The conqueror, who stains her fame,
Still the Gods love her, for that of high aim

Is this good France, the bleeding thing they stripe.
XI

She shall rise worthier of her prototype
Thro' her abasement deep; the pain that runs

From nerve to nerve some victory achieves.
They lie like circle-strewn soaked Autumn-leaves

Which stain the forest scarlet, her fair sons!
And of their death her life is: of their blood

From many streams now urging to a flood,
No more divided, France shall rise afresh.

Of them she learns the lesson of the flesh:-
The lesson writ in red since first Time ran,

A hunterhunting down the beast in man:
That till the chasing out of its last vice,

The flesh was fashioned but for sacrifice.
Immortal Mother of a mortal host!

Thou suffering of the wounds that will not slay,
Wounds that bring death but take not life away! -

Stand fast and hearken while thy victors boast:
Hearken, and loathe that music evermore.

Slip loose thy garments woven of pride and shame:
The torture lurks in them, with them the blame

Shall pass to leave thee purer than before.
Undo thy jewels, thinking whence they came,

For what, and of the abominable name
Of her who in imperial beauty wore.

O Mother of a fated fleeting host
Conceived in the past days of sin, and born

Heirs of disease and arrogance and scorn,
Surrender, yield the weight of thy great ghost,

Like wings on air, to what the heavens proclaim
With trumpets from the multitudinous mounds

Where peace has filled the hearing of thy sons:
Albeit a pang of dissolution rounds

Each new discernment of the undying ones,
Do thou stoop to these graves here scattered wide

Along thy fields, as sunless billows roll;
These ashes have the lesson for the soul.

'Die to thy Vanity, and strain thy Pride,
Strip off thy Luxury: that thou may'st live,

Die to thyself,' they say, 'as we have died
From dear existence and the foe forgive,

Nor pray for aught save in our little space
To warn good seed to greet the fair earth's face.'

O Mother! take their counsel, and so shall
The broader world breathe in on this thy home,

Light clear for thee the counter-changing dome,
Strength give thee, like an ocean's vast expanse

Off mountain cliffs, the generations all,
Not whirling in their narrow rings of foam,

But as a river forward. Soaring France!
Now is Humanity on trial in thee:

Now may'st thou gather humankind in fee:
Now prove that Reason is a quenchless scroll;

Make of calamity thine aureole,
And bleeding head us thro' the troubles of the sea.

ALSACE-LORRAINE
I

The sister Hours in circles linked,
Daughters of men, of men the mates,

Are gone on flow with the day that winked,
With the night that spanned at golden gates.

Mothers, they leave us, quickening seed;
They bear us grain or flower or weed,

As we have sown; is nought extinct
For them we fill to be our Fates.

Life of the breath is but the loan;
Passing death what we have sown.

Pearly are they till the pale inherited stain
Deepens in us, and the mirrors they form on their flow

Darken to feature and nature: a volumed chain,
Sequent of issue, in various eddies they show.

Theirs is the Book of the River of Life, to read
Leaf by leaf by reapers of long-sown seed:

There doth our shoot up to light from a spiriting sane
Stand as a tree whereonnumberless clusters grow:

Legible there how the heart, with its one false move
Cast Eurydice pallor on all we love.

Our fervid heart has filled that Book in chief;
Our fitful heart a wild reflection views;

Our craving heart of passion suckling grief
Disowns the author's work it must peruse;

Inconscient in its leap to wreak the deed,
A round of harvests red from crimson seed,

It marks the current Hours show leaf by leaf,
And rails at Destiny; nor traces clues;

Though sometimes it may think what novel light
Will strike their faces when the mind shall write.

II
Succourful daughters of men are the rosed and starred

Revolving Twelves in their fluent germinal rings,
Despite the burden to chasten, abase, depose.

Fallen on France, as the sweep of scythe over sward,
They breathed in her ear their voice of the crystal springs,

That run from a twilight rise, from a twilight close,
Through alternate beams and glooms, rejoicingly young.

Only to Earth's best loved, at the breathless turns
Where Life in fold of the Shadow reclines unstrung,

And a ghostly lamp of their moment's union burns,
Will such pure notes from the fountain-head be sung.

Voice of Earth's very soul to the soul she would see renewed:
A song that sought no tears, that laid not a touch on the breast

Sobbing aswoon and, like last foxgloves' bells upon ferns
In sandy alleys of woodland silence, shedding to bare.

Daughters of Earth and men, they piped of her natural brood;
Her patient helpful four-feet; wings on the flit or in nest;

Paws at our old-world task to scoop a defensive lair;
Snouts at hunt through the scented grasses; enhavened scuts

Flashing escape under show of a laugh nigh the mossed burrow-mouth.
Sack-like droop bronze pears on the nailed branch-frontage of huts,

To greet those wedded toilers from acres where sweat is a shower.
Snake, cicada, lizard, on lavender slopes up South,

Pant for joy of a sunlight driving the fielders to bower.
Sharpened in silver by one chance breeze is the olive's grey;

A royal-mantle floats, a red fritillary hies;
The bee, for whom no flower of garden or wild has nay,

Noises, heard if but named, so hot is the trade he plies.
Processions beneath green arches of herbage, the long colonnades;

Laboured mounds that a foot or a wanton stick may subvert;
Homely are they for a lowly look on bedewed grass-blades,

On citied fir-droppings, on twisted wreaths of the worm in dirt.
Does nought so loosen our sight from the despot heart, to receive

Balm of a sound Earth's primary heart at its active beat:
The motive, yet servant, of energy; simple as morn and eve;

Treasureless, fetterless; free of the bonds of a great conceit:
Unwounded even by cruel blows on a body that writhes;

Nor whimpering under misfortune; elusive of obstacles; prompt
To quit any threatened familiar domain seen doomed by the scythes;