Part 14

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.