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- 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 chnges with a song
- 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,
- 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
- Of cannon stand in trenches where the dead
- Clog the ensanguined ice. But life to these
- Prophetic and enraptured souls in vision,
- And the keen ecstasy of faded strife,
- And divination of the loss as gain,
- 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,
- 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
- 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.
- 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
- 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
- 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,
- 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.
- And you say:
- Take days for repitition, 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,
- 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
- Grown weary cries Enough!
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