Meredith's Lucifer is a restless monarch taking a night flight to escape his own kingdom. "Tired of his dark dominion," he rises over the earth, sweeps across Africa's deserts and the Arctic ice, then climbs to a middle height and looks at the stars. What he sees ends the flight. The stars are "the brain of heaven," and around them "marched, rank on rank, / The army of unalterable law." The poem's central idea is that the universe is held together by an order that cannot be argued with, and that the rebel who once defied heaven is dwarfed by it.
The octave, the first eight lines, builds Lucifer as a figure of vast, rather petty power. He looks down on "sinners" who "hugged their spectre of repose," a phrase that makes their comfort a ghost they cling to. They are "poor prey" for his "hot fit of pride," so his dominion seems to rest on weak victims and on his own temper. His movement is described in heavy, ship-like terms. He "leaned" on a wing, and his "huge bulk o'er Afric's sands careened," a verb that suggests a great hull tilting. The repeated "Now" opening three lines gives the flight a restless, sweeping rhythm, as though he is passing over the globe without finding anything to hold his interest. The "black planet" that "shadowed Arctic snows" is a little ambiguous. I read it as Lucifer himself, so huge that he becomes a dark body of his own, but either way the image is of darkness moving over white land.
The turn comes with the sestet, and it begins with a subtle shift. Rising through "wider zones," Lucifer feels his old wounds, since the space "pricked his scars / With memory of the old revolt from Awe." Capitalising "Awe" turns it into a personified power, and "revolt" recalls the traditional story of Satan's rebellion, which Milton retold in *Paradise Lost*. Meredith's version is quieter. Lucifer finds no angel host or divine throne. He looks at the stars and sinks.
That last verb is the poem's most striking moment. Line 12 is crowded with commas, "he looked, and sank," so the action drops away mid-line as if the energy has gone out of him. Meredith has already tied "soaring" to "sank," and the whole poem rises and falls with those two ideas. The stars' defining description, "the brain of heaven," is also telling. Heaven here is a mind, a system of reasoning, and not a court or a king. A rebel can fight a king, but it is much harder to rebel against a mathematical pattern.
The form reinforces this. It is a fourteen-line sonnet in iambic pentameter with a tightly interlocked rhyme scheme. The octave rhymes *abba abba*, so "uprose," "repose," "those" and "snows" frame the other rhymes like a fence. The sestet runs *cdc eed*, and its last two rhymes, "sank" and "rank," leave the final line, ending on "law," to rhyme with "Awe" back in line 10. The poem ends by echoing the word for what Lucifer once defied. Law and Awe sound alike, which suggests they are the same thing seen from different sides.
The final line is also the heaviest. "Unalterable" is a slow, five-syllable word, and after it the line stops. The earlier "marched, rank on rank" has a drumbeat of stressed syllables, a military tread that makes the stars an army, something Lucifer has no match for. Where his flight was solitary, theirs is collective, and their "ancient track" is older than his revolt.
The poem is significant because it takes a grand, familiar figure of rebellion and tests him against a different kind of authority. Satan's defeat comes from no punishment or battle, only from the sight of order that does not need to notice him. The sonnet's compression helps here. In fourteen lines it moves from earth's sands and snows to the sky, from pride to humility, and from a personal story of defiance to an impersonal picture of cosmic law. It leaves the reader with an unsettling thought, that the most powerful kind of authority may be the one that never has to speak.