Her arms below her sword-hilt crossed, The heart of that high-hallowed Jeanne Into the furnace-pit she tossed Before her body knew the flame, And sucked its essence: warmth for righteous work, An undivided power to speed her aim. She had no self but France: the sainted man No France but self. Him warrior and clerk, Free of his iron clutch; and him her young, In whirled imagination mastodonized; And him her penmen, him her poets; all For the visioned treasure-galleon astrain; Sent zenithward on bass and treble tongue, Till solely through 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