that way urged;<br>By craven compromises hourly swayed.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Crouched as a nestling, still its wings untried,<br>The man's mind opened under weight of cloud.<br>To penetrate the dark was it endowed;<br>Stood day before a vision shooting wide.<br>Whereat the spectral enemy lost form;<br>The traversed wilderness exposed its track.<br>He felt the far advance in looking back;<br>Thence trust in his foot forward through the storm.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Under the low-browed tempest's eye of ire,<br>That ere it lightened smote a coward heart,<br>Earth nerved her chastened son to hail athwart<br>All ventures perilous his shrouded Sire;<br>A stranger still, religiously divined;<br>Not yet with understanding read aright.<br>But when the mind, the cherishable mind,<br>The multitude's grave shepherd, took full flight,<br>Himself as mirror raised among his kind,<br>He saw, and first of brotherhood had sight:<br>Knew that his force to fly, his will to see,<br>His heart enlarged beyond its ribbed domain,<br>Had come of many a grip in mastery,<br>Which held conjoined the hostile rival twain,<br>And of his bosom made him lord, to keep<br>The starry roof of his unruffled frame<br>Awake to earth, to heaven, and plumb the deep<br>Below, above, aye with a wistful aim.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">The mastering mind in him, by tempests blown,<br>By traitor inmates baited, upward burned;<br>Perforce of growth, the Master mind discerned,<br>The Great Unseen, nowise the Dark Unknown.<br>To whom unwittingly did he aspire<br>In wilderness, where bitter was his need:<br>To whom in blindness, as an earthy seed<br>For light and air, he struck through crimson mire.<br>But not ere he upheld a forehead lamp,<br>And viewed an army, once the seeming doomed,<br>All choral in its fruitful garden camp,<br>The spiritual the palpable illumed.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">This gift of penetration and embrace,<br>His prize from tidal battles lost or won,<br>Reveals the scheme to animate his race:<br>How that it is a warfare but begun;<br>Unending; with no Power to interpose;<br>No prayer, save for strength to keep his ground,<br>Heard of the Highest; never battle's close,<br>The victory complete and victor crowned:<br>Nor solace in defeat, save from that sense<br>Of strength well spent, which is the strength renewed.<br>In manhood must he find his competence;<br>In his clear mind the spiritual food:<br>God being there while he his fight maintains;<br>Throughout his mind the Master Mind being there,<br>While he rejects the suicide despair;<br>Accepts the spur of explicable pains;<br>Obedient to Nature, not her slave:<br>Her lord, if to her rigid laws he bows;<br>Her dust, if with his conscience he plays knave,<br>And bids the Passions on the Pleasures browse:-<br>Whence Evil in a world unread before;<br>That mystery to simple springs resolved.<br>His God the Known, diviner to adore,<br>Shows Nature's savage riddles kindly solved.<br>Inconscient, insensitive, she reigns<br>In iron laws, though rapturous fair her face.<br>Back to the primal brute shall he retrace<br>His path, doth he permit to force her chains<br>A soft Persuader coursing through his veins,<br>An icy Huntress stringing to the chase:<br>What one the flash disdains;<br>What one so gives it grace.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">But is he rightly manful in her eyes,<br>A splendid bloodless knight to gain the skies,<br>A blood-hot son of Earth by all her signs,<br>Desireing and desireable he shines;<br>As peaches, that have caught the sun's uprise<br>And kissed warm gold till noonday, even as vines.<br>Earth fills him with her juices, without fear<br>That she will cast him drunken down the steeps.<br>All woman is she to this man most dear;<br>He sows for bread, and she in spirit reaps:<br>She conscient, she sensitive, in him;<br>With him enwound, his brave ambition hers:<br>By him humaner made; by his keen spurs<br>Pricked to race past the pride in giant limb,<br>Her crazy adoration of big thews,<br>Proud in her primal sons, when crags they hurled,<br>Were thunder spitting lightnings on the world<br>In daily deeds, and she their evening Muse.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">This man, this hero, works not to destroy;<br>This godlike--as the rock in ocean stands; -<br>He of the myriad eyes, the myriad hands<br>Creative; in his edifice has joy.<br>How strength may serve for purity is shown<br>When he himself can scourge to make it clean.<br>Withal his pitch of pride would not disown<br>A sober world that walks the balanced mean<br>Between its tempters, rarely overthrown:<br>And such at times his army's march has been.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Near is he to great Nature in the thought<br>Each changing Season intimately saith,<br>That nought save apparition knows the death;<br>To the God-lighted mind of man 'tis nought.<br>She counts not loss a word of any weight;<br>It may befal his passions and his greeds<br>To lose their treasures, like the vein that bleeds,<br>But life gone breathless will she reinstate.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Close on the heart of Earth his bosom beats,<br>When he the mandate lodged in it obeys,<br>Alive to breast a future wrapped in haze,<br>Strike camp, and onward, like the wind's cloud-fleets.<br>Unresting she, unresting he, from change<br>To change, as rain of cloud, as fruit of rain;<br>She feels her blood-tree throbbing in her grain,<br>Yet skyward branched, with loftier mark and range.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">No miracle the sprout of wheat from clod,<br>She knows, nor growth of man in grisly brute;<br>But he, the flower at head and soil at root,<br>Is miracle, guides he the brute to God.<br>And that way seems he bound; that way the road,<br>With his dark-lantern mind, unled, alone,<br>Wearifully through forest-tracts unsown,<br>He travels, urged by some internal goad.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Dares he behold the thing he is, what thing<br>He would become is in his mind its child;<br>Astir, demanding birth to light and wing;<br>For battle prompt, by pleasure unbeguiled.<br>So moves he forth in faith, if he has made<br>His mind God's temple, dedicate to truth.<br>Earth's nourishing delights, no more gainsaid,<br>He tastes, as doth the bridegroom rich in youth.<br>Then knows he Love, that beckons and controls;<br>The star of sky upon his footway cast;<br>Then match in him who holds his tempters fast,<br>The body's love and mind's, whereof the soul's.<br>Then Earth her man for woman finds at last,<br>To speed the pair unto her goal of goals.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Or is't the widowed's dream of her new mate?<br>Seen has she virulent days of heat in flood;<br>The sly Persuader snaky in his blood;<br>With her the barren Huntress alternate;<br>His rough refractory off on kicking heels<br>To rear; the man dragged rearward, shamed, amazed;<br>And as a torrent stream where cattle grazed,<br>His tumbled world. What, then, the faith she feels?<br>May not his aspect, like her own so fair<br>Reflexively, the central force belie,<br>And he, the once wild ocean storming sky,<br>Be rebel at the core? What hope is there?</div><div style="margin:10px 0">'Tis that in each recovery he preserves,<br>Between his upper and his nether wit,<br>Sense of his march ahead, more brightly lit;<br>He less the shaken thing of lusts and nerves;<br>With such a grasp upon his brute as tells<br>Of wisdom from that vile relapsing spun.<br>A Sun goes down in wasted fire, a Sun<br>Resplendent springs, to faith refreshed compels.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"><br /></a><br />poem by <a href="http://en.citatepedia.ro/by.php?a=George+Meredith">George Meredith</a><div class=q>
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<script type="text/javascript" src="//s7.addthis.com/js/300/addthis_widget.js#pubid=citatepedia" async="async"></script><div style="display:inline-block" class="addthis_sharing_toolbox" data-url="http://en.citatepedia.ro/comments.php?id=396693" data-title="A Reading Of Life--The Test Of Manhood de George Meredith" data-description="Like a flood river whirled at rocky banks,
An army issues out of wilderness,
With battle plucking round its ragged flanks;
Obstruction in the van; insane excess
Oft at the heart; yet hard the onward stress
Unto more spacious, where move ordered ra..."></div>
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