Tyler van Opstal- Some brief notes on Meredith’s Lucifer in Starlight

    Forever the bridesmaid and never the bride, George Meredith (1828-1909) remained stuck on the edge of literary renown throughout his career. A novelist and poet, he received seven nominations for the Nobel Prize in Literature and won none of them. He was a respected contemporary of Oscar Wilde and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (who paid homage to him in a Sherlock story), and an influence of Robert Louis Stevenson, three men who have greatly outstripped him in fame and prestige in the century following his death. While he does have some respect amongst academic circles for works including The Ordeal of Richard Feverel: A History of Father and Son (1859) which is considered to be one of the first examples of a modern English novel and The Egoist (1879) which is a lauded tragicomedy, his readership among modern lay readers is low. I have read no prose works of his myself. Perhaps this would not have bothered him too greatly however, as he considered his own greatest works to be his poetry which he began publishing in earnest after 1880. In one of these collections, Poems and Lyrics of the Joy of Earth (1883) there is a poem that I enjoy greatly, entitled “Lucifer in Starlight,” printed below. 

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. 

 

    The poem, which portrays the cosmos as heaven and the stars as both the brain of heaven and the ranks of soldiering angels, surrounding the earth and always shining down upon it, brings to my mind several other works published many years after Poems and Lyrics, particularly C.S. Lewis’ description of the cosmos in Out of the Silent Planet (1938). The protagonist of that novel (Ransom), when he is in space for the first time, exclaims “No: Space was the wrong name. Older thinkers had been wiser when they named it simply the heavens... Where day never shuts his eye up in the broad fields of the sky.” Like Meredith’s Lucifer, when Ransom reaches the “middle height” he is stricken by the power of the cosmos, and like Lucifer it is determined by Ransom that the stars, which never shut their eyes, are an unalterable army of heaven. Unlike Lucifer, however, Ransom is left awed but does not sink at the realization. He lacks the scars from the revolt (or at least he believes so, when he arrives on the planet of Malacandra he learns that he is scarred just as Lucifer is) and instead displays the entirely human trait of noticing unstoppable power and flying at full speed into it. 

Quotes from  

Meredith, George. “Lucifer in Starlight: https://www.lieder.net/lieder/get_text.html?TextId=46406  (the poem has been set to music by several composers) 

Lewis, C.S. The Space Trilogy. Three books in one volume. PDF copy of unspecified publisher.