Within; by the toppling throne the soldier won;
     By the yeasty ferment of what once had been,
     To cloud a rational mind for present things;
     By his own force, the suicide in his mill. 
     Needs never God of Vengeance intervene
     When giants their last lesson have to learn. 
     Fighting against an end he could discern,
     The chivalry whereof he had none
     He called from his worn slave’s abundant springs: 
     Not deigning spousally entreat
     That ever blinded by his martial skill,
     But harsh to have her worship counted out
     In human coin, her vital rivers drained,
     Her infant forests felled, commanded die
     The decade thousand deaths for his Imperial seat,
     Where throning he her faith in him maintained;
     Bound Reason to believe delayed defeat
     Was triumph; and what strength in her remained
     To head against the ultimate foreseen rout,
     Insensate taxed; of his impenitent will,
     Servant and sycophant:  without ally,
     In Python’s coils, the Master Craftsman still;
     The smiter, panther springer, trapper sly,
     The deadly wrestler at the crucial bout,
     The penetrant, the tonant, tower of towers,
     Striking from black disaster starry showers. 
     Her supreme player of man’s primaeval game,
     He won his harnessed victim’s rapturous shout,
     When every move was mortal to her frame,
     Her prayer to life that stricken he might lie,
     She to exchange his laurels for earth’s flowers.

     The innumerable whelmed him, and he fell: 
     A vessel in mid-ocean under storm. 
     Ere ceased the lullaby of his passing bell,
     He sprang to sight, in human form
     Revealed, from no celestial aids: 
     The shades enclosed him, and he fired the shades.

     Cannon his name,
     Cannon his voice, he came. 
     The fount of miracles from drought-dust arose,
     Amazing even on his Imperial stage,
     Where marvels lightened through the alternate hours
     And winged o’er human earth’s heroical shone. 
     Into the press of cumulative foes,
     Across the friendly fields of smoke and rage,
     A broken structure bore his furious powers;
     The man no more, the Warrior Chief the same;
     Match for all rivals; in himself but flame
     Of an outworn lamp, to illumine nought anon. 
     Yet loud as when he first showed War’s effete
     Their Schoolman off his eagre mounted high,
     And summoned to subject who dared compete,
     The cannon in the name Napoleon
     Discoursed of sulphur earth to curtained sky. 
     So through a tropic day a regnant sun,
     Where armies of assailant vapours thronged,
     His glory’s trappings laid on them:  comes night,
     Enwraps him in a bosom quick of heat
     From his anterior splendours,