Lucifer in Starlight

On a starred night Prince Lucifer uprose.
Tired of his dark dominion swung the fiend
Above the rolling ball in cloud part screened,
Where sinners hugged their spectre of repose.
Poor prey to his hot fit of pride were those.
And now his huge bulk o'er Afric's sands careened,
Now the black planet shadowed Arctic snows.
Soaring through wider zones that pricked his scars
With memory of the old revolt from Awe,
He reached a middle height, and at the stars,
Which are the brain of heaven, he looked and sank.
Around the ancient track marched, rank on rank,
The army of unalterable law.

George Meredith (1828-1909) is best known as the author of The Egoist and Diana of the Crossways. His poetry, however, notably the poems from Modern Love, is emerging from long eclipse, and this selection reveals the diversity and originality of one of the most influential writers of his time.

`His note was trenchant, turning kind,' Thomas Hardy wrote of him. The trenchancy was characteristic of his critical perspective on an age disoriented by a prosperity which had entailed severe moral and spiritual losses. The kindness was extended to those writers in whom he perceived excellence or the promise of it. Though he read for the bar, he turned for his living to journalism and to reading for the publishers Chapman and Hall. It was in these capacities that his influence was felt.

In his introduction to this edition, Keith Hanley, Lecturer in English at Lancaster University, describes Meredith's distinctive naturalism and shows how the poetry is `designed to amplify and frame' these human values. `Only a few read my verse, and yet it is that for which I most care,' he said in old age. It is in his poetry that he invested most of himself, and over a very long period.

Thomas Hardy, Robert Lowell and Tony Harrison are just three poets who have learned something from his emotional complexity and formal control. And the`Meredithian sonnet' has certainly not been exhausted as a modern form.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Principal Editions of Meredith's Poetry

Note on This Edition



from Poems (1851)

   Song: Spring



from Modern Love and Poems of the English Roadside with Poems and Ballads (1862)

   The Meeting

   The Promise in Disturbance

   Modern Love

   The Old Chartist

   I Chafe at Darkness

   Ode to the Spirit of Earth in Autumn



from Poems and Lyrics of the Joy of Earth (1883)

   A Ballad of Past Meridian

   The Lark Ascending

   Love in the Valley

   The Orchard and the Heath

   Lucifer in Starlight

   A later Alexandrian





from Ballads and Poems of Tragic Life (1887)

  King Harald's Trance



from A Reading of Earth (1888)

   Hard Weather

   The Thrush in February

   Outer and Inner

   Dirge in Woods

   Change in Recurrence

   Hymm to Colour



from Modern Love, A reprint, to which si added the Sage Enamoured and the Honest Lady (1892)

   The Lesson of Grief





from Poems: The Empty Purse, with Odes to the Comic Spirit, to Youth in Memory, and Verse (1892)

   Night of Frost in May



from A Reading of Life with Other Poems

  Song in the Songless



Poems left unpublished

In the Woods

The Fair Bedfellow

Aimee



Appendix

Love in the Valley

   (First version, from Poems, 1851)



NOtes

Selected Bibliography

Index of first lines