IX

Let but the rational prevail,

Our footing is on ground though all else fail:

Our kiss of Earth is then a plight

To 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 Twelves

Shall nurse for effort infinite

While leashed to brain the heart of France the Fair

Beats 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 swerves

When her lost look, as on a wave of wine,

Rolls Eastward, and the mother-flag descries

Caress with folds and curves

The fortress over Rhine,

Beneath the one tall spire.

Despite her brooding thought, her nightlong sighs,

Her anguish in desire,

She sees, above the brutish paw

Alert 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 way

For Europe’s march; and of the most golden chord

Of the Heliconian lyre

Excellent mistress. Yea, she sees, and can admire;

Still seeing in what walks the Gallia leads;

And with what shield upon Alsace-Lorraine

Her wary sister’s doubtful look misreads

A 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 range

Indisputable; to-morrow Simeonite.

X

The 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 reach

Heights yet unknown of nations; haply teach

A thirsting world to learn ’tis ‘she who can.’

She that in History’s Heliaea pleads

The 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 proceeds

The 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 low

Was fountain; now as wave at flow

Beneath the lights, my faith in God is best;—

On France has come the test

Of what she holds within

Responsive to Life’s deeper springs.

She above the nations blest

In fruitful and in liveliest,

In all that servant earth to heavenly bidding brings,

The devotee of Glory, she may win

Glory despoiling none, enrich her kind,

Illume her land, and take the royal seat

Unto 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 end

That for the flock in their grave hearing rings.

Specked overhead the imminent vulture wings

At 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 heat

Anticipating 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 trace

Amid the Deities, and pledge to chance

One whom we never could replace?

Now may she tune her nature’s many strings

To noble harmony, be seen, be known.

It was the foreign France, the unruly, feared;

Little for all her witcheries endeared;

Theatrical of arrogance, a sprite

With gaseous vapours overblown,

In her conceit of power ensphered,

Foredoomed to violate and atone;

Her the grim conqueror’s iron might

Avengeing clutched, distrusting rent;

Not that sharp intellect with fire endowed

To cleave our webs, run lightnings through our cloud;

Not virtual France, the France benevolent,

The chivalrous, the many-stringed, sublime

At 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 length

How 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 unhealed

Her panting wound; to higher Courts appealed

The 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 burn

Or France Napoleon.

For yet he breathes whom less her heart forswears

While trembles its desire to thwart her mind:

The Tyrant lives in Victory’s return.

What figure with recurrent footstep fares

Around those memoried tracks of scarlet mud,

To sow her future from an ashen urn

By lantern-light, as dragons’ teeth are sown?

Of bleeding pride the piercing seër is blind.

But, cleared her eyes of that ensanguined scud

Distorting her true features, to be shown

Benignly luminous, one who bears

Humanity at breast, and she might learn

How surely the excelling generous find

Renouncement is possession. Sure

As light enkindles light when heavenly earthly mates,

The flame of pure immits the flame of pure,

Magnanimous magnanimous creates.

So to majestic beauty stricken rears

Hard-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 live

Their common nurseling, like the torrent’s flower,

Shaken by foul Destruction’s fast-piled heap.

On France is laid the proud initiative

Of 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.

THE CAGEING OF ARES

ILIAD, v. 385

[DEDICATED TO THE COUNCIL AT THE HAGUE, 1899]

HOW big of breast our Mother Gaea laughed

At sight of her boy Giants on the leap

Each over other as they neighboured home,

Fronting the day’s descent across green slopes,

And up fired mountain crags their shadows danced.

Close with them in their fun, she scarce could guess,

Though these two billowy urchins reeked of craft,

It signalled some adventurous master-trick

To set Olympians buzzing in debate,

Lest it might be their godhead undermined,

The Tyranny menaced. Ephialtes high

On shoulders of his brother Otos waved

For the bull-bellowings given to grand good news,

Compact, complexioned in his gleeful roar

While Otos aped the prisoner’s wrists and knees,

With doleful sniffs between recurrent howls;

Till Gaea’s lap receiving them, they stretched,

And both upon her bosom shaken to speech,

Burst the hot story out of throats of both,

Like rocky head-founts, baffling in their glut

The hurried spout. And as when drifting storm

Disburdened loses clasp of here and yon

A peak, a forest mound, a valley’s gleam

Of grass and the river’s crooks and snaky coils,

Signification marvellous she caught,

Through gurglings of triumphant jollity,

Which now engulphed and now gave eye; at last

Subsided, and the serious naked deed,

With mountain-cloud of laughter banked around,

Stood in her sight confirmed: she could believe

That these, her sprouts of promise, her most prized,

These two made up of lion, bear and fox,

Her sportive, suckling mammoths, her young joy,

Still by the reckoning infants among men,

Had done the deed to strike the Titan host

In envy dumb, in envious heart elate:

These two combining strength and craft had snared,

Enmeshed, bound fast with thongs, discreetly caged

The blood-shedder, the terrible Lord of War;

Destroyer, ravager, superb in plumes;

The barren furrower of anointed fields;

The scarlet heel in towns, foul smoke to sky,

Her hated enemy, too long her scourge:

Great Ares. And they gagged his trumpet mouth

When they had seized on his implacable spear,

Hugged him to reedy helplessness despite

His godlike fury startled from amaze.

For he had eyed them nearing him in play,

The giant cubs, who gambolled and who snarled,

Unheeding his fell presence, by the mount

Ossa, beside a brushwood cavern; there

On Earth’s original fisticuffs they called

For ease of sharp dispute: whereat the God,

Approving, deemed that sometime trained to arms,

Good servitors of Ares they would be,

And ply the pointed spear to dominate

Their rebel restless fellows, villain brood

Vowed to defy Immortals. So it chanced

Amusedly he watched them, and as one

The lusty twain were on him and they had him.

Breath to us, Powers of air, for laughter loud!

Cock of Olympus he, superb in plumes!

Bound like a wheaten sheaf by those two babes!

Because they knew our Mother Gaea loathed him,

Knew him the famine, pestilence and waste;

A desolating fire to blind the sight

With splendour built of fruitful things in ashes;

The gory chariot-wheel on cries for justice;

Her deepest planted and her liveliest voice,

Heard from the babe as from the broken crone.

Behold him in his vessel of bronze encased,

And tumbled down the cave. But rather look—

Ah, that the woman tattler had not sought,

Of all the Gods to let her secret fly,

Hermes, after the thirteen songful months!

Prompting the Dexterous to work his arts,

And shatter earth’s delirious holiday,

Then first, as where the fountain runs a stream,

Resolving to composure on its throbs.

But see her in the Seasons through that year;

That one glad year and the fair opening month.

Had never our Great Mother such sweet face!

War with her, gentle war with her, each day

Her sons and daughters urged; at eve were flung,

On the morrow stood to challenge; in their strength

Renewed, indomitable; whereof they won,

From hourly wrestlings up to shut of lids,

Her ready secret: the abounding life

Returned for valiant labour: she and they

Defeated and victorious turn by turn;

By loss enriched, by overthrow restored.

Exchange of powers of this conflict came;

Defacement none, nor ever squandered force.

Is battle nature’s mandate, here it reigned,

As music unto the hand that smote the strings;

And she the rosier from their showery brows,

They fruitful from her ploughed and harrowed breast.

Back to the primal rational of those

Who suck the teats of milky earth, and clasp

Stability in hatred of the insane,

Man stepped; with wits less fearful to pronounce

The mortal mind’s concept of earth’s divorced

Above; those beautiful, those masterful,

Those lawless. High they sit, and if descend,

Descend to reap, not sowing. Is it just?

Earth in her happy children asked that word,

Whereto within their breast was her reply.

Those beautiful, those masterful, those lawless,

Enjoy the life prolonged, outleap the years;

Yet they (’twas the Great Mother’s voice inspired

The audacious thought), they, glorious over dust,

Outleap not her; disrooted from her soar,

To meet the certain fate of earth’s divorced,

And clap lame wings across a wintry haze,

Up to the farthest bourne: immortal still,

Thenceforth innocuous; lovelier than when ruled

The Tyranny. This her voice within them told,

When softly the Great Mother chid her sons

Not of the giant brood, who did create

Those lawless Gods, first offspring of our brain

Set moving by an abject blood, that waked

To wanton under elements more benign,

And planted aliens on Olympian heights;—

Imagination’s cradle poesy

Become a monstrous pressure upon men;—

Foes of good Gaea; until dispossessed

By light from her, born of the love of her,

Their lordship the illumined brain rejects

For earth’s beneficent, the sons of Law,

Her other name. So spake she in their heart,

Among the wheat-blades proud of stalk; beneath

Young vine-leaves pushing timid fingers forth,

Confidently to cling. And when brown corn

Swayed armied ranks with softened cricket song,

With gold necks bent for any zephyr’s kiss;

When vine-roots daily down a rubble soil

Drank fire of heaven athirst to swell the grape;

When swelled the grape, and in it held a ray,

Rich issue of the embrace of heaven and earth;

The very eye of passion drowsed by excess,

And yet a burning lion for the spring;

Then in that time of general cherishment,

Sweet breathing balm and flutes by cool wood-side,

He the harsh rouser of ire being absent, caged,

Then did good Gaea’s children gratefully

Lift hymns to Gods they judged, but praised for peace,

Delightful Peace, that answers Reason’s call

Harmoniously and images her Law;

Reflects, and though short-lived as then, revives,

In memories made present on the brain

By natural yearnings, all the happy scenes;

The picture of an earth allied to heaven;

Between them the known smile behind black masks;

Rightly their various moods interpreted;

And frolic because toilful children borne

With larger comprehension of Earth’s aim

At loftier, clearer, sweeter, by their aid.