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.

     X

     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.