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.

     IV

     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