Poem by Louise Imogen Guiney

Vergniaud in the Tumbril

I

THE wheels are silent, the cords are slack,
The terrible faces are surging back.
France, they too love thee! bid that keep plain;

The wrath and carnage I stayed afar
Colleagues of my white conscience are:
Accept my slayers, accept me slain!

Shed for days, in its olden guise
The quiet delicate snake-skin lies
To cheat a boy on his woodland stroll:

What if he crush it? Others see
Beauty’s miracle under a tree
Supple in mail, and adroit, and whole;

The shaper rid of a shape, and thence
(Growth of an outgrown excellence),
Mounted with infinite might and speed,

Freed like a soul to the heaven it dreamed;
Over life that was, and death that seemed
A victory and a revenge indeed!

As the serpent moves to the open spring,
The while a mock, a delusive thing
Sole in sight of the crowd may be,

So ye, my martyrs, arise, advance!
For what is left at the feet of France
It is our failure, it is not we.


II

Not to ourselves our strength we brought:
Inexpiable the Hand that wrought
In us the ruin of no redress,

The storm, the effort, the pang, the fire,
The premonition, the vast desire,
The primal passion of righteousness!

Scarce by the pitiful thwarted plan,
The haste, or the studious fears of man
Drawing a discord from best delight,

The measure is meted of God most wise;
Nor the future, with her adjusted eyes,
Shall speak us false in our dying fight.

But e’en to me now some use is clear
In the builded truth down-beaten here
For any along the way to spurn,

Since ever our broken task may stand
Disaster’s college in one saved land,
Whence many a stripling state shall learn.

Out of the human shoots the divine:
Be the Republic our only sign,
For whose life’s glory our lives have been

Ambassadors on a noble way
Tempest-driven, and sent astray
The first and the final good between.

Close to the vision undestroyed,
The hope not compassed and yet not void,
We perish so; but the world shall mark

On the hilltop of our work we died,
With joy of the groom before the bride,
With a dawn-cry thro’ the battle’s dark.


III

O last save me on the scaffold’s round!
Take heart, that after a thirst profound
The cup of delicious death is near,

And whoso hold it, or whence it flow,
O drink it to France, to France! and know
For the gift thou givest, thou hast her tear.

True seed thou wert of the sunnier hour,
Honorable, and burst to flower
Late in a hell-pit poison-walled:

Farewell, mortality lopped and pale,
Thou body that wast my friend! and Hail,
Dear spirit already!... My name is called.

1. When on the Marge of Evening
2. Heathenesse
3. Sherman: “An Horatian Ode”
4. Tryste Noel
5. A Talisman

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