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.

     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 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.

     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