To France

Mother of Freedom! Mother and fond nurse!Who, from thy mighty loins, with awful throesAnd cries of anguish bore her! what new woesEncompass thee? What long-forgotten curseRevives to chill thy soul and dull its seeing?Veiled are thy falcon-glances, as in death:Thou bleedest, France! and, sobbing, drawest breath,Sore smitten by the thing thou gavest being!

Is this thine offspring—once so nobly fairThat at her look were riven human chains,And all men blessed thee for thy travail pains?Behold! with serpents writhing in her hairShe stands, Medusa-like, the world appalling!Her bloodless cheeks bespeak the vampire's lust;Her victims fall before her in the dust;Yet, unappeased, she still would see them falling.

Is this blest Liberty, this treacherous thingThat hides its venom 'neath a mask of flowers,That smites its own defenders, and devoursThe hands that feed it? This whose rancorous stingIs uncontrolled by reason? Red and gory,The standard it uplifts on land and seaReveals it truly, hell-born Anarchy!Which borrows for its shame a name of glory.

Freedom disdains the cruel and the base,Their praise she deems inexpiable wrong,And in the homage of their savage songShe hears the voice of insult and disgrace.Scorning the ransomed slaves who rule no betterThan the oppressors they in wrath hurl down,Who make the Phrygian cap a despot's crown,And others with their broken shackles fetter—

She leaves them to the evils they invoke;And listening to the voices of the wild,—As listens for the mother's voice her child,—Courting the tempest and the lightning-stroke,She opens to the void her pinions regal:The clouds, the skies, she knows to be her own,And rising to the mountain-summits lone,She rests where rock the eyries of the eagle!