Canto 68The Dwarf Napoleon
Book 16. Part Seven - Pondicherry Circa 1927 – 1947
Lyrical Poems
Despair on the Staircase
Mute stands she, lonely on the topmost stair,
An image of magnificent despair;
5The grandeur of a sorrowful surmise
Wakes in the largeness of her glorious eyes.
In her beauty’s dumb significant pose I find
The tragedy of her mysterious mind.
Yet is she stately, grandiose, full of grace.
10A musing mask is her immobile face.
Her tail is up like an unconquered flag;
Its dignity knows not the right to wag.
An animal creature wonderfully human,
A charm and miracle of fur-footed Brahman,
15Whether she is spirit, woman or a cat,
Is now the problem I am wondering at.
The Dwarf Napoleon
(Hitler. October 1939)
Behold, by Maya’s fantasy of will
20A violent miracle takes sudden birth,
The real grows one with the incredible.
In the control of her magician wand
The small achieves things great, the base things grand.
This puny creature would bestride the earth
25Even as the immense colossus of the past.
Napoleon’s mind was swift and bold and vast,
His heart was calm and stormy like the sea,
His will dynamic in its grip and clasp.
His eye could hold a world within its grasp
30And see the great and small things sovereignly.
A movement of gigantic depth and scope
He seized and gave coherence to its hope.
Pondicherry, c. 1927–1947
Far other this creature of a nether clay,
35Void of all grandeur, like a gnome at play,
Iron and mud his nature’s mingled stuff,
A little limited visionary brain
Cunning and skilful in its narrow vein,
A sentimental egoist poor and rough,
40Whose heart was never sweet and fresh and young,
A headlong spirit driven by hopes and fears,
Intense neurotic with his shouts and tears,
Violent and cruel, devil, child and brute,
This screaming orator with his strident tongue,
45This prophet of a scanty fixed idea,
Plays now the leader of our human march;
His might shall build the future’s triumph arch.
Now is the world for his eating a ripe fruit.
His shadow falls from London to Corea.
50Cities and nations crumble in his course.
A terror holds the peoples in its grip:
World-destiny waits upon that foaming lip.
A Titan Power upholds this pigmy man,
The crude dwarf instrument of a mighty Force.
55Hater of the free spirit’s joy and light,
Made only of strength and skill and giant might,
A Will to trample humanity into clay
And unify earth beneath one iron sway,
Insists upon its fierce enormous plan.
60Trampling man’s mind and will into one mould
Docile and facile in a dreadful hold,
It cries its demon slogans to the crowd.
But if its tenebrous empire were allowed,
That mastery would prepare the dismal hour
65When the Inconscient shall regain its right,
And man who emerged as Nature’s conscious power,
Shall sink into the deep original night
Sharing like all her forms that went before
The doom of the mammoth and the dinosaur.
70It is the shadow of the Titan’s robe