NAPOLEON

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 through

Earth's toughest, seasons, elements, tame;

Dash at the bulk the sharpened few;

Count death the smallest of their debts:

Show that the will to do

Is masculine and begets!

These princes unto him the mother owed;

These jewels of manhood that rich hand bestowed.

What wonder, though with wits awake

To 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 less

Than ere she bled on sands or snows and knew

The slave's alternative, to worship or to rue!

Bright 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, adored

Once 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 wreath

Surpassing 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 retort

On sovereign power; there his final stand,

Among the perjured Scythian's shaggy horde,

The hydrocephalic aerolite

Had taken; flashing thence repellent teeth,

Though Europe's Master Europe's Rebel banned

To 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 cock

The 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, pluck

The hazards for new footing, how compel

Those timely incidents by men named luck,

Through forethought that defied the Fates to choose,

Her grovelling admiration had not yet

Imagined of the great man-miracle;

And France recounted with her comic smile

Duplicities of Court and Cabinet,

The silky female of his male in guile,

Wherewith her two-faced Master could amuse

A dupe he charmed in sunny beams to bask,

Before his feint for camisado struck

The lightning moment of the cast-off mask.

Splendours of earth repeating heaven's at set

Of sun down mountain cloud in masses arched;

Since Asia upon Europe marched,

Unmatched the copious multitudes; unknown

To Gallia's over-runner, Rome's inveterate foe,

Such hosts; all one machine for overthrow,

Coruscant from the Master's hand, compact

As reasoned thoughts in the Master's head; were shown

Yon lightning moment when his acme might

Blazed o'er the stream that cuts the sandy tract

Borussian from Sarmatia's famished flat;

The century's flower; and off its pinnacled throne,

Rayed servitude on Europe's ball of sight.

Behind the Northern curtain-folds he passed.

There heard hushed France her muffled heart beat fast

Against the hollow ear-drum, where she sat

In expectation's darkness, until cracked

The straining curtain-seams: a scaly light

Was ghost above an army under shroud.

Imperious on Imperial Fact

Incestuously 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 seas

Gulp 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 knoll

Beyond horizon, under no blest Cross:

By the vulture dotted and engarlanded.

Was it a necromancer lured

To weave his tense betraying spell?

A Titan whom our God endured

Till he of his foul hungers fell,

By all his craft and labour scourged?

A deluge Europe's liberated wave,

Paean 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 wear

The realm of Darkness with its Prince's air;

Assume in mien the resolute pretence

To satiate an hungered confidence,

Proved criminal by the sceptic seen to cower

Beside the generous face of that frail flower.

Desire 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 need

Of either's aid, distrust in trust did breed.

Their traffic instincts hooded their live wits

To issues. Never human fortune throve

On such alliance. Viewed by fits,

From Vulcan's forge a hovering Jove

Evolved. 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 success

He raged to clothe a perilous nakedness.

He would not fall, while falling; would not be taught,

While learning; would not relax his grasp on aught

He 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 spun

The 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 cirque

That narrowed at him thick and murk,

This gambler with his genius

Flung lives in angry volleys, bloody lightnings, flung

His 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 will

Within; 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 intervene

When giants their last lesson have to learn.

Fighting against an end he could discern,

The chivalry whereof he had none

He called from his worn slave's abundant springs:

Not deigning spousally entreat

That ever blinded by his martial skill,

But harsh to have her worship counted out

In human coin, her vital rivers drained,

Her infant forests felled, commanded die

The decade thousand deaths for his Imperial seat,

Where throning he her faith in him maintained;

Bound Reason to believe delayed defeat

Was triumph; and what strength in her remained

To 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 form

Revealed, 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 hours

And 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 flame

Of an outworn lamp, to illumine nought anon.

Yet loud as when he first showed War's effete

Their Schoolman off his eagre mounted high,

And summoned to subject who dared compete,

The cannon in the name Napoleon

Discoursed 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 heat

From his anterior splendours, and shall seem

Day 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 obscure

Lightened; 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 Force

Beget the greater for its overthrow.

The song of Liberty in her hearing spoke

A foreign tongue; Earth's fluttering little lyre

Unlike, but like the raven's ravening croak.

Not till her breath of being could aspire

Anew, this loved and scourged of Angels found

Our 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 dun

Behind o'ershadowing foemen: on a tide

They drew the nature having need of pride

Among her fellows for its vital dues:

He seen like some rare treasure-galleon,

Hull down, with masts against the Western hues.