Napoleon: A Poem

Overview
Charles Caleb Colton’s 1814 poem surveys Napoleon’s rise and first fall with the urgency of a contemporary witness and the breadth of a moral historian. Written on the eve of the Emperor’s abdication, it assembles a panorama of Europe convulsed by one man’s audacity, weighing military genius against the wreckage it leaves. The poem admires energy, discipline, and intellect while condemning boundless ambition that converts liberty’s rupture into empire’s chain. History becomes a theater for Providence: a scourge is permitted to chastise nations, then set aside when its lesson is learned.

Rise of the Conqueror
The opening movement traces Napoleon from obscure beginnings to commander of destinies. Colton sketches the arc from revolutionary ferment to disciplined mastery: the artilleryman who converts chaos into order, the strategist who forges victory from speed and surprise. Early triumphs are painted as dazzling yet double-edged; the same force that smites tyranny hardens into tyranny’s instrument. The coronation marks a pivot, a public emblem of inward transformation, where the champion of change enthrones himself as sovereign over it. Classical comparisons, to Alexander or Caesar, hover as measuring rods and warnings rather than mere ornaments.

Europe Under the Yoke
The middle stanzas enlarge the map to continental scale. Kings are manufactured and moved like counters; treaties are written with bayonets; a new nobility is minted from regiments instead of roots. Colton evokes capitals stunned by swift eagles, provinces bled by conscription, commerce choked by decrees, and minds patrolled by censorship. The grandeur of monuments and pageantry is counterweighted with graves, widows, and the silence of fields that once sang with harvest. Britain appears as the stubborn counterforce, an island power whose fleets guard the narrow seas and whose endurance keeps a remnant of Europe’s balance alive, yet the poem resists simple nationalism, insisting that victory without justice corrodes victor and vanquished alike.

The Turn of Fortune
Hubris sows the seeds of reversal. Spain resists with a patience fiercer than blades; the peninsular struggle becomes a millstone grinding away veteran legions. In the east, policy meets climate and will meets immensity; the march that begins in blaze returns in ashes. Colton personifies winter as Heaven’s ally, but he gives equal weight to miscalculation and moral fatigue. The poem quickens toward the coalition’s resurgence and the long-delayed convergence of princes and peoples. Leipzig and the passage of great rivers are evoked as emblems of tide, until the gates of Paris open and the man who once remade thrones accepts the narrowness of exile. The comet’s tail fades; the earth remembers its night and stars.

Moral and Political Reflections
The final movement harvests admonitions from spectacle. Greatness sundered from goodness is a transient blaze; power that rules by fear consumes its own fuel. Providence, in Colton’s vision, does not abolish human agency but bends its excess toward correction. Nations that barter freedom for glory wake to chains; rulers who mistake instruments for ends become instruments themselves. Peace emerges not as lassitude but as the hardest statesmanship, demanding limits, law, and mercy. The poem asks victors to spare, rebuild, and remember, lest victory mimic the vice it overthrew.

Tone and Imagery
Colton writes in elevated, declamatory verse studded with martial and elemental images, eagles and tempests, meteors and volcanoes, translating campaigns into natural convulsions. Classical and biblical echoes weave a second text beneath the first, situating Napoleon among the exempla of ambition and judgment. The cadence shifts between trumpet-blast and funeral-drum, sustaining a tension between admiration for capacity and grief for its uses. What remains after the blaze is not the figure of one man alone but a ledger of costs and a charter for restraint.