University of Virginia Library

III

Here, Forests of the Marne,
Where still your birds are calling,
Your streams of light in all directions falling
On floors with ivy sheen'd, room beyond room,
Your stems, the elder brothers of our house,
Would chant with pillar'd ever-budding boughs,
Of France our mother, she that drains
The wild cloud from the shoreless height
Of suns, in your twice-dropping rains,
Staunches your heavings day and night—
Nerves you against the tempest's strains
And soothes the lightning from your veins,
Dark rivers of the light.
But now is light forgot,
Forests of Gault, Traonne;
Here lightning is that she soothes not,
Lightning from human fears.
Blasted and wreckt
The zigzag mire of trenches runs,
About the ruin'd castle Mondement,
Amid your glades blood-fleck'd
That tremble all with guns.
At Charleroi defeated
France hath retreated,
Whelm'd are her wise and tomb-embedded walls
Inwrought with statues in heroic fragments,
Founded on famous written stones;
Beauty's time-chartered capitals,
Her royal towns,
Reims, Soissons, Laon,
Are fallen. What else falls?
And what though Attila was check'd
And headed back to the Hercynian wood
From these same Catalaunian fields
Where shattered were his waggon forts and shields,
Never, since Autumn was,
Hath tempest strown the grass
Nor charged the spirit-life of atmospheres
With ruin rich as this tremendous Year's—
For here the soul of France
Hath baulk'd the great advance
Of all their cannoniers.