The Roses of Bazeilles

Do the roses bloom, roses bloom
In lost Bazeilles,
Where shrilled a terrible human wail
In the blasting blaze of a living tomb ?
There they bloom
In lost Bazeilles !

Where men, like fiends, with frenzy fraught,
In a fiery street,
In a whirl of bullets and flaming sleet,
In a welter of falling ruin fought,
While women sought
With wavering feet.
Scared children clutching close their dress,
Babes in their arms,
Wildly to fly from hell's alarms !
Who if they 'scaped the seething press
Of murdering swarms,
Felt fiercer harms —
A horrible doom of scorching breath
From flame that clung,
To mother and child devouring hung,
Till all fell smouldering, heaped in death, -
Charred heaps of death
Encumbering flung !

May roses bloom, roses bloom
In lost Bazeilles ?
Where flame, to stifle the human wail.
Leapt, fuming, roaring over the doom
Of a living tomb,
And the sun turned pale
Over lost Bazeilles !

Yea, roses blow, roses blow,
White rose with red,
From yon charred fragments of the dead,
Crumbling chaos of friend and foe,
In a burnt-out woe.
With ruin fed !

A rose shall blow, roses blow
In the heart of France,
Though demons in their orgies dance,
And a hectoring, insolent, rude foe
Insult with a blow
Vanquished France !

Red rose of valour, rose of truth
And of purity,
Deep-bosomed rose of integrity,
Sweet white rose of innocent youth,
A celestial growth.
Bloom holily !

Rose shall be rife, roses blow rife
From a fallen throne,
Under whose shadowy shame lay prone
Nerveless a nation's nobler life ;
From manful spiritual strife,
From healthful use of stalwart limbs,
Wherewith a soul or body climbs,
Debarred : her stronger sons in chains,
A slow-souled vampire drained her veins :
Pampered with shows and shames she lay.
Poured out until this earth-convulsing day :
Then with the shock.
That made her throne to rock,
She rose dishevelled from her gory clay !

France lies in ashes : the nations pale
Behold dismayed
Over the earth an awful shade :
Tyranny stalks in feudal mail
O'er hearts that fail,
And faiths that fade !

Deep in a mountain's caverned hall,
It is whispered low.
Waits in a weird, sepulchral glow
An armed phantom, crowned and tall.
Whose hoary beard of centuries
Grows on the grey stone where it lies ;
While jewelled knights with glittering eyes
Glower round
In trance profound.

Anon, at agelong intervals.
The ghostly king
Sends a raven of sable wing
From his stupendous prison-walls.
To learn how near the fated hour.
When he may reassume the power . . .
Behold ! no raven comes again. . . .

. . . Behold ! the raven devours the slain I
Vaults asunder
Burst in thunder !
Lo ! in the hall of mirrors yonder,
In a palace consecrate to all
Agelong glories of the Gaul,

A German wears imperial
Purple : Barbarossa lives !
The ghost of a dark age revives.
And the heart of every freeman dies,
Seeing him rise !

Yet roses flower, roses flower I
And liberty,
Glorious, ardent, springs to the sky,
With breath as of morning, to overpower
Slaves that cower
In apathy !

Yea, roses bloom : a rose shall bloom
In the grave of France,
Whose breath, as of morning, may re-entrance
The spectre, till he slink to the tomb.
His eternal doom
Breathed from France I
She in her lingering agony
Dooms her tyrant with an eye
Charged with the light of liberty '.