Poems. Volume 3
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FRANCE
DECEMBER 1870 1 IWe look for her that sunlike stoodUpon the forehead of our day,An orb of nations, radiating foodFor body and for mind alway.Where is the Shape of glad array;The nervous hands, the front of steel,The clarion tongue? Where is the bold proud face?We see a vacant place;We hear an iron heel.IIO she that made the brave appealFor manhood when our time was dark,And from our fetters drove the sparkWhich was as lightning to revealNew seasons, with the swifter playOf pulses, and benigner day;She that divinely shook the deadFrom living man; that stretched aheadHer resolute forefinger straight,And marched toward the gloomy gateOf earth’s Untried, gave note, and inThe good name of HumanityCalled forth the daring vision! she,She likewise half corrupt of sin,Angel and Wanton! can it be?Her star has foundered in eclipse,The shriek of madness on her lips;Shreds of her, and no more, we see.There is horrible convulsion, smothered din,As of one that in a grave-cloth struggles to be free.IIILook not for spreading boughsOn the riven forest tree.Look down where deep in blood and mireBlack thunder plants his feet and ploughsThe soil for ruin: that is France:Still thrilling like a lyre,Amazed to shivering discord from a fallSudden as that the lurid hosts recallWho met in heaven the irreparable mischance.O that is France!The brilliant eyes to kindle bliss,The shrewd quick lips to laugh and kiss,Breasts that a sighing world inspire,And laughter-dimpled countenanceWhere soul and senses caught desire!IVEver invoking fire from heaven, the fireHas grasped her, unconsumable, but framedFor all the ecstasies of suffering dire.Mother of Pride, her sanctuary shamed:Mother of Delicacy, and made a markFor outrage: Mother of Luxury, stripped stark:Mother of Heroes, bondsmen: thro’ the rains,Across her boundaries, lo the league-long chains!Fond Mother of her martial youth; they pass,Are spectres in her sight, are mown as grass!Mother of Honour, and dishonoured: MotherOf Glory, she condemned to crown with baysHer victor, and be fountain of his praise.Is there another curse? There is another:Compassionate her madness: is she notMother of Reason? she that sees them mownLike grass, her young ones! Yea, in the low groanAnd under the fixed thunder of this hourWhich holds the animate world in one foul blotTranced circumambient while relentless PowerBeaks at her heart and claws her limbs down-thrown,She, with the plungeing lightnings overshot,With madness for an armour against pain,With milkless breasts for little ones athirst,And round her all her noblest dying in vain,Mother of Reason is she, trebly cursed,To feel, to see, to justify the blow;Chamber to chamber of her sequent brainGives answer of the cause of her great woe,Inexorably echoing thro’ the vaults,‘’Tis thus they reap in blood, in blood who sow:‘This is the sum of self-absolvëd faults.’Doubt not that thro’ her grief, with sight supreme,Thro’ her delirium and despair’s last dream,Thro’ pride, thro’ bright illusion and the broodBewildering of her various Motherhood,The high strong light within her, tho’ she bleeds,Traces the letters of returned misdeeds.She sees what seed long sown, ripened of late,Bears this fierce crop; and she discerns her fateFrom origin to agony, and onAs far as the wave washes long and wanOff one disastrous impulse: for of wavesOur life is, and our deeds are pregnant gravesBlown rolling to the sunset from the dawn.VAh, what a dawn of splendour, when her sowersWent forth and bent the necks of populationsAnd of their terrors and humiliationsWove her the starry wreath that earthward lowersNow in the figure of a burning yoke!Her legions traversed North and South and East,Of triumph they enjoyed the glutton’s feast:They grafted the green sprig, they lopped the oak.They caught by the beard the tempests, by the scalpThe icy precipices, and clove sheer throughThe heart of horror of the pinnacled Alp,Emerging not as men whom mortals knew.They were the earthquake and the hurricane,The lightnings and the locusts, plagues of blight,Plagues of the revel: they were Deluge rain,And dreaded Conflagration; lawless Might.Death writes a reeling line along the snows,Where under frozen mists they may be tracked,Who men and elements provoked to foes,And Gods: they were of god and beast compact:Abhorred of all. Yet, how they sucked the teatsOf Carnage, thirsty issue of their dam,Whose eagles, angrier than their oriflamme,Flushed the vext earth with blood, green earth forgets.The gay young generations mask her grief;Where bled her children hangs the loaded sheaf.Forgetful is green earth; the Gods aloneRemember everlastingly: they strikeRemorselessly, and ever like for like.By their great memories the Gods are known.VIThey are with her now, and in her ears, and known.’Tis they that cast her to the dust for Strength,Their slave, to feed on her fair body’s length,That once the sweetest and the proudest shone;Scoring for hideous dismembermentHer limbs, as were the anguish-taking breathGone out of her in the insufferable descentFrom her high chieftainship; as were she death,Who hears a voice of justice, feels the knifeOf torture, drinks all ignominy of life.They are with her, and the painful Gods might weep,If ever rain of tears came out of heavenTo flatter Weakness and bid conscience sleep,Viewing the woe of this Immortal, drivenFor the soul’s life to drain the maddening cupOf her own children’s blood implacably:Unsparing even as they to furrow upThe yellow land to likeness of a sea:The bountiful fair land of vine and grain,Of wit and grace and ardour, and strong roots,Fruits perishable, imperishable fruits;Furrowed to likeness of the dim grey mainBehind the black obliterating cyclone.VIIBehold, the Gods are with her, and are known.Whom they abandon misery persecutesNo more: them half-eyed apathy may loanThe happiness of pitiable brutes.Whom the just Gods abandon have no light,No ruthless light of introspective eyesThat in the midst of misery scrutinizeThe heart and its iniquities outright.They rest, they smile and rest; have earned perchanceOf ancient service quiet for a term;Quiet of old men dropping to the worm;And so goes out the soul. But not of France.She cries for grief, and to the Gods she cries,For fearfully their loosened hands chastize,And icily they watch the rod’s caressRavage her flesh from scourges merciless,But she, inveterate of brain, discernsThat Pity has as little place as JoyAmong their roll of gifts; for Strength she yearns.For Strength, her idol once, too long her toy.Lo, Strength is of the plain root-Virtues born:Strength shall ye gain by service, prove in scorn,Train by endurance, by devotion shape.Strength is not won by miracle or rape.It is the offspring of the modest years,The gift of sire to son, thro’ those firm lawsWhich we name Gods; which are the righteous cause,The cause of man, and manhood’s ministers.Could France accept the fables of her priests,Who blest her banners in this game of beasts,And now bid hope that heaven will intercedeTo violate its laws in her sore need,She would find comfort in their opiates:Mother of Reason! can she cheat the Fates?Would she, the champion of the open mind,The Omnipotent’s prime gift—the gift of growth—Consent even for a night-time to be blind,And sink her soul on the delusive sloth,For fruits ethereal and material, both,In peril of her place among mankind?The Mother of the many Laughters mightCall one poor shade of laughter in the lightOf her unwavering lamp to mark what thingsThe world puts faith in, careless of the truth:What silly puppet-bodies danced on strings,Attached by credence, we appear in sooth,Demanding intercession, direct aid,When the whole tragic tale hangs on a broken blade!She swung the sword for centuries; in a dayIt slipped her, like a stream cut off from source.She struck a feeble hand, and tried to pray,Clamoured of treachery, and had recourseTo drunken outcries in her dream that ForceNeeded but hear her shouting to obey.Was she not formed to conquer? The bright plumesOf crested vanity shed graceful nods:Transcendent in her foundries, Arts and looms,Had France to fear the vengeance of the Gods?Her faith was on her battle-roll of namesSheathed in the records of old war; with danceAnd song she thrilled her warriors and her dames,Embracing her Dishonour: gave him FranceFrom head to foot, France present and to come,So she might hear the trumpet and the drum—Bellona and Bacchante! rushing forthOn yon stout marching Schoolmen of the North.Inveterate of brain, well knows she whyStrength failed her, faithful to himself the first:Her dream is done, and she can read the sky,And she can take into her heart the worstCalamity to drug the shameful thoughtOf days that made her as the man she servedA name of terror, but a thing unnerved:Buying the trickster, by the trickster bought,She for dominion, he to patch a throne.VIIIHenceforth of her the Gods are known,Open to them her breast is laid.Inveterate of brain, heart-valiant,Never did fairer creature pantBefore the altar and the blade!IXSwift fall the blows, and men upbraid,And friends give echo blunt and cold,The echo of the forest to the axe.Within her are the fires that waxFor resurrection from the mould.XShe snatched at heaven’s flame of old,And kindled nations: she was weak:Frail sister of her heroic prototype,The Man; for sacrifice unripe,She too must fill a Vulture’s beak.Deride the vanquished, and acclaimThe conqueror, who stains her fame,Still the Gods love her, for that of high aimIs this good France, the bleeding thing they stripe.XIShe shall rise worthier of her prototypeThro’ her abasement deep; the pain that runsFrom nerve to nerve some victory achieves.They lie like circle-strewn soaked Autumn-leavesWhich stain the forest scarlet, her fair sons!And of their death her life is: of their bloodFrom many streams now urging to a flood,No more divided, France shall rise afresh.Of them she learns the lesson of the flesh:—The lesson writ in red since first Time ran,A hunter hunting down the beast in man:That till the chasing out of its last vice,The flesh was fashioned but for sacrifice.Immortal Mother of a mortal host!Thou suffering of the wounds that will not slay,Wounds that bring death but take not life away!—Stand fast and hearken while thy victors boast:Hearken, and loathe that music evermore.Slip loose thy garments woven of pride and shame:The torture lurks in them, with them the blameShall pass to leave thee purer than before.Undo thy jewels, thinking whence they came,For what, and of the abominable nameOf her who in imperial beauty wore.O Mother of a fated fleeting hostConceived in the past days of sin, and bornHeirs of disease and arrogance and scorn,Surrender, yield the weight of thy great ghost,Like wings on air, to what the heavens proclaimWith trumpets from the multitudinous moundsWhere peace has filled the hearing of thy sons:Albeit a pang of dissolution roundsEach new discernment of the undying ones,Do thou stoop to these graves here scattered wideAlong thy fields, as sunless billows roll;These ashes have the lesson for the soul.‘Die to thy Vanity, and strain thy Pride,Strip off thy Luxury: that thou may’st live,Die to thyself,’ they say, ‘as we have diedFrom dear existence and the foe forgive,Nor pray for aught save in our little spaceTo warn good seed to greet the fair earth’s face.’O Mother! take their counsel, and so shallThe broader world breathe in on this thy home,Light clear for thee the counter-changing dome,Strength give thee, like an ocean’s vast expanseOff mountain cliffs, the generations all,Not whirling in their narrow rings of foam,But as a river forward. Soaring France!Now is Humanity on trial in thee:Now may’st thou gather humankind in fee:Now prove that Reason is a quenchless scroll;Make of calamity thine aureole,And bleeding head us thro’ the troubles of the sea.ALSACE-LORRAINE
IThe sister Hours in circles linked,Daughters of men, of men the mates,Are gone on flow with the day that winked,With the night that spanned at golden gates.Mothers, they leave us, quickening seed;They bear us grain or flower or weed,As we have sown; is nought extinctFor them we fill to be our Fates.Life of the breath is but the loan;Passing death what we have sown.Pearly are they till the pale inherited stainDeepens in us, and the mirrors they form on their flowDarken to feature and nature: a volumed chain,Sequent of issue, in various eddies they show.Theirs is the Book of the River of Life, to readLeaf by leaf by reapers of long-sown seed:There doth our shoot up to light from a spiriting saneStand as a tree whereon numberless clusters grow:Legible there how the heart, with its one false moveCast Eurydice pallor on all we love.Our fervid heart has filled that Book in chief;Our fitful heart a wild reflection views;Our craving heart of passion suckling griefDisowns the author’s work it must peruse;Inconscient in its leap to wreak the deed,A round of harvests red from crimson seed,It marks the current Hours show leaf by leaf,And rails at Destiny; nor traces clues;Though sometimes it may think what novel lightWill strike their faces when the mind shall write.IISuccourful daughters of men are the rosed and starredRevolving Twelves in their fluent germinal rings,Despite the burden to chasten, abase, depose.Fallen on France, as the sweep of scythe over sward,They breathed in her ear their voice of the crystal springs,That run from a twilight rise, from a twilight close,Through alternate beams and glooms, rejoicingly young.Only to Earth’s best loved, at the breathless turnsWhere Life in fold of the Shadow reclines unstrung,And a ghostly lamp of their moment’s union burns,Will such pure notes from the fountain-head be sung.Voice of Earth’s very soul to the soul she would see renewed:A song that sought no tears, that laid not a touch on the breastSobbing aswoon and, like last foxgloves’ bells upon fernsIn sandy alleys of woodland silence, shedding to bare.Daughters of Earth and men, they piped of her natural brood;Her patient helpful four-feet; wings on the flit or in nest;Paws at our old-world task to scoop a defensive lair;Snouts at hunt through the scented grasses; enhavened scutsFlashing escape under show of a laugh nigh the mossed burrow-mouth.Sack-like droop bronze pears on the nailed branch-frontage of huts,To greet those wedded toilers from acres where sweat is a shower.Snake, cicada, lizard, on lavender slopes up South,Pant for joy of a sunlight driving the fielders to bower.Sharpened in silver by one chance breeze is the olive’s grey;A royal-mantle floats, a red fritillary hies;The bee, for whom no flower of garden or wild has nay,Noises, heard if but named, so hot is the trade he plies.Processions beneath green arches of herbage, the long colonnades;Laboured mounds that a foot or a wanton stick may subvert;Homely are they for a lowly look on bedewed grass-blades,On citied fir-droppings, on twisted wreaths of the worm in dirt.Does nought so loosen our sight from the despot heart, to receiveBalm of a sound Earth’s primary heart at its active beat:The motive, yet servant, of energy; simple as morn and eve;Treasureless, fetterless; free of the bonds of a great conceit:Unwounded even by cruel blows on a body that writhes;Nor whimpering under misfortune; elusive of obstacles; promptTo quit any threatened familiar domain seen doomed by the scythes;Its day’s hard business done, the score to the good accompt.Creatures of forest and mead, Earth’s essays in being, all kindsBound by the navel-knot to the Mother, never astray,They in the ear upon ground will pour their intuitive minds,Cut man’s tangles for Earth’s first broad rectilinear way:Admonishing loftier reaches, the rich adventurous shoots,Pushes of tentative curves, embryonic upwreathings in air;Not always the sprouts of Earth’s root-Laws preserving her brutes;Oft but our primitive hungers licentious in fine and fair.Yet the like aërial growths may chance be the delicate sprays,Infant of Earth’s most urgent in sap, her fierier zealFor entry on Life’s upper fields: and soul thus flourishing paysThe martyr’s penance, mark for brutish in man to heel.Her, from a nerveless well among stagnant pools of the dry,Through her good aim at divine, shall commune with Earth remake;Fraternal unto sororial, her, where abashed she may lie,Divinest of man shall clasp; a world out of darkness awake,As it were with the Resurrection’s eyelids uplifted, to seeHonour in shame, in substance the spirit, in that dry fountJets of the songful ascending silvery-bright water-treeSpout, with our Earth’s unbaffled resurgent desire for the mount,Though broken at intervals, clipped, and barren in seeming it be.For this at our nature arises rejuvenescent from Earth,However respersive the blow and nigh on infernal the fall,The chastisement drawn down on us merited: are we of worthAmid our satanic excrescences, this, for the less than a call,Will Earth reprime, man cherish; the God who is in us and round,Consenting, the God there seen. Impiety speaks despair;Religion the virtue of serving as things of the furrowy ground,Debtors for breath while breath with our fellows in service we share.Not such of the crowned discrownedCan Earth or humanity spare;Such not the God let die.IIIEastward of Paris morn is high;And darkness on that Eastward sideThe heart of France beholds: a thornIs in her frame where shines the morn:A rigid wave usurps her sky,With eagle crest and eagle-eyedTo scan what wormy wrinkles hintHer forces gathering: she the thrownFrom station, lopped of an arm, astounded, lone,Reading late History as a foul misprint:Imperial, Angelical,At strife commingled in her frame convulsed;Shame of her broken sword, a ravening gall;Pain of the limb where once her warm blood pulsed;These tortures to distract her underneathHer whelmed Aurora’s shade. But in that spaceWhen lay she dumb beside her trampled wreath,Like an unburied body mid the tombs,Feeling against her heart life’s bitter probeFor life, she saw how children of her race,The many sober sons and daughters, plied,By cottage lamplight through the water-globe,By simmering stew-pots, by the serious looms,Afield, in factories, with the birds astir,Their nimble feet and fingers; not deniedRefreshful chatter, laughter, galliard songs.So like Earth’s indestructible they were,That wrestling with its anguish rose her pride,To feel where in each breast the thought of her,On whom the circle Hours laid leaded thongs,Was constant; spoken sometimes in low toneAt lip or in a fluttered look,A shortened breath: and they were her loved own;Nor ever did they waste their strength with tears,For pity of the weeper, nor rebuke,Though mainly they were charged to pay her debt,The Mother having conscience in arrears;Ready to gush the flood of vain regret,Else hearken to her weaponed children’s moanOf stifled rage invoking vengeance: hell’s,If heaven should fail the counter-wave that swellsIn blood and brain for retribution swift.Those helped not: wings to her soul were these who yetCould welcome day for labour, night for rest,Enrich her treasury, built of cheerful thrift,Of honest heart, beyond all miracles;And likened to Earth’s humblest were Earth’s best.IVBrooding on her deep fall, the many stringsWhich formed her nature set a thought on Kings,As aids that might the low-laid cripple lift;And one among them hummed devoutly leal,While passed the sighing breeze along her breast.Of Kings by the festive vanquishers rammed downHer gorge since fell the Chief, she knew their crown;Upon her through long seasons was its grasp,For neither soul’s nor body’s weal;As much bestows the robber wasp,That in the hanging apple makes a meal,And carves a face of abscess where was fruitRipe ruddy. They would blotHer radiant leap above the slopes acute,Of summit to celestial; imputeThe wanton’s aim to her divinest shot;Bid her walk History backward over gaps;Abhor the day of Phrygian caps;Abjure her guerdon, execrate herself;The Hapsburg, Hohenzollern, Guelph,Admire repentant; reverently prostrateHer person unto the belly-god; of whomIs inward plenty and external bloom;Enough of pomp and stateAnd carnival to quenchThe breast’s desires of an intemperate wench,The head’s ideas beyond legitimate.She flung them: she was France: nor with far frownHer lover from the embrace of her refrained:But in her voice an interwoven wire,The exultation of her gross renown,Struck deafness at her heavens, and they wanedOver a look ill-gifted to aspire.Wherefore, as an abandonment, irate,The intemperate summoned up her trumpet days,Her treasure-galleon’s wondrous freight.The cannon-name she sang and shrieked; transferredHer soul’s allegiance; o’er the Tyrant slurred,Tranced with the zeal of her first fawning gaze,To clasp his trophy flags and hail him Saint.VShe hailed him Saint:And her Jeanne unsainted, foully sung!The virgin who conceived a France when funeral gloomsAcross a land aquake with sharp disseverance hung:Conceived, and under stress of battle brought her forth;Crowned her in purification of feud and foeman’s taint;Taught her to feel her blood her being, know her worth,Have joy of unity: the Jeanne bescreeched, bescoffed,Who flamed to ashes, flew up wreaths of faggot fumes;Through centuries a star in vapour-folds aloft.For her people to hail her Saint,Were no lifting of her, Earth’s gem,Earth’s chosen, Earth’s throb on divine:In the ranks of the starred she is one,While man has thought on our line:No lifting of her, but for them,Breath of the mountain, beam of the sunThrough mist, out of swamp-fires’ lures release,Youth on the forehead, the rough right waySeen to be footed: for them the heart’s peace,By the mind’s war won for a permanent miracle day.Her arms below her sword-hilt crossed,The heart of that high-hallowed JeanneInto the furnace-pit she tossedBefore her body knew the flame,And sucked its essence: warmth for righteous work,An undivided power to speed her aim.She had no self but France: the sainted manNo France but self. Him warrior and clerk,Free of his iron clutch; and him her young,In whirled imagination mastodonized;And him her penmen, him her poets; allFor the visioned treasure-galleon astrain;Sent zenithward on bass and treble tongue,Till solely through his glory France was prized.She who had her Jeanne;The child of her industrious;Earth’s truest, earth’s pure fount from the main;And she who had her one day’s mate,In the soul’s view illustriousPast blazonry, her Immaculate,Those hours of slavish Empire would recall;Thrill to the rattling anchor-chainShe heard upon a day in ‘I who can’;Start to the softened, tremulous bugle-blareOf that Caesarean ItalianAcross the storied fields of trampled grain,As to a Vercingetorix of old GaulBlowing the rally against a Caesar’s reign.Her soul’s protesting sobs she drowned to swearFidelity unto the sainted man,Whose nimbus was her crown; and be againThe foreigner in Europe, known of none,None knowing; sight to dazzle, voice to stun.Rearward she stepped, with thirst for Europe’s van;The dream she nursed a snare,The flag she bore a pall.VIIn Nature is no rearward step allowed.Hard on the rock Reality do we dashTo be shattered, if the material dream propels.The worship to departed splendour vowedConjured a simulacrum, wove her lash,For the slow measure timed her peal of bells.Thereof was the cannon-name a mockery round her hills;For the will of wills,Its flaccid ape,Weak as the final echo off a giant’s bawl:Napoleon for disdain,His banner steeped in crape.Thereof the barrier of Alsace-Lorraine;The frozen billow crested to its fall;Dismemberment; disfigurement;Her history blotted; her proud mantle rent;And ever that one word to reperuse,With eyes behind a veil of fiery dews;Knelling the spot where Gallic soil defiledShowed her sons’ valour as a frenzied childIn arms of the mailed man.Word that her mind must bear, her heart put under ban,Lest burst it: unto her eyes a ghost,Incredible though manifest: a sceneStamped with her new Saint’s name: and all his hostA wattled flock the foeman’s dogs between!VIIMark where a credible ghost pulls bridle to view that bareCorpse of a field still reddening cloud, and alive in its throesBeneath her Purgatorial Saint’s evocative stare:Brand on his name, the gulf of his glory, his Legend’s close.A lustreless Phosphor heading for daybeam Night’s dead-born,His underworld eyeballs grip the cast of the land for a frayExpugnant; swift up the heights, with the Victor’s instinctive scornOf the trapped below, he rides; he beholds, and a two-fold grey,Even as the misty sun growing moon that a frost enrings,Is shroud on the shrouded; he knows him there in the helmeted ranks.The golden eagles flap lame wings,The black double-headed are round their flanks.He is there in midst of the pupils he harried to brains awake, trod into union; lo,These are his Epic’s tutored Dardans, yon that Rhapsode’s Achaeans to know.Nor is aught of an equipollent conflict seen, nor the weaker’s flashed device;Headless is offered a breast to beaks deliberate, formal, assured, precise.Ruled by the mathematician’s hand, they solve their problem, as on a slate.This is the ground foremarked, and the day; their leader modestly hazarded date.His helmeted ranks might be draggers of pools or reapers of plains for the warrior’s guileDisplayed; they haul, they rend, as in some orderly office mercantile.And a timed artillery speaks full-mouthed on a stuttering feeble reduced to nought.Can it be France, an army of France, tricked, netted, convulsive, all writhen caught?Arterial blood of an army’s heart outpoured the Grey Observer sees:A forest of France in thunder comes, like a landslide hurled off her Pyrenees.Torrent and forest ramp, roll, sling on for a charge against iron, reason, Fate;It is gapped through the mass midway, bare ribs and dust ere the helmeted feel its weight.So the blue billow white-plumed is plunged upon shingle to screaming withdrawal, but snatched,Waved is the laurel eternal yielded by Death o’er the waste of brave men outmatched.The France of the fury was there, the thing he had wielded, whose honour was dearer than life;The Prussia despised, the harried, the trodden, was here; his pupil, the scholar in strife.He hated to heel, in a spasm of will,From sleep or debate, a mannikin squireWith head of a merlin hawk and quillAcrow on an ear. At him rained fireFrom a blast of eyeballs hotter than speech,To say what a deadly poison stuffedThe France here laid in her bloody ditch,Through the Legend passing human puffed.Credible ghost of the field which from him descends,Each dark anniversary day will its father return,Haling his shadow to spy where the Legend ends,That penman trumpeter’s part in the wreck discern.There, with the cup it presents at her lips, she stands,France, with her future staked on the word it may pledge.The vengeance urged of desire a reserve countermands;The patience clasped totters hard on the precipice edge.Lopped of an arm, mother love for her own springs quick,To curdle the milk in her breasts for the young they feed,At thought of her single hand, and the lost so nigh.Mother love for her own, who raised her when she lay sickNigh death, and would in like fountains fruitlessly bleed,Withholds the fling of her heart on the further die.Of love is wisdom. Is it great love, then wiseWill our wild heart be, though whipped unto madness moreBy its mentor’s counselling voice than thoughtfully reined.Desire of the wave for the shore,Passion for one last agony under skies,To make her heavens remorseful, she restrainedVIIIOn her lost arm love bade her look;On her one hand to meditate;The tumult of her blood abate;Disaster face, derision brook:Forbade the page of her Historic Muse,Until her demon his last hold forsook,And smoothly, with no countenance of hate,Her conqueror she could scan to measure. ThenceThe strange new Winter stream of ruling sense,Cold, comfortless, but braced to disabuse,Ran through the mind of this most lowly laid;From the top billow of victorious War,Down in the flagless troughs at ebb and flow;A wreck; her past, her future, both in shade.She read the things that are;Reality unaccepted readFor sign of the distraught, and took her blowTo brain; herself read through;Wherefore her predatory Glory paidNapoleon ransom knew.Her nature’s many strings hot gusts did jarAgainst the note of reason uttered low,Ere passionate with duty she might wed,Compel the bride’s embrace of her stern groom,Joined at an altar liker to the tomb,Nest of the Furies their first nuptial bed,They not the less were mated and proclaimedThe rational their issue. Then she rose.See how the rush of southern Springtide glowsOceanic in the chariot-wheel’s ascent,Illuminated with one breath. The maimed,Tom, tortured, winter-visaged, suddenlyHad stature; to the world’s wonderment,Fair features, grace of mien, nor leastThe comic dimples round her April mouth,Sprung of her intimate humanity.She stood before mankind the very SouthRapt out of frost to flowery drapery;Unshadowed save when somewhiles she looked East.IXLet but the rational prevail,Our footing is on ground though all else fail:Our kiss of Earth is then a plightTo walk within her Laws and have her light.Choice of the life or death lies in ourselves;There is no fate but when unreason lours.This Land the cheerful toiler delves,The thinker brightens with fine wit,The lovelier grace as lyric flowers,Those rosed and starred revolving TwelvesShall nurse for effort infiniteWhile leashed to brain the heart of France the FairBeats tempered music and its lead subserves.Washed from her eyes the Napoleonic glare,Divinely raised by that in her divine,Not the clear sight of Earth’s blunt actual swervesWhen her lost look, as on a wave of wine,Rolls Eastward, and the mother-flag descriesCaress with folds and curvesThe fortress over Rhine,Beneath the one tall spire.Despite her brooding thought, her nightlong sighs,Her anguish in desire,She sees, above the brutish pawAlert on her still quivering limb—As little in past time she saw,Nor when dispieced as prey,As victrix when abhorred—A Grand Germania, stout on soil;Audacious up the ethereal dim;The forest’s Infant; the strong hand for toil;The patient brain in twilights when astray;Shrewdest of heads to foil and counterfoil;The sceptic and devout; the potent sword;With will and armed to help in hewing wayFor Europe’s march; and of the most golden chordOf the Heliconian lyreExcellent mistress. Yea, she sees, and can admire;Still seeing in what walks the Gallia leads;And with what shield upon Alsace-LorraineHer wary sister’s doubtful look misreadsA mother’s throbs for her lost: so loved: so near:Magnetic. Hard the course for her to steer,The leap against the sharpened spikes restrain.For the belted Overshadower hard the course,On whom devolves the spirit’s touchstone, Force:Which is the strenuous arm, to strike inclined,That too much adamantine makes the mind;Forgets it coin of Nature’s rich Exchange;Contracts horizons within present sight:Amalekite to-day, across its rangeIndisputable; to-morrow Simeonite.XThe mother who gave birth to Jeanne;Who to her young Angelical sprang;Who lay with Earth and heard the notes she sang,And heard her truest sing them; she may reachHeights yet unknown of nations; haply teachA thirsting world to learn ’tis ‘she who can.’She that in History’s Heliaea pleadsThe nation flowering conscience o’er the beast;With heart expurged of rancour, tame of greeds;With the winged mind from fang and claw released;—Will such a land be seen? It will be seen;—Shall stand adjudged our foremost and Earth’s Queen.Acknowledgement that she of God proceedsThe invisible makes visible, as his priest,To her is yielded by a world reclaimed.And stands she mutilated, fancy-shamed,Yet strong in arms, yet strong in self-control,Known valiant, her maternal throbs repressed,Discarding vengeance, Giant with a soul;—My faith in her when she lay lowWas fountain; now as wave at flowBeneath the lights, my faith in God is best;—On France has come the testOf what she holds withinResponsive to Life’s deeper springs.She above the nations blestIn fruitful and in liveliest,In all that servant earth to heavenly bidding brings,The devotee of Glory, she may winGlory despoiling none, enrich her kind,Illume her land, and take the royal seatUnto the strong self-conqueror assigned.But ah, when speaks a loaded breath the double name,Humanity’s old Foeman winks agrin.Her constant Angel eyes her heart’s quick beat,The thrill of shadow coursing through her frame.Like wind among the ranks of amber wheat.Our Europe, vowed to unity or torn,Observes her face, as shepherds note the morn,And in a ruddy beacon mark an endThat for the flock in their grave hearing rings.Specked overhead the imminent vulture wingsAt poise, one fatal movement indiscreet,Sprung from the Aetna passions’ mad revolts,Draws down; the midnight hovers to descend;And dire as Indian noons of ulcer heatAnticipating tempest and the bolts,Hangs curtained terrors round her next day’s door,Death’s emblems for the breast of Europe flings;The breast that waits a spark to fire her store.Shall, then, the great vitality, France,Signal the backward step once more;Again a Goddess Fortune traceAmid the Deities, and pledge to chanceOne whom we never could replace?Now may she tune her nature’s many stringsTo noble harmony, be seen, be known.It was the foreign France, the unruly, feared;Little for all her witcheries endeared;Theatrical of arrogance, a spriteWith gaseous vapours overblown,In her conceit of power ensphered,Foredoomed to violate and atone;Her the grim conqueror’s iron mightAvengeing clutched, distrusting rent;Not that sharp intellect with fire endowedTo cleave our webs, run lightnings through our cloud;Not virtual France, the France benevolent,The chivalrous, the many-stringed, sublimeAt intervals, and oft in sweetest chime;Though perilously instrument,A breast for any having godlike gleam.This France could no antagonist disesteem,To spurn at heel and confiscate her brood.Albeit a waverer between heart and mind,And laurels won from sky or plucked from blood,Which wither all the wreath when intertwined,This cherishable France she may redeem.Beloved of Earth, her heart should feel at lengthHow much unto Earth’s offspring it doth owe.Obstructions are for levelling, have we strength;’Tis poverty of soul conceived a foe.Rejected be the wrath that keeps unhealedHer panting wound; to higher Courts appealedThe wrongs discerned of higher: Europe waits:She chooses God or gambles with the Fates.Shines the new Helen in Alsace-Lorraine,A darker river severs Rhine and Rhone,Is heard a deadlier Epic of the twain;We see a Paris burnOr France Napoleon.For yet he breathes whom less her heart forswearsWhile trembles its desire to thwart her mind:The Tyrant lives in Victory’s return.What figure with recurrent footstep faresAround those memoried tracks of scarlet mud,To sow her future from an ashen urnBy lantern-light, as dragons’ teeth are sown?Of bleeding pride the piercing seër is blind.But, cleared her eyes of that ensanguined scudDistorting her true features, to be shownBenignly luminous, one who bearsHumanity at breast, and she might learnHow surely the excelling generous findRenouncement is possession. SureAs light enkindles light when heavenly earthly mates,The flame of pure immits the flame of pure,Magnanimous magnanimous creates.So to majestic beauty stricken rearsHard-visaged rock against the risen glow;And men are in the secret with the spheres,Whose glory is celestially to bestow.Now nation looks to nation, that may liveTheir common nurseling, like the torrent’s flower,Shaken by foul Destruction’s fast-piled heap.On France is laid the proud initiativeOf sacrifice in one self-mastering hour,Whereby more than her lost one will she reap;Perchance the very lost regain,To count it less than her superb reward.Our Europe, where is debtor each to each,Pass measure of excess, and war is Cain,Fraternal from the Seaman’s beach,From answering Rhine in grand accord,From Neva beneath Northern cloud,And from our Transatlantic Europe loud,Will hail the rare example for their theme;Give response, as rich foliage to the breeze;In their entrusted nurseling know them one:Like a brave vessel under press of steam,Abreast the winds and tides, on angry seas,Plucked by the heavens forlorn of present sun,Will drive through darkness, and, with faith supreme,Have sight of haven and the crowded quays.