lordly

O no, the wary Nature sends a new troop of fairer forms, of lordlier youths, with a little more excess of direction to hold them fast to their several aim; makes them a little wrongheaded in that direction in which they are rightest, and on goes the game again with new whirl, for a generation or two more.

Including forms that reach beyond themselves--in prosodic terms, forms that escape their normative couplet structure--to expose another kind of generative rhythm: Nor any memory of thee anywhere; For never Muse has bound about thine hair The high Pierian flower whose graft outgrows All summer kinship of the summer rose And colour of deciduous days, nor shed Reflex and flush of heaven about thine head, Nor reddened brows made pale by floral grief With splendid shadow from that lordlier leaf.

As the historian Golo Mann notes in his brief, brilliant paragraph on George, he "taught the German language a steep, sometimes bewitchingly beautiful artistry," but "to be lordlier than one's time, to sit in judgment over it with priestly gestures, for this, sooner or later, one will be punished."