Lucifer Starlit

Read this poem last night under a Borgesian spell; not quite sure what to make of it, other than being awestruck by its imagery. George Meredith’s the author, a moderately successful and quite prolific Victorian novelist and poet. I had never before heard of him until Senor Borges quotes a few lines of his. Read it slowly and carefully, allow your imagination a bit of free reign. I think it ultimately gives hope, like something out of the twentieth chapter of the Apocalypse.


On a starr’d night Prince Lucifer uprose
Tired of his dark dominion swung the fiend
Above the rolling ball in cloud part screen’d
Where sinners hugg’d their spectre of repose.
Poor prey to his hot fit of pride were those.
And now upon his western wing he lean’d,
Now his huge bulk o’er Afric’s sands careen’d,
Now the black planet shadow’d Arctic snows.
Soarning through wider zones that prick’d his scars
With memory of the old revolt from Awe,
He reach’d a middle height, and at the stars,
Which are the brain of heaven, he look’d, and sank.
Around the ancient track march’d, rank on rank,
The army of unalterable law.