Volume Iii Part 16 (2/2)
She had no self but France: the sainted man No 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; all For the visioned treasure-galleon astrain; Sent zenithward on ba.s.s 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 ill.u.s.trious Past blazonry, her Immaculate, Those hours of slavish Empire would recall; Thrill to the rattling anchor-chain She heard upon a day in 'I who can'; Start to the softened, tremulous bugle-blare Of that Caesarean Italian Across the storied fields of trampled grain, As to a Vercingetorix of old Gaul Blowing the rally against a Caesar's reign.
Her soul's protesting sobs she drowned to swear Fidelity unto the sainted man, Whose nimbus was her crown; and be again The 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.
VI
In Nature is no rearward step allowed.
Hard on the rock Reality do we dash To be shattered, if the material dream propels.
The wors.h.i.+p to departed splendour vowed Conjured 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 c.r.a.pe.
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 defiled Showed her sons' valour as a frenzied child In 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 scene Stamped with her new Saint's name: and all his host A wattled flock the foeman's dogs between!
VII
Mark where a credible ghost pulls bridle to view that bare Corpse of a field still reddening cloud, and alive in its throes Beneath her Purgatorial Saint's evocative stare: Brand on his name, the gulf of his glory, his Legend's close.
A l.u.s.treless Phosphor heading for daybeam Night's dead-born, His underworld eyeb.a.l.l.s grip the cast of the land for a fray Expugnant; swift up the heights, with the Victor's instinctive scorn Of 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, a.s.sured, 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 guile Displayed; 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 ma.s.s midway, bare ribs and dust ere the helmeted feel its weight.
So the blue billow white-plumed is plunged upon s.h.i.+ngle to screaming withdrawal, but s.n.a.t.c.hed, 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 squire With head of a merlin hawk and quill Acrow on an ear. At him rained fire From a blast of eyeb.a.l.l.s hotter than speech, To say what a deadly poison stuffed The France here laid in her b.l.o.o.d.y ditch, Through the Legend pa.s.sing 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 b.r.e.a.s.t.s 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 sick Nigh 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 wise Will our wild heart be, though whipped unto madness more By its mentor's counselling voice than thoughtfully reined.
Desire of the wave for the sh.o.r.e, Pa.s.sion for one last agony under skies, To make her heavens remorseful, she restrained
VIII
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