I grant you ample leave
George Eliot’s poem “I Grant You Ample Leave” was never published in her lifetime, but seems to have been written around 1874. It was published posthumously in Bernard J. Paris’ study “George Eliot’s Unpublished Poetry”, which appeared in “Studies in Philology 56” in 1959.
Known by her pen name George Eliot, Mary Ann Evans was born on 22 November 1819 in Nuneaton, Warwickshire, England, and she died on 22 December 1880 in Chelsea, London, England, at the age of 61.Eliot was a novelist, poet, journalist, and translator. She wrote seven novels. Like Dickens and Hardy, she emerged from provincial England, and her works are known for their realism, psychological insight, sense of place and detailed depiction of the countryside.
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“I grant you ample leave To use the hoary formula ‘I am’ Naming the emptiness where thought is not; But fill the void with definition, ‘I’ Will be no more a datum than the words You link false inference with, the ‘Since’ & ‘so’ That, true or not, make up the atom-whirl. Resolve your ‘Ego’, it is all one web With vibrant ether clotted into worlds: Your subject, self, or self-assertive ‘I’ Turns nought but object, melts to molecules, Is stripped from naked Being with the rest Of those rag-garments named the Universe. Or if, in strife to keep your ‘Ego’ strong You make it weaver of the etherial light, Space, motion, solids & the dream of Time — Why, still ’tis Being looking from the dark, The core, the centre of your consciousness, That notes your bubble-world: sense, pleasure, pain, What are they but a shifting otherness, Phantasmal flux of moments? — ”