We have seen mighty men ballooning high, And in another moment bump the ground. He falls; and in his measurement is found To count some inches o’er the common fry. ’Twas not enough to send him climbing sky, Yet ’twas enough above his fellows crowned, Had he less panted. Let his faithful hound Bark at detractors. He may walk or lie. Concerns it most ourselves, who with our gas— This little Isle’s insatiable greed For Continents—filled to inflation burst. So do ripe nations into squalor pass, When, driven as herds by their old private thirst, They scorn the brain’s wild search for virtuous light.
OUTSIDE THE CROWD
To sit on History in an easy chair, Still rivalling the wild hordes by whom ’twas writ! Sure, this beseems a race of laggard wit, Unwarned by those plain letters scrawled on air. If more than hands’ and armsful be our share, Snatch we for substance we see vapours flit. Have we not heard derision infinite When old men play the youth to chase the snare? Let us be belted athletes, matched for foes, Or stand aloof, the great Benevolent, The Lord of Lands no Robber-birds annex, Where Justice holds the scales with pure intent; Armed to support her sword;—lest we compose That Chapter for the historic word on Wrecks.
TRAFALGAR DAY
He leads: we hear our Seaman’s call In the roll of battles won; For he is Britain’s Admiral Till setting of her sun.
When Britain’s life was in her ships, He kept the sea as his own right; And saved us from more fell eclipse Than drops on day from blackest night. Again his battle spat the flame! Again his victory flag men saw! At sound of Nelson’s chieftain name, A deeper breath did Freedom draw.
Each trusty captain knew his part: They served as men, not marshalled kine: The pulses they of his great heart, With heads to work his main design. Their Nelson’s word, to beat the foe, And spare the fall’n, before them shone. Good was the hour of blow for blow, And clear their course while they fought on.
Behold the Envied vanward sweep!— A day in mourning weeds adored! Then Victory was wrought to weep; Then sorrow crowned with laurel soared.
A breezeless flag above a shroud All Britain was when wind and wave, To make her, passing human, proud, Brought his last gift from o’er the grave!
Uprose the soul of him a star On that brave day of Ocean days: It rolled the smoke from Trafalgár To darken Austerlitz ablaze. Are we the men of old, its light Will point us under every sky The path he took; and must we fight, Our Nelson be our battle-cry!
He leads: we hear our Seaman’s call In the roll of battles won; For he is Britain’s Admiral Till setting of her sun.
ODES IN CONTRIBUTION TO THE SONG OF FRENCH HISTORY
THE REVOLUTION
I
Not yet had History’s Aetna smoked the skies, And low the Gallic Giantess lay enchained, While overhead in ordered set and rise Her kingly crowns immutably defiled; Effulgent on funereal piled Across the vacant heavens, and distrained Her body, mutely, even as earth, to bear; Despoiled the tomb of hope, her mouth of air.
II
Through marching scores of winters racked she lay, Beneath a hoar-frost’s brilliant crust, Whereon the jewelled flies that drained Her breasts disported in a glistering spray; She, the land’s fount of fruits, enclosed with dust; By good and evil angels fed, sustained In part to curse, in part to pray, Sucking the dubious rumours, till men saw The throbs of her charged heart before the Just, So worn the harrowed surface had become: And still they deemed the dance above was Law, Amort all passion in a rebel dumb.
III
Then, on the unanticipated day, Earth heaved, and rose a veinous mound To roar of the underfloods; and off it sprang, Ravishing as red wine in woman’s form, A splendid Maenad, she of the delirious laugh, Her body twisted flames with the smoke-cap crowned; She of the Bacchic foot; the challenger to the fray, Bewitchment for the embrace; who sang, who sang Intoxication to her swarm, Revolved them, hair, voice, feet, in her carmagnole, As with a stroke she snapped the Royal staff, Dealt the awaited blow on gilt decay (O ripeness of the time! O Retribution sure, If but our vital lamp illume us to endure!) And, like a glad releasing of her soul, Sent the word Liberty up to meet the midway blue, Her bridegroom in descent to her; and they joined, In the face of men they joined: attest it true, The million witnesses, that she, For ages lying beside the mole, Was on the unanticipated miracle day Upraised to midway heaven and, as to her goal, Enfolded, ere the Immaculate knew What Lucifer of the Mint had coined His bride’s adulterate currency Of burning love corrupt of an infuriate hate; She worthy, she unworthy; that one day his mate: His mate for that one day of the unwritten deed. Read backward on the hoar-frost’s brilliant crust; Beneath it read. Athirst to kiss, athirst to slay, she stood, A radiance fringed with grim affright; For them that hungered, she was nourishing food, For those who sparkled, Night. Read in her heart, and how before the Just Her doings, her misdoings, plead.
IV
Down on her leap for him the young Angelical broke To husband a resurgent France: From whom, with her dethroning stroke, Dishonour passed; the dalliance, That is occasion’s yea or nay, In issues for the soul to pay, Discarded; and the cleft ’twixt deed and word, The sinuous lie which warbles the sweet bird, Wherein we see old Darkness peer, Cold Dissolution beck, she had flung hence; And hence the talons and the beak of prey; Hence all the lures to silken swine Thronging the troughs of indolence; With every sleek convolvement serpentine; The pride in elfin arts to veil an evil leer, And bid a goatfoot trip it like a fay. He clasped in this revived, uprisen France, A valorous dame, of countenance The lightning’s upon cloud: unlit as yet On brows and lips the lurid shine Of seas in the night-wind’s whirl; unstirred Her pouch of the centuries’ injuries compressed; The shriek that tore the world as yet unheard: Earth’s animate full flower she looked, intense For worship, wholly given him, fair Adoring or desiring; in her bright jet, Earth’s crystal spring to sky: Earth’s warrior Best To win Heaven’s Pure up that midway We vision for new ground, where sense And spirit are one for the further flight; breast-bare, Bare-limbed; nor graceless gleamed her disarray In scorn of the seductive insincere, But martially nude for hot Bellona’s play, And amorous of the loftiest in her view.
V
She sprang from dust to drink of earth’s cool dew, The breath of swaying grasses share, Mankind embrace, their weaklings rear, At wrestle with the tyrannic strong; Her forehead clear to her mate, virgin anew, As immortals may be in the mortal sphere. Read through her launching heart, who had lain long With Earth and heard till it became her own Our good Great Mother’s eve and matin song: The humming burden of Earth’s toil to feed Her creatures all, her task to speed their growth, Her aim to lead them up her pathways, shown Between the Pains and Pleasures; warned of both, Of either aided on their hard ascent. Now when she looked, with love’s benign delight After great ecstasy, along the plains, What foulest impregnation of her sight Transformed the scene to multitudinous troops Of human sketches, quaver-figures, bent, As were they winter sedges, broken hoops, Dry udder, vineless poles, worm-eaten posts, With features like the flowers defaced by deluge rains? Recked she that some perverting devil had limned Earth’s proudest to spout scorn of the Maker’s hand, Who could a day behold these deathly hosts, And see, decked, graced, and delicately trimmed, A ribanded and gemmed elected few, Sanctioned, of milk and honey starve the land:— Like melody in flesh, its pleasant game Olympianwise perform, cloak but the shame: Beautiful statures; hideous, By Christian contrast; pranked with golden chains, And flexile where is manhood straight; Mortuaries where warm should beat The brotherhood that keeps blood sweet: Who dared in cantique impious Proclaim the Just, to whom was due Cathedral gratitude in the pomp of state, For that on those lean outcasts hung the sucker Pains, On these elect the swelling Pleasures grew. Surely a devil’s land when that meant death for each! Fresh from the breast of Earth, not thus, With all the body’s life to plump the leech, Is Nature’s way, she knew. The abominable scene Spat at the skies; and through her veins, To cloud celestially sown, Ran venom of what nourishment Her dark sustainer subterrene Supplied her, stretched supine on the rack, Alive in the shrewd nerves, the seething brains, Under derisive revels, prone As one clamped fast, with the interminable senseless blent.
VI
Now was her face white waves in the tempest’s sharp flame-blink; Her skies shot black. Now was it visioned infamy to drink Of earth’s cool dew, and through the vines Frolic in pearly laughter with her young, Watching the healthful, natural, happy signs Where hands of lads and maids like tendrils clung, After their sly shy ventures from the leaf, And promised bunches. Now it seemed The world was one malarious mire, Crying for purification: chief This land of France. It seemed A duteous desire To drink of life’s hot flood, and the crimson streamed.
VII
She drank what makes man demon at the draught. Her skies lowered black, Her lover flew, There swept a shudder over men. Her heavenly lover fled her, and she laughed, For laughter was her spirit’s weapon then. The Infernal rose uncalled, he with his crew.
VIII
As mighty thews burst manacles, she went mad: Her heart a flaring torch usurped her wits. Such enemies of her next-drawn breath she had! To tread her down in her live grave beneath Their dancing floor sunned blind by the Royal wreath, They ringed her steps with crafty prison pits. Without they girdled her, made nest within. There ramped the lion, here entrailed the snake. They forced the cup to her lips when she drank blood; Believing it, in the mother’s mind at strain, In the mother’s fears, and in young Liberty’s wail Alarmed, for her encompassed children’s sake, The sole sure way to save her priceless bud. Wherewith, when power had gifted her to prevail, Vengeance appeared as logically akin. Insanely rational they; she rationally insane; And in compute of sin, was hers the appealing sin.
IX
Amid the plash of scarlet mud Stained at the mouth, drunk with our common air, Not lack of love was her defect; The Fury mourned and raged and bled for France Breathing from exultation to despair At every wild-winged hope struck by mischance Soaring at each faint gleam o’er her abyss. Heard still, to be heard while France shall stand erect, The frontier march she piped her sons, for where Her crouching outer enemy camped, Attendant on the deadlier inner’s hiss. She piped her sons the frontier march, the wine Of martial music, History’s cherished tune; And they, the saintliest labourers that aye Dropped sweat on soil for bread, took arms and tramped; High-breasted to match men or elements, Or Fortune, harsh schoolmistress with the undrilled: War’s ragged pupils; many a wavering line, Torn from the dear fat soil of champaigns hopefully tilled, Torn from the motherly bowl, the homely spoon, To jest at famine, ply The novel scythe, and stand to it on the field; Lie in the furrows, rain-clouds for their tents; Fronting the red artillery straighten spine; Buckle the shiver at sight of comrades strewn; Over an empty platter affect the merrily filled; Die, if the multiple hazards around said die; Downward measure a foeman mightily sized; Laugh at the legs that would run for a life despised; Lyrical on into death’s red roaring jaw-gape, steeled Gaily to take of the foe his lesson, and give reply. Cheerful apprentices, they shall be masters soon!
X
Lo, where hurricane flocks of the North-wind rattle their thunder Loud through a night, and at dawn comes change to the great South-west, Hounds are the hounded in clouds, waves, forests, inverted the race: Lo, in the day’s young beams the colossal invading pursuers Burst upon rocks and were foam; Ridged up a torrent crest; Crumbled to ruin, still gazing a glacial wonder; Turned shamed feet toe to heel on their track at a panic pace. Yesterday’s clarion cock scudded hen of the invalid comb; They, the triumphant tonant towering upper, were under; They, violators of home, dared hope an inviolate home; They that had stood for the stroke were the vigorous hewers; Quick as the trick of the wrist with the rapier, they the pursuers. Heavens and men amazed heard the arrogant crying for grace; Saw the once hearth-reek rabble the scourge of an army dispieced; Saw such a shift of the hunt as when Titan Olympus clomb. Fly! was the sportsman’s word; and the note of the quarry rang, Chase!
XI
Banners from South, from East, Sheaves of pale banners drooping hole and shred; The captive brides of valour, Sabine Wives Plucked from the foeman’s blushful bed, For glorious muted battle-tongues Of deeds along the horizon’s red, At cost of unreluctant lives; Her toilful heroes homeward poured, To give their fevered mother air of the lungs. She breathed, and in the breathing craved. Environed as she was, at bay, Safety she kissed on her drawn sword, And waved for victory, for fresh victory waved: She craved for victory as her daily bread; For victory as her daily banquet raved.
XII
Now had her glut of vengeance left her grey Of blood, who in her entrails fiercely tore To clutch and squeeze her snakes; herself the more Devitalizing: red washer Auroral ray; Desired if but to paint her pallid hue. The passion for that young horizon red, Which dowered her with the flags, the blazing fame, Like dotage of the past-meridian dame For some bright Sungod adolescent, swelled Insatiate, to the voracious grew, The glutton’s inward raveners bred; Till she, mankind’s most dreaded, most abhorred, Witless in her demands on Fortune, asked, As by the weaving Fates impelled, To have the thing most loathed, the iron lord, Controller and chastiser, under Victory masked.
XIII
Banners from East, from South, She hugged him in them, feared the scourge they meant, Yet blindly hugged, and hungering built his throne. So may you see the village innocent, With curtsey of shut lids and open mouth, In act to beg for sweets expect a loathly stone: See furthermore the Just in his measures weigh Her sufferings and her sins, dispense her meed. False to her bridegroom lord of the miracle day, She fell: from his ethereal home observed Through love, grown alien love, not moved to plead Against the season’s fruit for deadly Seed, But marking how she had aimed, and where she swerved, Why suffered, with a sad consenting thought. Nor would he shun her sullen look, nor monstrous hold The doer of the monstrous; she aroused, She, the long tortured, suddenly freed, distraught, More strongly the divine in him than when Joy of her as she sprang from mould Drew him the midway heavens adown To clasp her in his arms espoused Before the sight of wondering men, And put upon the day a deathless crown. The veins and arteries of her, fold in fold, His alien love laid open, to divide The martyred creature from her crimes; he knew What cowardice in her valour could reside; What strength her weakness covered; what abased Sublimity so illumining, and what raised This wallower in old slime to noblest heights, Up to the union on the midway blue:— Day that the celestial grave Recorder hangs Among dark History’s nocturnal lights, With vivid beams indicative to the quick Of all who have felt the vaulted body’s pangs Beneath a mind in hopeless soaring sick. She had forgot how, long enslaved, she yearned To the one helping hand above; Forgot her faith in the Great Undiscerned, Whereof she sprang aloft to her Angelical love That day: and he, the bright day’s husband, still with love, Though alien, though to an upper seat retired, Behold a wrangling heart, as ’twere her soul On eddies of wild waters cast; In wilderness division; fired For domination, freedom, lust, The Pleasures; lo, a witch’s snaky bowl Set at her lips; the blood-drinker’s madness fast Upon her; and therewith mistrust, Most of herself: a mouth of guile. Compassionately could he smile, To hear the mouth disclaiming God, And clamouring for the Just! Her thousand impulses, like torches, coursed City and field; and pushed abroad O’er hungry waves to thirsty sands, Flaring at further; she had grown to be The headless with the fearful hands; To slaughter, else to suicide, enforced. But he, remembering how his love began, And of what creature, pitied when was plain Another measure of captivity: The need for strap and rod; The penitential prayers again; Again the bitter bowing down to dust; The burden on the flesh for who disclaims the God, The answer when is call upon the Just. Whence her lost virtue had found refuge strode Her master, saying, ‘I only; I who can!’ And echoed round her army, now her chain. So learns the nation, closing Anarch’s reign, That she had been in travail of a Man.
NAPOLÉON
I
Cannon his name, Cannon his voice, he came. Who heard of him heard shaken hills, An earth at quake, to quiet stamped; Who looked on him beheld the will of wills, The driver of wild flocks where lions ramped: Beheld War’s liveries flee him, like lumped grass Nid-nod to ground beneath the cuffing storm; While laurelled over his Imperial form, Forth from her bearded tube of lacquey brass, Reverberant notes and long blew volant Fame. Incarnate Victory, Power manifest, Infernal or God-given to mankind, On the quenched volcano’s cusp did he take stand, A conquering army’s height above the land, Which calls that army offspring of its breast, And sees it mid the starry camps enshrined; His eye the cannon’s flame, The cannon’s cave his mind.
II
To weld the nation in a name of dread, And scatter carrion flies off wounds unhealed, The Necessitated came, as comes from out Electric ebon lightning’s javelin-head, Threatening agitation in the revealed Founts of our being; terrible with doubt, With radiance restorative. At one stride Athwart the Law he stood for sovereign sway. That Soliform made featureless beside His brilliancy who neighboured: vapour they; Vapour what postured statues barred his tread. On high in amphitheatre field on field, Italian, Egyptian, Austrian, Far heard and of the carnage discord clear, Bells of his escalading triumphs pealed In crashes on a choral chant severe, Heraldic of the authentic Charlemagne, Globe, sceptre, sword, to enfold, to rule, to smite, Make unity of the mass, Coherent or refractory, by his might.
Forth from her bearded tube of lacquey brass, Fame blew, and tuned the jangles, bent the knees Rebellious or submissive; his decrees Were thunder in those heavens and compelled: Such as disordered earth, eclipsed of stars, Endures for sign of Order’s calm return, Whereunto she is vowed; and his wreckage-spars, His harried ships, old riotous Ocean lifts alight, Subdued to splendour in his delirant churn. Glory suffused the accordant, quelled, By magic of high sovereignty, revolt: And he, the reader of men, himself unread; The name of hope, the name of dread; Bloom of the coming years or blight; An arm to hurl the bolt With aim Olympian; bore Likeness to Godhead. Whither his flashes hied Hosts fell; what he constructed held rock-fast. So did earth’s abjects deem of him that built and clove. Torch on imagination, beams he cast, Whereat they hailed him deified: If less than an eagle-speeding Jove, than Vulcan more. Or it might be a Vulcan-Jove, Europe for smithy, Europe’s floor Lurid with sparks in evanescent showers, Loud echo-clap of hammers at all hours, Our skies the reflex of its furnace blast.
III
On him the long enchained, released For bride of the miracle day up the midway blue; She from her heavenly lover fallen to serve for feast Of rancours and raw hungers; she, the untrue, Yet pitiable, not despicable, gazed. Fawning, her body bent, she gazed With eyes the moonstone portals to her heart: Eyes magnifying through hysteric tears This apparition, ghostly for belief; Demoniac or divine, but sole Over earth’s mightiest written Chief; Earth’s chosen, crowned, unchallengeable upstart: The trumpet word to awake, transform, renew; The arbiter of circumstance; High above limitations, as the spheres. Nor ever had heroical Romance, Never ensanguined History’s lengthened scroll, Shown fulminant to shoot the levin dart Terrific as this man, by whom upraised, Aggrandized and begemmed, she outstripped her peers; Like midnight’s levying brazier-beacon blazed Defiant to the world, a rally for her sons, Day of the darkness; this man’s mate; by him, Cannon his name, Rescued from vivisectionist and knave, Her body’s dominators and her shame; By him with the rivers of ranked battalions, brave Past mortal, girt: a march of swords and guns Incessant; his proved warriors; loaded dice He flung on the crested board, where chilly Fears Behold the Reaper’s ground, Death sitting grim, Awatch for his predestined ones, Mid shrieks and torrent-hooves; but these, Inebriate of his inevitable device, Hail it their hero’s wood of lustrous laurel-trees, Blossom and fruit of fresh Hesperides, The boiling life-blood in their cheers. Unequalled since the world was man they pour A spiky girdle round her; these, her sons, His cataracts at smooth holiday, soon to roar Obstruction shattered at his will or whim: Kind to her ear as quiring Cherubim, And trampling earth like scornful mastodons.
IV
The flood that swept her to be slave Adoring, under thought of being his mate, These were, and unto the visibly unexcelled, As much of heart as abjects can she gave, Or what of heart the body bears for freight When Majesty apparent overawes; By the flash of his ascending deeds upheld, Which let not feminine pride in him have pause To question where the nobler pride rebelled. She read the hieroglyphic on his brow, Felt his firm hand to wield the giant’s mace; Herself whirled upward in an eagle’s claws, Past recollection of her earthly place; And if cold Reason pressed her, called him Fate; Offering abashed the servile woman’s vow. Delirium was her virtue when the look At fettered wrists and violated laws Faith in a rectitude Supernal shook, Till worship of him shone as her last rational state, The slave’s apology for gemmed disgrace. Far in her mind that leap from earth to the ghost Midway on high; or felt as a troubled pool; Or as a broken sleep that hunts a dream half lost, Arrested and rebuked by the common school Of daily things for truancy. She could rejoice To know with wakeful eyeballs Violence Her crowned possessor, and, on every sense Incumbent, Fact, Imperial Fact, her choice, In scorn of barren visions, aims at a glassy void. Who sprang for Liberty once, found slavery sweet; And Tyranny, on alert subservience buoyed, Spurred a blood-mare immeasureably fleet To shoot the transient leagues in a passing wink, Prompt for the glorious bound at the fanged abyss’s brink. Scarce felt she that she bled when battle scored On riddled flags the further conjured line; From off the meteor gleam of his waved sword Reflected bright in permanence: she bled As the Bacchante spills her challengeing wine With whirl o’ the cup before the kiss to lip; And bade drudge History in his footprints tread, For pride of sword-strokes o’er slow penmanship: Each step of his a volume: his sharp word The shower of steel and lead Or pastoral sunshine.
V
Persistent through the brazen chorus round His thunderous footsteps on the foeman’s ground, A broken carol of wild notes was heard, As when an ailing infant wails a dream. Strange in familiarity it rang: And now along the dark blue vault might seem Winged migratories having but heaven for home, Now the lone sea-bird’s cry down shocks of foam, Beneath a ruthless paw the captive’s pang.
It sang the gift that comes from God To mind of man as air to lung. So through her days of under sod Her faith unto her heart had sung, Like bedded seed by frozen clod, With view of wide-armed heaven and buds at burst, And midway up, Earth’s fluttering little lyre. Even for a glimpse, for even a hope in chained desire The vision of it watered thirst.
VI
But whom those errant moans accused As Liberty’s murderous mother, cried accursed, France blew to deafness: for a space she mused; She smoothed a startled look, and sought, From treasuries of the adoring slave, Her surest way to strangle thought; Picturing her dread lord decree advance Into the enemy’s land; artillery, bayonet, lance; His ordering fingers point the dial’s to time their ranks: Himself the black storm-cloud, the tempest’s bayonet-glaive. Like foam-heads of a loosened freshet bursting banks, By mount and fort they thread to swamp the sluggard plains. Shines his gold-laurel sun, or cloak connivent rains. They press to where the hosts in line and square throng mute; He watchful of their form, the Audacious, the Astute; Eagle to grip the field; to work his craftiest, fox. From his brief signal, straight the stroke of the leveller falls; From him those opal puffs, those arcs with the clouded balls: He waves and the voluble scene is a quagmire shifting blocks; They clash, they are knotted, and now ’tis the deed of the axe on the log; Here away moves a spiky woodland, and yon away sweep Rivers of horse torrent-mad to the shock, and the heap over heap Right through the troughed black lines turned to bunches or shreds, or a fog Rolling off sunlight’s arrows. Not mightier Phoebus in ire, Nor deadlier Jove’s avengeing right hand, than he of the brain Keen at an enemy’s mind to encircle and pierce and constrain, Muffling his own for a fate-charged blow very Gods may admire. Sure to behold are his eagles on high where the conflict raged. Rightly, then, should France worship, and deafen the disaccord Of those who dare withstand an irresistible sword To thwart his predestined subjection of Europe. Let them submit! She said it aloud, and heard in her breast, as a singer caged, With the beat of wings at bars, Earth’s fluttering little lyre. No more at midway heaven, but liker midway to the pit: Not singing the spirally upward of rapture, the downward of pain Rather, the drop sheer downward from pressure of merciless weight.
Her strangled thought got breath, with her worship held debate; To yield and sink, yet eye askant the mark she had missed. Over the black-blue rollers of that broad Westerly main, Steady to sky, the light of Liberty glowed In a flaming pillar, that cast on the troubled waters a road For Europe to cross, and see the thing lost subsist. For there ’twas a shepherd led his people, no butcher of sheep; Firmly there the banner he first upreared Stands to rally; and nourishing grain do his children reap From a father beloved in life, in his death revered. Contemplating him and his work, shall a skyward glance Clearer sight of our dreamed and abandoned obtain; Nay, but as if seen in station above the Republic, France Had view of her one-day’s heavenly lover again; Saw him amid the bright host looking down on her; knew she had erred, Knew him her judge, knew yonder the spirit preferred; Yonder the base of the summit she strove that day to ascend, Ere cannon mastered her soul, and all dreams had end.
VII
Soon felt she in her shivered frame A bodeful drain of blood illume Her wits with frosty fire to read The dazzling wizard who would have her bleed On fruitless marsh and snows of spectral gloom For victory that was victory scarce in name. Husky his clarions laboured, and her sighs O’er slaughtered sons were heavier than the prize; Recalling how he stood by Frederic’s tomb, With Frederic’s country underfoot and spurned: There meditated; till her hope might guess, Albeit his constant star prescribe success, The savage strife would sink, the civil aim To head a mannered world breathe zephyrous Of morning after storm; whereunto she yearned; And Labour’s lovely peace, and Beauty’s courtly bloom, The mind in strenuous tasks hilarious. At such great height, where hero hero topped, Right sanely should the Grand Ascendant think No further leaps at the fanged abyss’s brink True Genius takes: be battle’s dice-box dropped!
She watched his desert features, hung to hear The honey words desired, and veiled her face; Hearing the Seaman’s name recur Wrathfully, thick with a meaning worse Than call to the march: for that inveterate Purse Could kindle the extinct, inform a vacant place, Conjure a heart into the trebly felled. It squeezed the globe, insufferably swelled To feed insurgent Europe: rear and van Were haunted by the amphibious curse; Here flesh, there phantom, livelier after rout: The Seaman piping aye to the rightabout, Distracted Europe’s Master, puffed remote Those Indies of the swift Macedonian, Whereon would Europe’s Master somewhiles doat, In dreamings on a docile universe Beneath an immarcessible Charlemagne.
Nor marvel France should veil a seer’s face, And call on darkness as a blest retreat. Magnanimously could her iron Emperor Confront submission: hostile stirred to heat All his vast enginery, allowed no halt Up withered avenues of waste-blood war, To the pitiless red mounts of fire afume, As ’twere the world’s arteries opened! Woe the race! Ask wherefore Fortune’s vile caprice should balk His panther spring across the foaming salt, From martial sands to the cliffs of pallid chalk! There is no answer: seed of black defeat She then did sow, and France nigh unto death foredoom. See since that Seaman’s epicycle sprite Engirdle, lure and goad him to the chase Along drear leagues of crimson spotting white With mother’s tears of France, that he may meet Behind suborned battalions, ranked as wheat Where peeps the weedy poppy, him of the sea; Earth’s power to baffle Ocean’s power resume; Victorious army crown o’er Victory’s fleet; And bearing low that Seaman upon knee, Stay the vexed question of supremacy, Obnoxious in the vault by Frederic’s tomb.
VIII
Poured streams of Europe’s veins the flood Full Rhine or Danube rolls off morning-tide Through shadowed reaches into crimson-dyed: And Rhine and Danube knew her gush of blood Down the plucked roots the deepest in her breast. He tossed her cordials, from his laurels pressed. She drank for dryness thirstily, praised his gifts. The blooded frame a powerful draught uplifts Writhed the devotedness her voice rang wide In cries ecstatic, as of the martyr-Blest, Their spirits issuing forth of bodies racked, And crazy chuckles, with life’s tears at feud; While near her heart the sunken sentinel Called Critic marked, and dumb in awe reviewed This torture, this anointed, this untracked To mortal source, this alien of his kind; Creator, slayer, conjuror, Solon-Mars, The cataract of the abyss, the star of stars; Whose arts to lay the senses under spell Aroused an insurrectionary mind.
IX
He, did he love her? France was his weapon, shrewd At edge, a wind in onset: he loved well His tempered weapon, with the which he hewed Clean to the ground impediments, or hacked, Sure of the blade that served the great man-miracle. He raised her, robed her, gemmed her for his bride, Did but her blood in blindness given exact. Her blood she gave, was blind to him as guide: She quivered at his word, and at his touch Was hound or steed for any mark he espied. He loved her more than little, less than much. The fair subservient of Imperial Fact Next to his consanguineous was placed In ranked esteem; above the diurnal meal, Vexatious carnal appetites above, Above his hoards, while she Imperial Fact embraced, And rose but at command from under heel. The love devolvent, the ascension love, Receptive or profuse, were fires he lacked, Whose marrow had expelled their wasteful sparks; Whose mind, the vast machine of endless haste, Took up but solids for its glowing seal. The hungry love, that fish-like creatures feel, Impelled for prize of hooks, for prey of sharks, His night’s first quarter sicklied to distaste, In warm enjoyment barely might distract. A head that held an Europe half devoured Taste in the blood’s conceit of pleasure soured. Nought save his rounding aim, the means he plied, Death for his cause, to him could point appeal. His mistress was the thing of uses tried. Frigid the netting smile on whom he wooed, But on his Policy his eye was lewd. That sharp long zig-zag into distance brooked No foot across; a shade his ire provoked. The blunder or the cruelty of a deed His Policy imperative could plead. He deemed nought other precious, nor knew he Legitimate outside his Policy. Men’s lives and works were due, from their birth’s date, To the State’s shield and sword, himself the State. He thought for them in mass, as Titan may; For their pronounced well-being bade obey; O’er each obstructive thicket thunderclapped, And straight their easy road to market mapped. Watched Argus to survey the huge preserves He held or coveted; Mars was armed alert At sign of motion; yet his brows were murk, His gorge would surge, to see the butcher’s work, The Reaper’s field; a sensitive in nerves. He rode not over men to do them hurt. As one who claimed to have for paramour Earth’s fairest form, he dealt the cancelling blow; Impassioned, still impersonal; to ensure Possession; free of rivals, not their foe.
The common Tyrant’s frenzies, rancour, spites, He knew as little as men’s claim on rights. A kindness for old servants, early friends, Was constant in him while they served his ends; And if irascible, ’twas the moment’s reek From fires diverted by some gusty freak. His Policy the act which breeds the act Prevised, in issues accurately summed From reckonings of men’s tempers, terrors, needs:— That universal army, which he leads Who builds Imperial on Imperious Fact. Within his hot brain’s hammering workshop hummed A thousand furious wheels at whirr, untired As Nature in her reproductive throes; And did they grate, he spake, and cannon fired: The cause being aye the incendiary foes Proved by prostration culpable. His dispense Of Justice made his active conscience; His passive was of ceaseless labour formed. So found this Tyrant sanction and repose; Humanly just, inhumanly unwarmed. Preventive fencings with the foul intent Occult, by him observed and foiled betimes, Let fool historians chronicle as crimes. His blows were dealt to clear the way he went: Too busy sword and mind for needless blows. The mighty bird of sky minutest grains On ground perceived; in heaven but rays or rains; In humankind diversities of masks, For rule of men the choice of bait or goads. The statesman steered the despot to large tasks; The despot drove the statesman on short roads. For Order’s cause he laboured, as inclined A soldier’s training and his Euclid mind. His army unto men he could present As model of the perfect instrument. That creature, woman, was the sofa soft, When warriors their dusty armour doffed, And read their manuals for the making truce With rosy frailties framed to reproduce. He farmed his land, distillingly alive For the utmost extract he might have and hive, Wherewith to marshal force; and in like scheme, Benign shone Hymen’s torch on young love’s dream. Thus to be strong was he beneficent; A fount of earth, likewise a firmament.
The disputant in words his eye dismayed: Opinions blocked his passage. Rent Were Councils with a gesture; brayed By hoarse camp-phrase what argument Dared interpose to waken spleen In him whose vision grasped the unseen, Whose counsellor was the ready blade, Whose argument the cannonade. He loathed his land’s divergent parties, loth To grant them speech, they were such idle troops; The friable and the grumous, dizzards both. Men were good sticks his mastery wrought from hoops; Some serviceable, none credible on oath. The silly preference they nursed to die In beds he scorned, and led where they should lie. If magic made them pliable for his use, Magician he could be by planned surprise. For do they see the deuce in human guise, As men’s acknowledged head appears the deuce, And they will toil with devilish craft and zeal. Among them certain vagrant wits that had Ideas buzzed; they were the feebly mad; Pursuers of a film they hailed ideal; But could be dangerous fire-flies for a brain Subdued by fact, still amorous of the inane. With a breath he blew them out, to beat their wings The way of such transfeminated things, And France had sense of vacancy in Light. That is the soul’s dead darkness, making clutch Wild hands for aid at muscles within touch; Adding to slavery’s chain the stringent twist; Even when it brings close surety that aright She reads her Tyrant through his golden mist; Perceives him fast to a harsher Tyrant bound; Self-ridden, self-hunted, captive of his aim; Material grandeur’s ape, the Infernal’s hound; Enormous, with no infinite around; No starred deep sky, no Muse, or lame The dusty pattering pinions, The voice as through the brazen tube of Fame.
X
Hugest of engines, a much limited man, She saw the Lustrous, her great lord, appear Through that smoked glass her last privation brought To point her critic eye and spur her thought: A heart but to propel Leviathan; A spirit that breathed but in earth’s atmosphere. Amid the plumed and sceptred ones Irradiatingly Jovian, The mountain tower capped by the floating cloud; A nursery screamer where dialectics ruled: Mannerless, graceless, laughterless, unlike Herself in all, yet with such power to strike, That she the various features she could scan Dared not to sum, though seeing: and befooled By power which beamed omnipotent, she bowed, Subservient as roused echo round his guns. Invulnerable Prince of Myrmidons, He sparkled, by no sage Athene schooled. Partly she read her riddle, stricken and pained; But irony, her spirit’s tongue, restrained. The Critic, last of vital in the proud Enslaved, when most detectively endowed, Admired how irony’s venom off him ran, Like rain-drops down a statue cast in bronze: Whereby of her keen rapier disarmed, Again her chant of eulogy began, Protesting, but with slavish senses charmed.
Her warrior, chief among the valorous great In arms he was, dispelling shades of blame, With radiance palpable in fruit and weight. Heard she reproach, his victories blared response; His victories bent the Critic to acclaim, As with fresh blows upon a ringing sconce. Or heard she from scarred ranks of jolly growls His veterans dwarf their reverence and, like owls, Laugh in the pitch of discord, to exalt Their idol for some genial trick or fault, She, too, became his marching veteran. Again she took her breath from them who bore His eagles through the tawny roar, And murmured at a peaceful state, That bred the title charlatan, As missile from the mouth of hate, For one the daemon fierily filled and hurled, Cannon his name, Shattering against a barrier world; Her supreme player of man’s primaeval game.
The daemon filled him, and he filled her sons; Strung them to stature over human height, As march the standards down the smoky fight; Her cherubim, her towering mastodons! Directed vault or breach, break through Earth’s toughest, seasons, elements, tame; Dash at the bulk the sharpened few; Count death the smallest of their debts: Show that the will to do Is masculine and begets!
These princes unto him the mother owed; These jewels of manhood that rich hand bestowed. What wonder, though with wits awake To read her riddle, for these her offspring’s sake;— And she, before high heaven adulteress, The lost to honour, in his glory clothed, Else naked, shamed in sight of men, self-loathed;— That she should quench her thought, nor worship less Than ere she bled on sands or snows and knew The slave’s alternative, to worship or to rue!
XI
Bright from the shell of that much limited man, Her hero, like the falchion out of sheath, Like soul that quits the tumbled body, soared: And France, impulsive, nuptial with his plan, Albeit the Critic fretting her, adored Once more. Exultingly her heart went forth, Submissive to his mind and mood, The way of those pent-eyebrows North; For now was he to win the wreath Surpassing sunniest in camp or Court; Next, as the blessed harvest after years of blight, Sit, the Great Emperor, to be known the Good!
Now had the Seaman’s volvent sprite, Lean from the chase that barked his contraband, A beggared applicant at every port, To strew the profitless deeps and rot beneath, Slung northward, for a hunted beast’s retort On sovereign power; there his final stand, Among the perjured Scythian’s shaggy horde, The hydrocephalic aërolite Had taken; flashing thence repellent teeth, Though Europe’s Master Europe’s Rebel banned To be earth’s outcast, ocean’s lord and sport.
Unmoved might seem the Master’s taunted sword. Northward his dusky legions nightly slipped, As on the map of that all-provident head; He luting Peace the while, like morning’s cock The quiet day to round the hours for bed; No pastoral shepherd sweeter to his flock. Then Europe first beheld her Titan stripped. To what vast length of limb and mounds of thews, How trained to scale the eminences, pluck The hazards for new footing, how compel Those timely incidents by men named luck, Through forethought that defied the Fates to choose, Her grovelling admiration had not yet Imagined of the great man-miracle; And France recounted with her comic smile Duplicities of Court and Cabinet, The silky female of his male in guile, Wherewith her two-faced Master could amuse A dupe he charmed in sunny beams to bask, Before his feint for camisado struck The lightning moment of the cast-off mask.
Splendours of earth repeating heaven’s at set Of sun down mountain cloud in masses arched; Since Asia upon Europe marched, Unmatched the copious multitudes; unknown To Gallia’s over-runner, Rome’s inveterate foe, Such hosts; all one machine for overthrow, Coruscant from the Master’s hand, compact As reasoned thoughts in the Master’s head; were shown Yon lightning moment when his acme might Blazed o’er the stream that cuts the sandy tract Borussian from Sarmatia’s famished flat; The century’s flower; and off its pinnacled throne, Rayed servitude on Europe’s ball of sight.
XII
Behind the Northern curtain-folds he passed. There heard hushed France her muffled heart beat fast Against the hollow ear-drum, where she sat In expectation’s darkness, until cracked The straining curtain-seams: a scaly light Was ghost above an army under shroud. Imperious on Imperial Fact Incestuously the incredible begat. His veterans and auxiliaries, The trained, the trustful, sanguine, proud, Princely, scarce numerable to recite,— Titanic of all Titan tragedies!— That Northern curtain took them, as the seas Gulp the great ships to give back shipmen white.
Alive in marble, she conceived in soul, With barren eyes and mouth, the mother’s loss; The bolt from her abandoned heaven sped; The snowy army rolling knoll on knoll Beyond horizon, under no blest Cross: By the vulture dotted and engarlanded.
Was it a necromancer lured To weave his tense betraying spell? A Titan whom our God endured Till he of his foul hungers fell, By all his craft and labour scourged? A deluge Europe’s liberated wave, Pæan to sky, leapt over that vast grave. Its shadow-points against her sacred land converged. And him, her yoke-fellow, her black lord, her fate, In doubt, in fevered hope, in chills of hate, That tore her old credulity to strips, Then pressed the auspicious relics on her lips, His withered slave for foregone miracles urged. And he, whom now his ominous halo’s round, A three parts blank decrescent sickle, crowned, Prodigious in catastrophe, could wear The realm of Darkness with its Prince’s air; Assume in mien the resolute pretence To satiate an hungered confidence, Proved criminal by the sceptic seen to cower Beside the generous face of that frail flower.
XIII
Desire and terror then had each of each: His crown and sword were staked on the magic stroke; Her blood she gave as one who loved her leech; And both did barter under union’s cloak. An union in hot fever and fierce need Of either’s aid, distrust in trust did breed. Their traffic instincts hooded their live wits To issues. Never human fortune throve On such alliance. Viewed by fits, From Vulcan’s forge a hovering Jove Evolved. The slave he dragged the Tyrant drove. Her awe of him his dread of her invoked: His nature with her shivering faith ran yoked. What wisdom counselled, Policy declined; All perils dared he save the step behind. Ahead his grand initiative becked: One spark of radiance blurred, his orb was wrecked. Stripped to the despot upstart, for success He raged to clothe a perilous nakedness. He would not fall, while falling; would not be taught, While learning; would not relax his grasp on aught He held in hand, while losing it; pressed advance, Pricked for her lees the veins of wasted France; Who, had he stayed to husband her, had spun The strength he taxed unripened for his throw, In vengeful casts calamitous, On fields where palsying Pyrrhic laurels grow, The luminous the ruinous. An incalescent scorpion, And fierier for the mounded cirque That narrowed at him thick and murk, This gambler with his genius Flung lives in angry volleys, bloody lightnings, flung His fortunes to the hosts he stung, With victories clipped his eagle’s wings. By the hands that built him up was he undone: By the star aloft, which was his ram’s-head will Within; by the toppling throne the soldier won; By the yeasty ferment of what once had been, To cloud a rational mind for present things; By his own force, the suicide in his mill. Needs never God of Vengeance intervene When giants their last lesson have to learn. Fighting against an end he could discern, The chivalry whereof he had none He called from his worn slave’s abundant springs: Not deigning spousally entreat That ever blinded by his martial skill, But harsh to have her worship counted out In human coin, her vital rivers drained, Her infant forests felled, commanded die The decade thousand deaths for his Imperial seat, Where throning he her faith in him maintained; Bound Reason to believe delayed defeat Was triumph; and what strength in her remained To head against the ultimate foreseen rout, Insensate taxed; of his impenitent will, Servant and sycophant: without ally, In Python’s coils, the Master Craftsman still; The smiter, panther springer, trapper sly, The deadly wrestler at the crucial bout, The penetrant, the tonant, tower of towers, Striking from black disaster starry showers. Her supreme player of man’s primaeval game, He won his harnessed victim’s rapturous shout, When every move was mortal to her frame, Her prayer to life that stricken he might lie, She to exchange his laurels for earth’s flowers.
The innumerable whelmed him, and he fell: A vessel in mid-ocean under storm. Ere ceased the lullaby of his passing bell, He sprang to sight, in human form Revealed, from no celestial aids: The shades enclosed him, and he fired the shades.
Cannon his name, Cannon his voice, he came. The fount of miracles from drought-dust arose, Amazing even on his Imperial stage, Where marvels lightened through the alternate hours And winged o’er human earth’s heroical shone. Into the press of cumulative foes, Across the friendly fields of smoke and rage, A broken structure bore his furious powers; The man no more, the Warrior Chief the same; Match for all rivals; in himself but flame Of an outworn lamp, to illumine nought anon. Yet loud as when he first showed War’s effete Their Schoolman off his eagre mounted high, And summoned to subject who dared compete, The cannon in the name Napoleon Discoursed of sulphur earth to curtained sky. So through a tropic day a regnant sun, Where armies of assailant vapours thronged, His glory’s trappings laid on them: comes night, Enwraps him in a bosom quick of heat From his anterior splendours, and shall seem Day instant, Day’s own lord in the furnace gleam, The virulent quiver on ravished eyes prolonged, When severed darkness, all flaminical bright, Slips vivid eagles linked in rapid flight; Which bring at whiles the lionly far roar, As wrestled he with manacles and gags, To speed across a cowering world once more, Superb in ordered floods, his lordly flags. His name on silence thundered, on the obscure Lightened; it haunted morn and even-song: Earth of her prodigy’s extinction long, With shudderings and with thrillings, hung unsure.
Snapped was the chord that made the resonant bow, In France, abased and like a shrunken corse; Amid the weakest weak, the lowest low, From the highest fallen, stagnant off her source; Condemned to hear the nations’ hostile mirth; See curtained heavens, and smell a sulphurous earth; Which told how evermore shall tyrant Force Beget the greater for its overthrow. The song of Liberty in her hearing spoke A foreign tongue; Earth’s fluttering little lyre Unlike, but like the raven’s ravening croak. Not till her breath of being could aspire Anew, this loved and scourged of Angels found Our common brotherhood in sight and sound: When mellow rang the name Napoleon, And dim aloft her young Angelical waved. Between ethereal and gross to choose, She swung; her soul desired, her senses craved. They pricked her dreams, while oft her skies were dun Behind o’ershadowing foemen: on a tide They drew the nature having need of pride Among her fellows for its vital dues: He seen like some rare treasure-galleon, Hull down, with masts against the Western hues.