Poems. Volume 3

NAPOLÉON

ICannon 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 grassNid-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.IITo weld the nation in a name of dread,And scatter carrion flies off wounds unhealed,The Necessitated came, as comes from outElectric ebon lightning’s javelin-head,Threatening agitation in the revealedFounts of our being; terrible with doubt,With radiance restorative.  At one strideAthwart the Law he stood for sovereign sway.That Soliform made featureless besideHis 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 pealedIn 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 kneesRebellious or submissive; his decreesWere 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 boltWith aim Olympian; boreLikeness to Godhead.  Whither his flashes hiedHosts 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 floorLurid with sparks in evanescent showers,Loud echo-clap of hammers at all hours,Our skies the reflex of its furnace blast.IIIOn him the long enchained, releasedFor bride of the miracle day up the midway blue;She from her heavenly lover fallen to serve for feastOf rancours and raw hungers; she, the untrue,Yet pitiable, not despicable, gazed.Fawning, her body bent, she gazedWith eyes the moonstone portals to her heart:Eyes magnifying through hysteric tearsThis apparition, ghostly for belief;Demoniac or divine, but soleOver 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 dartTerrific as this man, by whom upraised,Aggrandized and begemmed, she outstripped her peers;Like midnight’s levying brazier-beacon blazedDefiant 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, bravePast mortal, girt: a march of swords and gunsIncessant; his proved warriors; loaded diceHe flung on the crested board, where chilly FearsBehold 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 pourA spiky girdle round her; these, her sons,His cataracts at smooth holiday, soon to roarObstruction shattered at his will or whim:Kind to her ear as quiring Cherubim,And trampling earth like scornful mastodons.IVThe flood that swept her to be slaveAdoring, 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 freightWhen Majesty apparent overawes;By the flash of his ascending deeds upheld,Which let not feminine pride in him have pauseTo 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 lookAt fettered wrists and violated lawsFaith 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 ghostMidway 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 schoolOf daily things for truancy.  She could rejoiceTo know with wakeful eyeballs ViolenceHer crowned possessor, and, on every senseIncumbent, 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 fleetTo 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 scoredOn riddled flags the further conjured line;From off the meteor gleam of his waved swordReflected bright in permanence: she bledAs the Bacchante spills her challengeing wineWith 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 wordThe shower of steel and leadOr pastoral sunshine.VPersistent through the brazen chorus roundHis 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 seemWinged 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 GodTo mind of man as air to lung.So through her days of under sodHer 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 desireThe vision of it watered thirst.VIBut whom those errant moans accusedAs 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 advanceInto 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 sweepRivers of horse torrent-mad to the shock, and the heap over heapRight through the troughed black lines turned to bunches or shreds, or a fogRolling off sunlight’s arrows.  Not mightier Phoebus in ire,Nor deadlier Jove’s avengeing right hand, than he of the brainKeen 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 disaccordOf those who dare withstand an irresistible swordTo 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 painRather, 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 glowedIn a flaming pillar, that cast on the troubled waters a roadFor 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 uprearedStands to rally; and nourishing grain do his children reapFrom a father beloved in life, in his death revered.Contemplating him and his work, shall a skyward glanceClearer sight of our dreamed and abandoned obtain;Nay, but as if seen in station above the Republic, FranceHad 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.VIISoon felt she in her shivered frameA bodeful drain of blood illumeHer wits with frosty fire to readThe dazzling wizard who would have her bleedOn fruitless marsh and snows of spectral gloomFor victory that was victory scarce in name.Husky his clarions laboured, and her sighsO’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 aimTo head a mannered world breathe zephyrousOf 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 thinkNo further leaps at the fanged abyss’s brinkTrue Genius takes: be battle’s dice-box dropped!She watched his desert features, hung to hearThe honey words desired, and veiled her face;Hearing the Seaman’s name recurWrathfully, thick with a meaning worseThan call to the march: for that inveterate PurseCould kindle the extinct, inform a vacant place,Conjure a heart into the trebly felled.It squeezed the globe, insufferably swelledTo feed insurgent Europe: rear and vanWere haunted by the amphibious curse;Here flesh, there phantom, livelier after rout:The Seaman piping aye to the rightabout,Distracted Europe’s Master, puffed remoteThose Indies of the swift Macedonian,Whereon would Europe’s Master somewhiles doat,In dreamings on a docile universeBeneath an immarcessible Charlemagne.Nor marvel France should veil a seer’s face,And call on darkness as a blest retreat.Magnanimously could her iron EmperorConfront submission: hostile stirred to heatAll his vast enginery, allowed no haltUp 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 balkHis panther spring across the foaming salt,From martial sands to the cliffs of pallid chalk!There is no answer: seed of black defeatShe then did sow, and France nigh unto death foredoom.See since that Seaman’s epicycle spriteEngirdle, lure and goad him to the chaseAlong drear leagues of crimson spotting whiteWith mother’s tears of France, that he may meetBehind suborned battalions, ranked as wheatWhere 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.VIIIPoured streams of Europe’s veins the floodFull Rhine or Danube rolls off morning-tideThrough shadowed reaches into crimson-dyed:And Rhine and Danube knew her gush of bloodDown 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 upliftsWrithed the devotedness her voice rang wideIn 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 sentinelCalled Critic marked, and dumb in awe reviewedThis torture, this anointed, this untrackedTo 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 spellAroused an insurrectionary mind.IXHe, did he love her?  France was his weapon, shrewdAt edge, a wind in onset: he loved wellHis tempered weapon, with the which he hewedClean 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 touchWas hound or steed for any mark he espied.He loved her more than little, less than much.The fair subservient of Imperial FactNext to his consanguineous was placedIn 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 devouredTaste 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 brookedNo foot across; a shade his ire provoked.The blunder or the cruelty of a deedHis Policy imperative could plead.He deemed nought other precious, nor knew heLegitimate 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 preservesHe held or coveted; Mars was armed alertAt 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 paramourEarth’s fairest form, he dealt the cancelling blow;Impassioned, still impersonal; to ensurePossession; 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 reekFrom fires diverted by some gusty freak.His Policy the act which breeds the actPrevised, in issues accurately summedFrom reckonings of men’s tempers, terrors, needs:—That universal army, which he leadsWho builds Imperial on Imperious Fact.Within his hot brain’s hammering workshop hummedA thousand furious wheels at whirr, untiredAs Nature in her reproductive throes;And did they grate, he spake, and cannon fired:The cause being aye the incendiary foesProved by prostration culpable.  His dispenseOf 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 intentOccult, 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 grainsOn 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 inclinedA soldier’s training and his Euclid mind.His army unto men he could presentAs 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 truceWith rosy frailties framed to reproduce.He farmed his land, distillingly aliveFor 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.  RentWere Councils with a gesture; brayedBy hoarse camp-phrase what argumentDared interpose to waken spleenIn him whose vision grasped the unseen,Whose counsellor was the ready blade,Whose argument the cannonade.He loathed his land’s divergent parties, lothTo 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 dieIn 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 hadIdeas buzzed; they were the feebly mad;Pursuers of a film they hailed ideal;But could be dangerous fire-flies for a brainSubdued by fact, still amorous of the inane.With a breath he blew them out, to beat their wingsThe way of such transfeminated things,And France had sense of vacancy in Light.That is the soul’s dead darkness, making clutchWild hands for aid at muscles within touch;Adding to slavery’s chain the stringent twist;Even when it brings close surety that arightShe 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 lameThe dusty pattering pinions,The voice as through the brazen tube of Fame.XHugest of engines, a much limited man,She saw the Lustrous, her great lord, appearThrough that smoked glass her last privation broughtTo 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 onesIrradiatingly Jovian,The mountain tower capped by the floating cloud;A nursery screamer where dialectics ruled:Mannerless, graceless, laughterless, unlikeHerself in all, yet with such power to strike,That she the various features she could scanDared not to sum, though seeing: and befooledBy 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 proudEnslaved, 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 greatIn 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 growlsHis veterans dwarf their reverence and, like owls,Laugh in the pitch of discord, to exaltTheir idol for some genial trick or fault,She, too, became his marching veteran.Again she took her breath from them who boreHis 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 throughEarth’s toughest, seasons, elements, tame;Dash at the bulk the sharpened few;Count death the smallest of their debts:Show that the will to doIs masculine and begets!These princes unto him the mother owed;These jewels of manhood that rich hand bestowed.What wonder, though with wits awakeTo 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 lessThan ere she bled on sands or snows and knewThe slave’s alternative, to worship or to rue!XIBright 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, adoredOnce 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 wreathSurpassing 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 retortOn sovereign power; there his final stand,Among the perjured Scythian’s shaggy horde,The hydrocephalic aëroliteHad taken; flashing thence repellent teeth,Though Europe’s Master Europe’s Rebel bannedTo 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 cockThe 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, pluckThe hazards for new footing, how compelThose timely incidents by men named luck,Through forethought that defied the Fates to choose,Her grovelling admiration had not yetImagined of the great man-miracle;And France recounted with her comic smileDuplicities of Court and Cabinet,The silky female of his male in guile,Wherewith her two-faced Master could amuseA dupe he charmed in sunny beams to bask,Before his feint for camisado struckThe lightning moment of the cast-off mask.Splendours of earth repeating heaven’s at setOf sun down mountain cloud in masses arched;Since Asia upon Europe marched,Unmatched the copious multitudes; unknownTo Gallia’s over-runner, Rome’s inveterate foe,Such hosts; all one machine for overthrow,Coruscant from the Master’s hand, compactAs reasoned thoughts in the Master’s head; were shownYon lightning moment when his acme mightBlazed o’er the stream that cuts the sandy tractBorussian from Sarmatia’s famished flat;The century’s flower; and off its pinnacled throne,Rayed servitude on Europe’s ball of sight.XIIBehind the Northern curtain-folds he passed.There heard hushed France her muffled heart beat fastAgainst the hollow ear-drum, where she satIn expectation’s darkness, until crackedThe straining curtain-seams: a scaly lightWas ghost above an army under shroud.Imperious on Imperial FactIncestuously 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 seasGulp 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 knollBeyond horizon, under no blest Cross:By the vulture dotted and engarlanded.Was it a necromancer luredTo weave his tense betraying spell?A Titan whom our God enduredTill 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 wearThe realm of Darkness with its Prince’s air;Assume in mien the resolute pretenceTo satiate an hungered confidence,Proved criminal by the sceptic seen to cowerBeside the generous face of that frail flower.XIIIDesire 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 needOf either’s aid, distrust in trust did breed.Their traffic instincts hooded their live witsTo issues.  Never human fortune throveOn such alliance.  Viewed by fits,From Vulcan’s forge a hovering JoveEvolved.  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 successHe raged to clothe a perilous nakedness.He would not fall, while falling; would not be taught,While learning; would not relax his grasp on aughtHe 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 spunThe 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 cirqueThat narrowed at him thick and murk,This gambler with his geniusFlung lives in angry volleys, bloody lightnings, flungHis 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 willWithin; 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 interveneWhen giants their last lesson have to learn.Fighting against an end he could discern,The chivalry whereof he had noneHe called from his worn slave’s abundant springs:Not deigning spousally entreatThat ever blinded by his martial skill,But harsh to have her worship counted outIn human coin, her vital rivers drained,Her infant forests felled, commanded dieThe decade thousand deaths for his Imperial seat,Where throning he her faith in him maintained;Bound Reason to believe delayed defeatWas triumph; and what strength in her remainedTo 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 formRevealed, 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 hoursAnd 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 flameOf an outworn lamp, to illumine nought anon.Yet loud as when he first showed War’s effeteTheir Schoolman off his eagre mounted high,And summoned to subject who dared compete,The cannon in the name NapoleonDiscoursed 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 heatFrom his anterior splendours, and shall seemDay 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 obscureLightened; 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 ForceBeget the greater for its overthrow.The song of Liberty in her hearing spokeA foreign tongue; Earth’s fluttering little lyreUnlike, but like the raven’s ravening croak.Not till her breath of being could aspireAnew, this loved and scourged of Angels foundOur 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 dunBehind o’ershadowing foemen: on a tideThey drew the nature having need of prideAmong her fellows for its vital dues:He seen like some rare treasure-galleon,Hull down, with masts against the Western hues.