<div style="background:#fff;border:#bbb dashed 1px;padding:5px"><a href="http://en.citatepedia.ro/comments.php?id=396949" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none"><div style="margin:10px 0"><strong>The Woods Of Westermain</strong></div><div style="margin:10px 0">I</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Enter these enchanted woods,<br>You who dare.<br>Nothing harms beneath the leaves<br>More than waves a swimmer cleaves.<br>Toss your heart up with the lark,<br>Foot at peace with mouse and worm,<br>Fair you fare.<br>Only at a dread of dark<br>Quaver, and they quit their form:<br>Thousand eyeballs under hoods<br>Have you by the hair.<br>Enter these enchanted woods,<br>You who dare.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">II</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Here the snake across your path<br>Stretches in his golden bath:<br>Mossy-footed squirrels leap<br>Soft as winnowing plumes of Sleep:<br>Yaffles on a chuckle skim<br>Low to laugh from branches dim:<br>Up the pine, where sits the star,<br>Rattles deep the moth-winged jar.<br>Each has business of his own;<br>But should you distrust a tone,<br>Then beware.<br>Shudder all the haunted roods,<br>All the eyeballs under hoods<br>Shroud you in their glare.<br>Enter these enchanted woods,<br>You who dare.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">III</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Open hither, open hence,<br>Scarce a bramble weaves a fence,<br>Where the strawberry runs red,<br>With white star-flower overhead;<br>Cumbered by dry twig and cone,<br>Shredded husks of seedlings flown,<br>Mine of mole and spotted flint:<br>Of dire wizardry no hint,<br>Save mayhap the print that shows<br>Hasty outward-tripping toes,<br>Heels to terror on the mould.<br>These, the woods of Westermain,<br>Are as others to behold,<br>Rich of wreathing sun and rain;<br>Foliage lustreful around<br>Shadowed leagues of slumbering sound.<br>Wavy tree-tops, yellow whins,<br>Shelter eager minikins,<br>Myriads, free to peck and pipe:<br>Would you better? would you worse?<br>You with them may gather ripe<br>Pleasures flowing not from purse.<br>Quick and far as Colour flies<br>Taking the delighted eyes,<br>You of any well that springs<br>May unfold the heaven of things;<br>Have it homely and within,<br>And thereof its likeness win,<br>Will you so in soul's desire:<br>This do sages grant t' the lyre.<br>This is being bird and more,<br>More than glad musician this;<br>Granaries you will have a store<br>Past the world of woe and bliss;<br>Sharing still its bliss and woe;<br>Harnessed to its hungers, no.<br>On the throne Success usurps,<br>You shall seat the joy you feel<br>Where a race of water chirps,<br>Twisting hues of flourished steel:<br>Or where light is caught in hoop<br>Up a clearing's leafy rise,<br>Where the crossing deerherds troop<br>Classic splendours, knightly dyes.<br>Or, where old-eyed oxen chew<br>Speculation with the cud,<br>Read their pool of vision through,<br>Back to hours when mind was mud;<br>Nigh the knot, which did untwine<br>Timelessly to drowsy suns;<br>Seeing Earth a slimy spine,<br>Heaven a space for winging tons.<br>Farther, deeper, may you read,<br>Have you sight for things afield,<br>Where peeps she, the Nurse of seed,<br>Cloaked, but in the peep revealed;<br>Showing a kind face and sweet:<br>Look you with the soul you see't.<br>Glory narrowing to grace,<br>Grace to glory magnified,<br>Following that will you embrace<br>Close in arms or aery wide.<br>Banished is the white Foam-born<br>Not from here, nor under ban<br>Phoebus lyrist, Phoebe's horn,<br>Pipings of the reedy Pan.<br>Loved of Earth of old they were,<br>Loving did interpret her;<br>And the sterner worship bars<br>None whom Song has made her stars.<br>You have seen the huntress moon<br>Radiantly facing dawn,<br>Dusky meads between them strewn<br>Glimmering like downy awn:<br>Argent Westward glows the hunt,<br>East the blush about to climb;<br>One another fair they front,<br>Transient, yet outshine the time;<br>Even as dewlight off the rose<br>In the mind a jewel sows.<br>Thus opposing grandeurs live<br>Here if Beauty be their dower:<br>Doth she of her spirit give,<br>Fleetingness will spare her flower.<br>This is in the tune we play,<br>Which no spring of strength would quell;<br>In subduing does not slay;<br>Guides the channel, guards the well:<br>Tempered holds the young blood-heat,<br>Yet through measured grave accord,<br>Hears the heart of wildness beat<br>Like a centaur's hoof on sward.<br>Drink the sense the notes infuse,<br>You a larger self will find:<br>Sweetest fellowship ensues<br>With the creatures of your kind.<br>Ay, and Love, if Love it be<br>Flaming over I and ME,<br>Love meet they who do not shove<br>Cravings in the van of Love.<br>Courtly dames are here to woo,<br>Knowing love if it be true.<br>Reverence the blossom-shoot<br>Fervently, they are the fruit.<br>Mark them stepping, hear them talk,<br>Goddess, is no myth inane,<br>You will say of those who walk<br>In the woods of Westermain.<br>Waters that from throat and thigh<br>Dart the sun his arrows back;<br>Leaves that on a woodland sigh<br>Chat of secret things no lack;<br>Shadowy branch-leaves, waters clear,<br>Bare or veiled they move sincere;<br>Not by slavish terrors tripped<br>Being anew in nature dipped,<br>Growths of what they step on, these;<br>With the roots the grace of trees.<br>Casket-breasts they give, nor hide,<br>For a tyrant's flattered pride,<br>Mind, which nourished not by light,<br>Lurks the shuffling trickster sprite:<br>Whereof are strange tales to tell;<br>Some in blood writ, tombed in bell.<br>Here the ancient battle ends,<br>Joining two astonished friends,<br>Who the kiss can give and take<br>With more warmth than in that world<br>Where the tiger claws the snake,<br>Snake her tiger clasps infurled,<br>And the issue of their fight<br>People lands in snarling plight.<br>Here her splendid beast she leads<br>Silken-leashed and decked with weeds<br>Wild as he, but breathing faint<br>Sweetness of unfelt constraint.<br>Love, the great volcano, flings<br>Fires of lower Earth to sky;<br>Love, the sole permitted, sings<br>Sovereignly of ME and I.<br>Bowers he has of sacred shade,<br>Spaces of superb parade,<br>Voiceful . . . But bring you a note<br>Wrangling, howsoe'er remote,<br>Discords out of discord spin<br>Round and round derisive din:<br>Sudden will a pallor pant<br>Chill at screeches miscreant;<br>Owls or spectres, thick they flee;<br>Nightmare upon horror broods;<br>Hooded laughter, monkish glee,<br>Gaps the vital air.<br>Enter these enchanted woods<br>You who dare.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">IV</div><div style="margin:10px 0">You must love the light so well<br>That no darkness will seem fell.<br>Love it so you could accost<br>Fellowly a livid ghost.<br>Whish! the phantom wisps away,<br>Owns him smoke to cocks of day.<br>In your breast the light must burn<br>Fed of you, like corn in quern<br>Ever plumping while the wheel<br>Speeds the mill and drains the meal.<br>Light to light sees little strange,<br>Only features heavenly new;<br>Then you touch the nerve of Change,<br>Then of Earth you have the clue;<br>Then her two-sexed meanings melt<br>Through you, wed the thought and felt.<br>Sameness locks no scurfy pond<br>Here for Custom, crazy-fond:<br>Change is on the wing to bud<br>Rose in brain from rose in blood.<br>Wisdom throbbing shall you see<br>Central in complexity;<br>From her pasture 'mid the beasts<br>Rise to her ethereal feasts,<br>Not, though lightnings track your wit<br>Starward, scorning them you quit:<br>For be sure the bravest wing<br>Preens it in our common spring,<br>Thence along the vault to soar,<br>You with others, gathering more,<br>Glad of more, till you reject<br>Your proud title of elect,<br>Perilous even here while few<br>Roam the arched greenwood with you.<br>Heed that snare.<br>Muffled by his cavern-cowl<br>Squats the scaly Dragon-fowl,<br>Who was lord ere light you drank,<br>And lest blood of knightly rank<br>Stream, let not your fair princess<br>Stray: he holds the leagues in stress,<br>Watches keenly there.<br>Oft has he been riven; slain<br>Is no force in Westermain.<br>Wait, and we shall forge him curbs,<br>Put his fangs to uses, tame,<br>Teach him, quick as cunning herbs,<br>How to cure him sick and lame.<br>Much restricted, much enringed,<br>Much he frets, the hooked and winged,<br>Never known to spare.<br>'Tis enough: the name of Sage<br>Hits no thing in nature, nought;<br>Man the least, save when grave Age<br>From yon Dragon guards his thought.<br>Eye him when you hearken dumb<br>To what words from Wisdom come.<br>When she says how few are by<br>Listening to her, eye his eye.<br>Self, his name declare.<br>Him shall Change, transforming late,<br>Wonderously renovate.<br>Hug himself the creature may:<br>What he hugs is loathed decay.<br>Crying, slip thy scales, and slough!<br>Change will strip his armour off;<br>Make of him who was all maw,<br>Inly only thrilling-shrewd,<br>Such a servant as none saw<br>Through his days of dragonhood.<br>Days when growling o'er his bone,<br>Sharpened he for mine and thine;<br>Sensitive within alone;<br>Scaly as the bark of pine.<br>Change, the strongest son of Life,<br>Has the Spirit here to wife.<br>Lo, their young of vivid breed,<br>Bear the lights that onward speed,<br>Threading thickets, mounting glades,<br>Up the verdurous colonnades,<br>Round the fluttered curves, and down,<br>Out of sight of Earth's blue crown,<br>Whither, in her central space,<br>Spouts the Fount and Lure o' the chase.<br>Fount unresting, Lure divine!<br>There meet all: too late look most.<br>Fire in water hued as wine,<br>Springs amid a shadowy host,<br>Circled: one close-headed mob,<br>Breathless, scanning divers heaps,<br>Where a Heart begins to throb,<br>Where it ceases, slow, with leaps.<br>And 'tis very strange, 'tis said,<br>How you spy in each of them<br>Semblance of that Dragon red,<br>As the oak in bracken-stem.<br>And, 'tis said, how each and each:<br>Which commences, which subsides:<br>First my Dragon! doth beseech<br>Her who food for all provides.<br>And she answers with no sign;<br>Utters neither yea nor nay;<br>Fires the water hued as wine;<br>Kneads another spark in clay.<br>Terror is about her hid;<br>Silence of the thunders locked;<br>Lightnings lining the shut lid;<br>Fixity on quaking rocked.<br>Lo, you look at Flow and Drought<br>Interflashed and interwrought:<br>Ended is begun, begun<br>Ended, quick as torrents run.<br>Young Impulsion spouts to sink;<br>Luridness and lustre link;<br>'Tis your come and go of breath;<br>Mirrored pants the Life, the Death;<br>Each of either reaped and sown:<br>Rosiest rosy wanes to crone.<br>See you so? your senses drift;<br>'Tis a shuttle weaving swift.<br>Look with spirit past the sense,<br>Spirit shines in permanence.<br>That is She, the view of whom<br>Is the dust within the tomb,<br>Is the inner blush above,<br>Look to loathe, or look to love;<br>Think her Lump, or know her Flame;<br>Dread her scourge, or read her aim;<br>Shoot your hungers from their nerve;<br>Or, in her example, serve.<br>Some have found her sitting grave;<br>Laughing, some; or, browed with sweat,<br>Hurling dust of fool and knave<br>In a hissing smithy's jet.<br>More it were not well to speak;<br>Burn to see, you need but seek.<br>Once beheld she gives the key<br>Airing every doorway, she.<br>Little can you stop or steer<br>Ere of her you are the seer.<br>On the surface she will witch,<br>Rendering Beauty yours, but gaze<br>Under, and the soul is rich<br>Past computing, past amaze.<br>Then is courage that endures<br>Even her awful tremble yours.<br>Then, the reflex of that Fount<br>Spied below, will Reason mount<br>Lordly and a quenchless force,<br>Lighting Pain to its mad source,<br>Scaring Fear till Fear escapes,<br>Shot through all its phantom shapes.<br>Then your spirit will perceive<br>Fleshly seed of fleshly sins;<br>Where the passions interweave,<br>How the serpent tangle spins<br>Of the sense of Earth misprised,<br>Brainlessly unrecognized;<br>She being Spirit in her clods,<br>Footway to the God of Gods.<br>Then for you are pleasures pure,<br>Sureties as the stars are sure:<br>Not the wanton beckoning flags<br>Which, of flattery and delight,<br>Wax to the grim Habit-Hags<br>Riding souls of men to night:<br>Pleasures that through blood run sane,<br>Quickening spirit from the brain.<br>Each of each in sequent birth,<br>Blood and brain and spirit, three,<br>(Say the deepest gnomes of Earth),<br>Join for true felicity.<br>Are they parted, then expect<br>Some one sailing will be wrecked:<br>Separate hunting are they sped,<br>Scan the morsel coveted.<br>Earth that Triad is: she hides<br>Joy from him who that divides;<br>Showers it when the three are one<br>Glassing her in union.<br>Earth your haven, Earth your helm,<br>You command a double realm;<br>Labouring here to pay your debt,<br>Till your little sun shall set;<br>Leaving her the future task:<br>Loving her too well to ask.<br>Eglantine that climbs the yew,<br>She her darkest wreathes for those<br>Knowing her the Ever-new,<br>And themselves the kin o' the rose.<br>Life, the chisel, axe and sword,<br>Wield who have her depths explored:<br>Life, the dream, shall be their robe<br>Large as air about the globe;<br>Life, the question, hear its cry<br>Echoed with concordant Why;<br>Life, the small self-dragon ramped,<br>Thrill for service to be stamped.<br>Ay, and over every height<br>Life for them shall wave a wand:<br>That, the last, where sits affright,<br>Homely shows the stream beyond.<br>Love the light and be its lynx,<br>You will track her and attain;<br>Read her as no cruel Sphinx<br>In the woods of Westermain,<br>Daily fresh the woods are ranged;<br>Glooms which otherwhere appal,<br>Sounded: here, their worths exchanged<br>Urban joins with pastoral:<br>Little lost, save what may drop<br>Husk-like, and the mind preserves.<br>Natural overgrowths they lop,<br>Yet from nature neither swerves,<br>Trained or savage: for this cause:<br>Of our Earth they ply the laws,<br>Have in Earth their feeding root,<br>Mind of man and bent of brute.<br>Hear that song; both wild and ruled.<br>Hear it: is it wail or mirth?<br>Ordered, bubbled, quite unschooled?<br>None, and all: it springs of Earth.<br>O but hear it! 'tis the mind;<br>Mind that with deep Earth unites,<br>Round the solid trunk to wind<br>Rings of clasping parasites.<br>Music have you there to feed<br>Simplest and most soaring need.<br>Free to wind, and in desire<br>Winding, they to her attached<br>Feel the trunk a spring of fire,<br>And ascend to heights unmatched,<br>Whence the tidal world is viewed<br>As a sea of windy wheat,<br>Momently black, barren, rude;<br>Golden-brown, for harvest meet,<br>Dragon-reaped from folly-sown;<br>Bride-like to the sickle-blade:<br>Quick it varies, while the moan,<br>Moan of a sad creature strayed,<br>Chiefly is its voice. So flesh<br>Conjures tempest-flails to thresh<br>Good from worthless. Some clear lamps<br>Light it; more of dead marsh-damps.<br>Monster is it still, and blind,<br>Fit but to be led by Pain.<br>Glance we at the paths behind,<br>Fruitful sight has Westermain.<br>There we laboured, and in turn<br>Forward our blown lamps discern,<br>As you see on the dark deep<br>Far the loftier billows leap,<br>Foam for beacon bear.<br>Hither, hither, if you will,<br>Drink instruction, or instil,<br>Run the woods like vernal sap,<br>Crying, hail to luminousness!<br>But have care.<br>In yourself may lurk the trap:<br>On conditions they caress.<br>Here you meet the light invoked<br>Here is never secret cloaked.<br>Doubt you with the monster's fry<br>All his orbit may exclude;<br>Are you of the stiff, the dry,<br>Cursing the not understood;<br>Grasp you with the monster's claws;<br>Govern with his truncheon-saws;<br>Hate, the shadow of a grain;<br>You are lost in Westermain:<br>Earthward swoops a vulture sun,<br>Nighted upon carrion:<br>Straightway venom wine-cups shout<br>Toasts to One whose eyes are out:<br>Flowers along the reeling floor<br>Drip henbane and hellebore:<br>Beauty, of her tresses shorn,<br>Shrieks as nature's maniac:<br>Hideousness on hoof and horn<br>Tumbles, yapping in her track:<br>Haggard Wisdom, stately once,<br>Leers fantastical and trips:<br>Allegory drums the sconce,<br>Impiousness nibblenips.<br>Imp that dances, imp that flits,<br>Imp o' the demon-growing girl,<br>Maddest! whirl with imp o' the pits<br>Round you, and with them you whirl<br>Fast where pours the fountain-rout<br>Out of Him whose eyes are out:<br>Multitudes on multitudes,<br>Drenched in wallowing devilry:<br>And you ask where you may be,<br>In what reek of a lair<br>Given to bones and ogre-broods:<br>And they yell you Where.<br>Enter these enchanted woods,<br>You who dare.</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> <img src="https://www.citatepedia.ro/g/32share.png" style="float:left" alt="Share"> <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=396949" data-title="The Woods Of Westermain de George Meredith" data-description="I Enter these enchanted woods, You who dare. Nothing harms beneath the leaves More than waves a swimmer cleaves. Toss your heart up with the lark, Foot at peace with mouse and worm, Fair you fare. Only at a dread of dark Quaver, and they quit the..."></div> </div> </div>

solid border dashed border dotted border double border groove border ridge border inset border outset border no border blue green red purple cyan gold silver black