Vii

Soon felt she in her shivered frame A bodeful drain of blood illume Her wits with frosty fire to read The dazzling wizard who would have her bleed On fruitless marsh and snows of spectral gloom For victory that was victory scarce in name. Husky his clarions laboured, and her sighs O’er slaughtered sons were heavier than the prize; Recalling how he stood by Frederic’s tomb, With Frederic’s country underfoot and spurned: There meditated; till her hope might guess, Albeit his constant star prescribe success, The savage strife would sink, the civil aim To head a mannered world breathe zephyrous Of morning after storm; whereunto she yearned; And Labour’s lovely peace, and Beauty’s courtly bloom, The mind in strenuous tasks hilarious. At such great height, where hero hero topped, Right sanely should the Grand Ascendant think No further leaps at the fanged abyss’s brink True Genius takes: be battle’s dice-box dropped!

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.