FullReads

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,
Is shroud on the shrouded; he knows him there in the helmeted ranks.
The golden eagles flap lame wings,
The black double-headed are round their flanks.
He is there in midst of the pupils he harried to brains awake, trod into union; lo,
These are his Epic’s tutored Dardans, yon that Rhapsode’s Achaeans to know.
Nor is aught of an equipollent conflict seen, nor the weaker’s flashed device;
Headless is offered a breast to beaks deliberate, formal, assured, precise.
Ruled by the mathematician’s hand, they solve their problem, as on a slate.
This is the ground foremarked, and the day; their leader modestly hazarded date.
His helmeted ranks might be draggers of pools or reapers of plains for the warrior’s guile
Displayed; they haul, they rend, as in some orderly office mercantile.
And a timed artillery speaks full-mouthed on a stuttering feeble reduced to nought.
Can it be France, an army of France, tricked, netted, convulsive, all writhen caught?
Arterial blood of an army’s heart outpoured the Grey Observer sees:
A forest of France in thunder comes, like a landslide hurled off her Pyrenees.
Torrent and forest ramp, roll, sling on for a charge against iron, reason, Fate;
It is gapped through the mass midway, bare ribs and dust ere the helmeted feel its weight.
So the blue billow white-plumed is plunged upon shingle to screaming withdrawal, but snatched,
Waved is the laurel eternal yielded by Death o’er the waste of brave men outmatched.
The France of the fury was there, the thing he had wielded, whose honour was dearer than life;
The Prussia despised, the harried, the trodden, was here; his pupil, the scholar in strife.

He hated to heel, in a spasm of will,
From sleep or debate, a mannikin squire
With head of a merlin hawk and quill
Acrow on an ear. At him rained fire
From a blast of eyeballs hotter than speech,
To say what a deadly poison stuffed
The France here laid in her bloody ditch,
Through the Legend passing human puffed.

Credible ghost of the field which from him descends,
Each dark anniversary day will its father return,
Haling his shadow to spy where the Legend ends,
That penman trumpeter’s part in the wreck discern.

There, with the cup it presents at her lips, she stands,
France, with her future staked on the word it may pledge.
The vengeance urged of desire a reserve countermands;
The patience clasped totters hard on the precipice edge.
Lopped of an arm, mother love for her own springs quick,
To curdle the milk in her breasts for the young they feed,
At thought of her single hand, and the lost so nigh.
Mother love for her own, who raised her when she lay sick
Nigh death, and would in like fountains fruitlessly bleed,
Withholds the fling of her heart on the further die.

Of love is wisdom. Is it great love, then wise
Will our wild heart be, though whipped unto madness more
By its mentor’s counselling voice than thoughtfully reined.
Desire of the wave for the shore,
Passion for one last agony under skies,
To make her heavens remorseful, she restrained