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Poems and Ballads (Third Series) - Taken from The Collected Poetical Works of Algernon Charles - Swinburne—Vol. III by Algernon Charles Swinburne
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south-west wind:
Where the citadel cliffs of England are flanked with bastions of
serpentine,
Far off to the windward loomed their hulls, an hundred and
twenty-nine,
All filled full of the war, full-fraught with battle and charged
with bale;
Then store-ships weighted with cannon; and all were an hundred and
fifty sail.
The measureless menace of darkness anhungered with hope to prevail
upon light,
The shadow of death made substance, the present and visible spirit
of night,
Came, shaped as a waxing or waning moon that rose with the fall of
day,
To the channel where couches the Lion in guard of the gate of the
lustrous bay.
Fair England, sweet as the sea that shields her, and pure as the
sea from stain,
Smiled, hearing hardly for scorn that stirred her the menace of
saintly Spain.


III

I

"They that ride over ocean wide with hempen bridle and horse of
tree,"
How shall they in the darkening day of wrath and anguish and fear
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