Page:Prometheus Bound, and other poems.djvu/237

231 To mad dissimilar ends they swerved aside. Each grave her nationality has pieced By its own noble breadth, and fortified, And pinned it deeper to the soil. Forlorn Of thanks, be, therefore, no one of these graves! Not Hers,—who, at her husband's side, in scorn, Outfaced the whistling shot and hissing waves, Until she felt her little babe unborn Recoil, within her, from the violent staves And bloodhounds of the world: at which, her life Dropt inwards from her eyes, and followed it Beyond the hunters. Garibaldi's wife And child died so. And now, the sea-weeds fit Her body like a proper shroud and coif, And murmurously the ebbing waters grit The little pebbles, while she lies interred In the sea-sand. Perhaps, ere dying thus, She looked up in his face which never stirred From its clenched anguish, as to make excuse For leaving him for his, if so she erred. Well he remembers that she could not choose. A memorable grave! Another is At Genoa, where a king may fitly lie,— Who bursting that heroic heart of his At lost Novara, that he could not die, Though thrice into the cannon's eyes for this He plunged his shuddering steed, and felt the sky Reel back between the fire-shocks;—stripped away The ancestral ermine ere the smoke had cleared, And naked to the soul, that none might say His kingship covered what was base and bleared With treason, he went out an exile, yea, An exiled patriot! Let him be revered.