| |
| YOU have become a forge of snow-white fire, | |
| A crucible of molten steel, O France! | |
| Your sons are stars who cluster to a dawn | |
| And fade in light for you, O glorious France! | |
| They pass through meteor changes with a song | 5 |
| Which to all islands and all continents | |
| Says life is neither comfort, wealth, nor fame, | |
| Nor quiet hearthstones, friendship, wife nor child, | |
| Nor love, nor youth’s delight, nor manhood’s power, | |
| Nor many days spent in a chosen work, | 10 |
| Nor honored merit, nor the patterned theme | |
| Of daily labor, nor the crowns nor wreaths | |
| Of seventy years. | |
| |
| These are not all of life, | |
| O France, whose sons amid the rolling thunder | 15 |
| Of cannon stand in trenches where the dead | |
| Clog the ensanguined ice. But life to these | |
| Prophetic and enraptured souls is vision, | |
| And the keen ecstasy of fated strife, | |
| And divination of the loss as gain, | 20 |
| And reading mysteries with brightened eyes | |
| In fiery shock and dazzling pain before | |
| The orient splendour of the face of Death, | |
| As a great light beside a shadowy sea; | |
| And in a high will’s strenuous exercise, | 25 |
| Where the warmed spirit finds its fullest strength | |
| And is no more afraid, and in the stroke | |
| Of azure lightning when the hidden essence | |
| And shifting meaning of man’s spiritual worth | |
| And mystical significance in time | 30 |
| Are instantly distilled to one clear drop | |
| Which mirrors earth and heaven. | |
| |
| This is life | |
| Flaming to heaven in a minute’s span | |
| When the breath of battle blows the smouldering spark. | 35 |
| And across these seas | |
| We who cry Peace and treasure life and cling | |
| To cities, happiness, or daily toil | |
| For daily bread, or trail the long routine | |
| Of seventy years, taste not the terrible wine | 40 |
| Whereof you drink, who drain and toss the cup | |
| Empty and ringing by the finished feast; | |
| Or have it shaken from your hand by sight | |
| Of God against the olive woods. | |
| |
| As Joan of Arc amid the apple trees | 45 |
| With sacred joy first heard the voices, then | |
| Obeying plunged at Orleans in a field | |
| Of spears and lived her dream and died in fire, | |
| Thou, France, hast heard the voices and hast lived | |
| The dream and known the meaning of the dream, | 50 |
| And read its riddle: how the soul of man | |
| May to one greatest purpose make itself | |
| A lens of clearness, how it loves the cup | |
| Of deepest truth, and how its bitterest gall | |
| Turns sweet to soul’s surrender. | 55 |
| |
| And you say: | |
| Take days for repetition, stretch your hands | |
| For mocked renewal of familiar things: | |
| The beaten path, the chair beside the window, | |
| The crowded street, the task, the accustomed sleep, | 60 |
| And waking to the task, or many springs | |
| Of lifted cloud, blue water, flowering fields— | |
| The prison-house grows close no less, the feast | |
| A place of memory sick for senses dulled | |
| Down to the dusty end where pitiful Time | 65 |
| Grown weary cries Enough! | |
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