VIII
Upon his will he binds a radiant chain,
For Freedom's sake he is no longer free.
It is his task, the slave of Liberty,
With his own blood to wipe away a stain.
That pain may cease, he yields his flesh to pain.
To banish war, he must a warrior be.
He dwells in Night, eternal Dawn to see,
And gladly dies, abundant life to gain.
Until Thomas Hardy wrote The Dynasts, no poet had attempted to fashion into one great poem the epic story of the Napoleonic wars. There had been odes, lyrics, sonnets, narrative and didactic poems innumerable on Waterloo and other famous battles by land and sea, on dramatic or sentimental episodes in the fighting, on the aims or personality of the Emperor himself, but the theme as a whole had seemed too vast, too complex even for epic treatment, and had been left to the plodding Muse of History. Nor has Hardy welded it all into anything like another Iliad; there is something
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