All 6 Uses of
poise
in
Middlemarch
- …finds itself able and at ease: he was enamoured of that arduous invention which is the very eye of research, provisionally framing its object and correcting it to more and more exactness of relation; he wanted to pierce the obscurity of those minute processes which prepare human misery and joy, those invisible thoroughfares which are the first lurking-places of anguish, mania, and crime, that delicate poise and transition which determine the growth of happy or unhappy consciousness.†
Chpt 2
- It seemed clear that where there was a baby, things were right enough, and that error, in general, was a mere lack of that central poising force.†
Chpt 5
- We should not grieve, should we, baby?" said Celia confidentially to that unconscious centre and poise of the world, who had the most remarkable fists all complete even to the nails, and hair enough, really, when you took his cap off, to make—you didn't know what:—in short, he was Bouddha in a Western form.†
Chpt 5
- But he held her waist with one hand and laid the other gently on both of hers; for this rather abrupt man had much tenderness in his manners towards women, seeming to have always present in his imagination the weakness of their frames and the delicate poise of their health both in body and mind.†
Chpt 7
- Lydgate, by betting on his own strokes, had won sixteen pounds; but young Hawley's arrival had changed the poise of things.†
Chpt 7 *
- He was fuming under a repressive law which he was forced to acknowledge: he was dangerously poised, and Rosamond's voice now brought the decisive vibration.†
Chpt 8
Definition:
-
(poise) calm and in control -- as in "shows poise under pressure"
and/or:
prepared for action -- as in "poised for action" -- (sometimes suspended or hovering as in "a finger poised over the mute button")
and/or:
confident and graceful in movement -- as in "the poise and balance of a dancer"