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