his glory France was prized. 
     She who had her Jeanne;
     The child of her industrious;
     Earth’s truest, earth’s pure fount from the main;
     And she who had her one day’s mate,
     In the soul’s view illustrious
     Past blazonry, her Immaculate,
     Those hours of slavish Empire would recall;
     Thrill to the rattling anchor-chain
     She heard upon a day in ‘I who can’;
     Start to the softened, tremulous bugle-blare
     Of that Caesarean Italian
     Across the storied fields of trampled grain,
     As to a Vercingetorix of old Gaul
     Blowing the rally against a Caesar’s reign. 
     Her soul’s protesting sobs she drowned to swear
     Fidelity unto the sainted man,
     Whose nimbus was her crown; and be again
     The foreigner in Europe, known of none,
     None knowing; sight to dazzle, voice to stun. 
     Rearward she stepped, with thirst for Europe’s van;
     The dream she nursed a snare,
     The flag she bore a pall.

     VI

     In Nature is no rearward step allowed. 
     Hard on the rock Reality do we dash
     To be shattered, if the material dream propels. 
     The worship to departed splendour vowed
     Conjured a simulacrum, wove her lash,
     For the slow measure timed her peal of bells.

     Thereof was the cannon-name a mockery round her hills;
     For the will of wills,
     Its flaccid ape,
     Weak as the final echo off a giant’s bawl: 
     Napoleon for disdain,
     His banner steeped in crape. 
     Thereof the barrier of Alsace-Lorraine;
     The frozen billow crested to its fall;
     Dismemberment; disfigurement;
     Her history blotted; her proud mantle rent;
     And ever that one word to reperuse,
     With eyes behind a veil of fiery dews;
     Knelling the spot where Gallic soil defiled
     Showed her sons’ valour as a frenzied child
     In arms of the mailed man. 
     Word that her mind must bear, her heart put under ban,
     Lest burst it:  unto her eyes a ghost,
     Incredible though manifest:  a scene
     Stamped with her new Saint’s name:  and all his host
     A wattled flock the foeman’s dogs between!

     VII

     Mark where a credible ghost pulls bridle to view that bare
     Corpse of a field still reddening cloud, and alive in its throes
     Beneath her Purgatorial Saint’s evocative stare: 
     Brand on his name, the gulf of his glory, his Legend’s close. 
     A lustreless Phosphor heading for daybeam Night’s dead-born,
     His underworld eyeballs grip the cast of the land for a fray
     Expugnant; swift up the heights, with the Victor’s instinctive scorn
     Of the trapped below, he rides; he beholds, and a two-fold grey,
     Even as the misty sun growing moon that a frost enrings,