Home ⇒ 📌George Meredith ⇒ Lucifer in Starlight
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 upon his western wing he leaned,
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.
(2 votes, average: 3.00 out of 5)
Related poetry:
- Operation Memory We were smoking some of this knockout weed when Operation Memory was announced. To his separate bed Each soldier went, counting backwards from a hundred With a needle in his arm. And there I was, in the middle Of a recession, in the middle of a strange city, between jobs And apartments and wives. Nobody […]...
- The Starlight Night Look at the stars! look, look up at the skies! O look at all the fire-folk sitting in the air! The bright boroughs, the circle-citadels there! Down in dim woods the diamond delves! the elves’-eyes! The grey lawns cold where gold, where quickgold lies! Wind-beat whitebeam! airy abeles set on a flare! Flake-doves sent floating […]...
- Tombstones in the Starlight I. The Minor Poet His little trills and chirpings were his best. No music like the nightingale’s was born Within his throat; but he, too, laid his breast Upon a thorn. II. The Pretty Lady She hated bleak and wintry things alone. All that was warm and quick, she loved too well- A light, a […]...
- The Brain is wider than the Sky The Brain is wider than the Sky For put them side by side The one the other will contain With ease and You beside The Brain is deeper than the sea For hold them Blue to Blue The one the other will absorb As Sponges Buckets do The Brain is just the weight of God […]...
- Victory All night the ways of Heaven were desolate, Long roads across a gleaming empty sky. Outcast and doomed and driven, you and I, Alone, serene beyond all love or hate, Terror or triumph, were content to wait, We, silent and all-knowing. Suddenly Swept through the heaven low-crouching from on high, One horseman, downward to the […]...
- Hymn to Lucifer Ware, nor of good nor ill, what aim hath act? Without its climax, death, what savour hath Life? an impeccable machine, exact He paces an inane and pointless path To glut brute appetites, his sole content How tedious were he fit to comprehend Himself! More, this our noble element Of fire in nature, love in […]...
- Sonnet CXXII Thy gift, thy tables, are within my brain Full character’d with lasting memory, Which shall above that idle rank remain Beyond all date, even to eternity; Or at the least, so long as brain and heart Have faculty by nature to subsist; Till each to razed oblivion yield his part Of thee, thy record never […]...
- Sonnet 122: Thy gift, thy tables, are within my brain Thy gift, thy tables, are within my brain Full charactered with lasting memory, Which shall above that idle rank remain Beyond all date even to eternity- Or at the least, so long as brain and heart Have faculty by nature to subsist; Till each to razed oblivion yield his part Of thee, thy record never […]...
- Daybreak On the tidal mud, just before sunset, Dozens of starfishes Were creeping. It was As though the mud were a sky And enormous, imperfect stars Moved across it as slowly As the actual stars cross heaven. All at once they stopped, And, as if they had simply Increased their receptivity To gravity, they sank down […]...
- Will There Be Starlight Will there be starlight Tonight While she gathers Damask And lilac And sweet-scented heathers? And will she find flowers, Or will she find thorns Guarding the petals Of roses unborn? Will there be starlight Tonight While she gathers Seashells And mussels And albatross feathers? And will she find treasure Or will she find pain At […]...
- September I, from a window where the Meuse is wide, Looked eastward out to the September night; The men that in the hopeless battle died Rose, and deployed, and stationed for the fight; A brumal army, vague and ordered large For mile on mile by some pale general,- I saw them lean by companies to the […]...
- The Bandit Upon his way to rob a Bank He paused to watch a fire; Though crowds were pressing rank on rank He pushed a passage nigher; Then sudden heard, piercing and wild, The screaming of a child. A Public Enemy was he, A hater of the law; He looked around for bravery But only fear he […]...
- Like A Flower In The Rain I cut the middle fingernail of the middle Finger Right hand Real short And I began rubbing along her cunt As she sat upright in bed Spreading lotion over her arms Face And breasts After bathing. Then she lit a cigarette: “don’t let this put you off,” An smoked and continued to rub The lotion […]...
- The Choral Union He staggered in from night and frost and fog And lampless streets: he’d guzzled like a hog And drunk till he was dazed. And now he came To hear-he couldn’t call to mind the name – But he’d been given a ticket for the show, And thought he’d (hiccup) chance his luck and go. The […]...
- God's Skallywags The God of Scribes looked down and saw The bitter band of seven, Who had outraged his holy law And lost their hope of Heaven: Came Villon, petty thief and pimp, And obscene Baudelaire, And Byron with his letcher limp, And Poe with starry stare. And Wilde who lived his hell on earth, And Burns, […]...
- The Rose Of Peace If Michael, leader of God’s host When Heaven and Hell are met, Looked down on you from Heaven’s door-post He would his deeds forget. Brooding no more upon God’s wars In his divine homestead, He would go weave out of the stars A chaplet for your head. And all folk seeing him bow down, And […]...
- The Creation And God stepped out on space, And he looked around and said: I’m lonely I’ll make me a world. And far as the eye of God could see Darkness covered everything, Blacker than a hundred midnights Down in a cypress swamp. Then God smiled, And the light broke, And the darkness rolled up on one […]...
- This Is A Poem I Wrote At Night, Before The Dawn This is a poem I wrote before I died and was reborn: – After the years of the apples ripening and the eagles soaring, After the festival here the small flowers gleamed like the first stars, And the horses cantered and romped away like the experience of skill; mastered and serene Power, grasped and governed […]...
- The Sun and Moon must make their haste The Sun and Moon must make their haste The Stars express around For in the Zones of Paradise The Lord alone is burned His Eye, it is the East and West The North and South when He Do concentrate His Countenance Like Glow Worms, flee away Oh Poor and Far Oh Hindred Eye That hunted […]...
- The Dream I WOKE to find my pillow wet With the tears for deeds deep hid in sleep. I knew no sorrow here, but yet The tears fell softly through the deep. Your eyes, your other eyes of dream, Looked at me through the veil of blank; I saw their joyous, starlit gleam Like one who watches […]...
- Amateurs of Heaven Two lovers to a midnight meadow came High in the hills, to lie there hand and hand Like effigies and look up at the stars, The never-setting ones set in the North To circle the Pole in idiot majesty, And wonder what was given them to wonder. Being amateurs, they knew some of the names […]...
- A Strange Wild Song He thought he saw an Elephant That practised on a fife: He looked again, and found it was A letter from his wife. “At length I realize,” he said, “The bitterness of life!” He thought he saw a Buffalo Upon the chimney-piece: He looked again, and found it was His Sister’s Husband’s Niece. “Unless you […]...
- Beaumont and Fletcher An hour ere sudden sunset fired the west, Arose two stars upon the pale deep east. The hall of heaven was clear for night’s high feast, Yet was not yet day’s fiery heart at rest. Love leapt up from his mother’s burning breast To see those warm twin lights, as day decreased, Wax wider, till […]...
- Mr. Brain Mr Brain was a hermit dwarf who liked to eat shellfish off The moon. He liked to go into a tree then because there is a Little height to see a little further, which may reveal now the Stone, a pebble it is a twig, it is nothing under the moon that You can make […]...
- The Mad Gardener's Song He thought he saw an Elephant, That practised on a fife: He looked again, and found it was A letter from his wife. ‘At length I realise,’ he said, The bitterness of Life!’ He thought he saw a Buffalo Upon the chimney-piece: He looked again, and found it was His Sister’s Husband’s Niece. ‘Unless you […]...
- Dream Song 135: I heard said 'Cats that walk by their wild lone' I heard said ‘Cats that walk by their wild lone’ But Henry had need of friends. They disappeared Shall I follow my dream? Clothes disappeared in a backward sliding, zones Shot into view, pocked, exact & weird: Who is what he seem? I will tell you now a story about Speck: After other cuts, he […]...
- Adventure Out of the wood my White Knight came: His eyes were bright with a bitter flame, As I clung to his stirrup leather; For I was only a dreaming lad, Yet oh, what a wonderful faith I had! And the song in my heart was never so glad, As we took to the trail together. […]...
- Imagining Defeat She woke me up at dawn, Her suitcase like a little brown dog at her heels. I sat up and looked out the window At the snow falling in the stand of blackjack trees. A bus ticket in her hand. Then she brought something black up to her mouth, A plum I thought, but it […]...
- Mind Games I am a waterfall in the desert. A rain from a cloudless sky. A well known but unborn child. An insistence experience That you never had. I play mind games with your brain. When you strike the keys and remember the sea I come as indefinable memory. When you look at your watch And the […]...
- Decorations My only medals are the scars I’ve won in weary, peacetime wars, A-fighting for my little brood, To win them shelter, shoon and food; But most of all to give them faith In God’s good mercy unto death. My sons have medals gleaming bright, Proud trophies won in foreign fight; But though their crosses bravely […]...
- The Black Swan When the swans turned my sister into a swan I would go to the lake, at night, from milking: The sun would look out through the reeds like a swan, A swan’s red beak; and the beak would open And inside there was darkness, the stars and the moon. Out on the lake, a girl […]...
- Modern Love XLVIII: Their Sense 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. Behold! I looked for peace, and thought it near. Our inmost hearts had opened, each to each. We drank the pure daylight of […]...
- Nightpiece Gaunt in gloom, The pale stars their torches, Enshrouded, wave. Ghostfires from heaven’s far verges faint illume, Arches on soaring arches, Night’s sindark nave. Seraphim, The lost hosts awaken To service till In moonless gloom each lapses muted, dim, Raised when she has and shaken Her thurible. And long and loud, To night’s nave upsoaring, […]...
- High waving heather 'neath stormy blasts bending High waving heather ‘neath stormy blasts bending, Midnight and moonlight and bright shining stars, Darkness and glory rejoicingly blending, Earth rising to heaven and heaven descending, Man’s spirit away from its drear dungeon sending, Bursting the fetters and breaking the bars. All down the mountain sides wild forests lending One mighty voice to the life-giving […]...
- A House upon the Height A House upon the Height That Wagon never reached No Dead, were ever carried down No Peddler’s Cart approached Whose Chimney never smoked Whose Windows Night and Morn Caught Sunrise first and Sunset last Then held an Empty Pane Whose fate Conjecture knew No other neighbor did And what it was we never lisped Because […]...
- Science-fiction Cradlesong By and by Man will try To get out into the sky, Sailing far beyond the air From Down and Here to Up and There. Stars and sky, sky and stars Make us feel the prison bars. Suppose it done. Now we ride Closed in steel, up there, outside Through our port-holes see the vast […]...
- The Tenor Man Pottering around the stage, A hyperactive ancient in his own backyard – Independent of the band it seems. Disrhythmic shuffling of ashtray, Beer, a pack of cigarettes, Adjusting microphones, Then in the middle eight He draws, exhales, and catches breath, Stoops forward to the mouthpiece And blows, a tumbling counterpoint, Scales soaring from his horn. […]...
- Grand-Père And so when he reached my bed The General made a stand: “My brave young fellow,” he said, “I would shake your hand.” So I lifted my arm, the right, With never a hand at all; Only a stump, a sight Fit to appal. “Well, well. Now that’s too bad! That’s sorrowful luck,” he said; […]...
- Sonnet 15: When I consider every thing that grows When I consider every thing that grows Holds in perfection but a little moment. That this huge stage presenteth nought but shows Whereon the stars in secret influence comment. When I perceive that men as plants increase, Cheerèd and checked even by the self-same sky, Vaunt in their youthful sap, at height decrease, And wear […]...
- Hawker, the Standard Bearer The grey gull sat on a floating whale, On a floating whale sat he, And he told his tale of the storm and the gale, And the ships that he saw with steam and sail, As he flew by the Northern Sea. “I have seen a sign that is strange and new, That I never […]...