 | Voices and visions |  |
13
AUX INVALIDES
What dead king ever knew sepulchral gloom
Lordlier than he in this last haughty home,
Below the Invalides' huge golden dome,
Twelve marble Victories ranging round his tomb?
Here from mosaics of laurel-pictured floor
We throng to mark his monolith high loom;
Here sculptures laud for us his deeds and state;
Here lie his brothers, kings too, since they bore
His name. As though to have breathed here were to be
By some reflected force of greatness great,
The insensate air itself seems charged with immortality.
Lordlier than he in this last haughty home,
Below the Invalides' huge golden dome,
Twelve marble Victories ranging round his tomb?
Here from mosaics of laurel-pictured floor
We throng to mark his monolith high loom;
Here sculptures laud for us his deeds and state;
Here lie his brothers, kings too, since they bore
His name. As though to have breathed here were to be
By some reflected force of greatness great,
The insensate air itself seems charged with immortality.
And yet these proud memorial grandeurs, wed
With reverence for the regal dust they hide,
Are in their glory and pomp like petrified
Tears that by widow and orphan have been shed.
These porphyries and chalcedonies are cold
As once was his ambition; overhead
St. Louis, offering Christ the martial blade,
Stares mockery; still in mockery we behold
On arch or spandrel saints of earlier times; ...
Till now the twelve great marble Victories fade,
And in their stead tower twelve great ghosts of war's colossal crimes.
With reverence for the regal dust they hide,
Are in their glory and pomp like petrified
Tears that by widow and orphan have been shed.
These porphyries and chalcedonies are cold
As once was his ambition; overhead
St. Louis, offering Christ the martial blade,
Stares mockery; still in mockery we behold
On arch or spandrel saints of earlier times; ...
Till now the twelve great marble Victories fade,
And in their stead tower twelve great ghosts of war's colossal crimes.
Paris.
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