Volume Iii Part 12 (2/2)
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 pa.s.sion for that young horizon red, Which dowered her with the flags, the blazing fame, Like dotage of the past-meridian dame For some bright SunG.o.d 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 n.o.blest 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, l.u.s.t, 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.
Compa.s.sionately could he smile, To hear the mouth disclaiming G.o.d, 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 G.o.d, 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.
NAPOLEON
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 gra.s.s Nid-nod to ground beneath the cuffing storm; While laurelled over his Imperial form, Forth from her bearded tube of lacquey bra.s.s, Reverberant notes and long blew volant Fame.
Incarnate Victory, Power manifest, Infernal or G.o.d-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 ma.s.s, Coherent or refractory, by his might.
Forth from her bearded tube of lacquey bra.s.s, 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 s.h.i.+ps, 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 G.o.dhead. 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 circ.u.mstance; 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 l.u.s.trous laurel-trees, Blossom and fruit of fresh Hesperides, The boiling life-blood in their cheers.
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