Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, ed. Poems of Places: An Anthology in 31 Volumes.
France: Vols. IX–X. 1876–79.
Napoleons Last Look
By Bartholomew Simmons (18041850)
W
Upon the armed deck,
That holds within its thunderous lair
The last of empire’s wreck,—
E’en him whose capture now the chain
From captive earth shall smite;
Ho! rocked upon the moaning main,
Watcher, what of the night?
Of morning’s coming breeze
Far in the north begins to furl
Night’s vapor from the seas.
Her every shred of canvas spread,
The proud ship plunges free,
While bears afar, with stormy head,
Cape Ushant on our lee.”
Forth in the dawning gray
A silent man made to the deck
His solitary way.
And, leaning o’er the poop, he gazed
Till on his straining view
That cloudlike speck of land, upraised,
Distinct, but slowly grew.
Maddens to marble there;
He risked Renown’s all-grasping game,
Dominion or despair,
And lost; and lo! in vapor furled,
The last of that loved France,
For which his prowess cursed the world,
Is dwindling from his glance.
From the fierce hour when first
On the astounded hearts of men
His meteor-presence burst,—
When blood-besotted Anarchy
Sank quelled amid the roar
Of thy far-sweeping musketry,
Eventful Thermidor!
Marengo’s carnage yields,
Or bursts o’er Lodi, beating down
Bavaria’s thousand shields;
Then, turning from the battle-sod,
Assumes the Consul’s palm,
Or seizes giant empire’s rod
In solemn Notre Dame.
Her ill-requited love,
Whose faith as beauteous as her brow
Brought blessings from above,
Her trampled heart, his darkening star,
The cry of outraged man,
And white-lipped Rout and wolfish War,
Loud thundering on his van.
Whose billows round him roll!
Thou ’rt calmness to the storms that sweep
This moment o’er his soul.
Black chaos swims before him, spread
With trophy-shaping bones;
The council-strife, the battle-dead,
Rent charters, cloven thrones.
Of thy transcendent power
Match with the soul-compelling sway
Which in this dreadful hour
Aids thee to hide beneath the show
Of calmest lip and eye
The hell that wars and works below,
The quenchless thirst to die?
The morning flashed to day,
And the sun followed glory-born,
Rejoicing on his way,
And still o’er ocean’s kindling flood
That muser cast his view,
While round him awed and silent stood
His fate’s devoted few.
When down that Belgian hill
His bristling Guards’ superb platoon
He led unbroken still!
Now would he pause, and quit their side
Upon destruction’s marge,
Nor kinglike share with desperate pride
Their vainly glorious charge?
Amid that onset on,
Where blazing shot and sabre-crash
Pealed o’er his empire gone;
There, ’neath his vanquished eagles tost,
Should close his grand career,
Girt by his heaped and slaughtered host
He lived,—for fetters here!
Cape Ushant melts away,
Even as his kingdom’s shattered might
Shall utterly decay,
Save when his spirit-shaking story,
In years remotely dim,
Warms some pale minstrel with its glory
To raise the song to him.