I Grant you Ample Leave

Eliot, George (1819 - 1880)

Original Text

Bernard J. Paris, "George Eliot's Unpublished Poetry," Studies in Philology 56 (1959): 544-45. Yale University Library MS Vault, Eliot 7, p. 7.

1"I grant you ample leave

2To use the hoary formula 'I am'

3Naming the emptiness where thought is not;

4But fill the void with definition, 'I'

5Will be no more a datum than the words

6You link false inference with, the 'Since' & 'so'

7That, true or not, make up the atom-whirl.

8Resolve your 'Ego', it is all one web

9With vibrant ether clotted into worlds:

10Your subject, self, or self-assertive 'I'

11Turns nought but object, melts to molecules,

12Is stripped from naked Being with the rest

13Of those rag-garments named the Universe.

14Or if, in strife to keep your 'Ego' strong

15You make it weaver of the etherial light,

16Space, motion, solids & the dream of Time --

17Why, still 'tis Being looking from the dark,

18The core, the centre of your consciousness,

19That notes your bubble-world: sense, pleasure, pain,

20What are they but a shifting otherness,

21Phantasmal flux of moments? --"

Publication Start Year

1959

RPO poem Editors

Ian Lancashire

RPO Edition

2001

Rhyme