Today’s Poem: Lucifer in Starlight

George Meredith’s Paradise Lost

William Blake, Paradise Lost: Satan Calling Up His Legions, 1804 (Wikimedia Commons)

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Lucifer in Starlight 

by George Meredith 

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. 

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Seven times a nominee for the Nobel Prize in Literature (tied with Ezra Pound, exceeded only by Thomas Hardy and Andre Malraux, who were nominated twelve and fifteen times respectively without winning), the Victorian poet and novelist George Meredith (1828–1909) was once described by William Michael Rossetti, of the famous family, as “a kind of limited Keats.” His poems explore territories smaller than Keats’s lush imaginative landscapes, but also, frequently, more immediately personal. 

Their tragedies are, we might say, the most banal human tragedies: the disintegration of a marriage, for example, in Meredith’s 1862 sequence of sonnet innovations, Modern Love. It would be easy not only to damn Meredith with faint praise, as Rossetti has done, but to dismiss him altogether as a petty modern chronicler of domestic infelicity, a theme that also occupied him as a novelist. 

William Strang, George Meredith (Wikimedia Commons)

 

As a poet, however, in his sheer emotional and thematic range over a long career, Meredith invites admiration. His long poem “The Lark Ascending,” published in 1881, recalls the pastoral sublimity of his Romantic forebears, Wordsworth and Shelley, and inspired a musical interpretation by the twentieth-century English composer Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872–1958). 

Meanwhile, 1883’s “Lucifer in Starlight” seems to reach back as far as Milton, resurrecting that poet’s vast doomed protagonist as a figure for futility, in a Petrarchan sonnet so thick with evocative language — those “sinners hugg[ing] their spectre of repose,” those stars that “are the brain of heaven” — that even the dark angel’s defeat, stared down by the constellations in their fixity and the natural law, “unalterable,” that consigns him to his doom, manages to feel, if not actually triumphant, still like a triumph of beauty.  

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