[Pg 328]

As wine of living fire

Keen as the heart's desire

That makes the heart its pyre

And on its burning visions burns itself to death.

For here of all thy waters, here of all

Thy windy ways the wildest, and beset

As some beleaguered city's war-breached wall

With deaths enmeshed all round it in deep net,

Thick sown with rocks deadlier than steel, and fierce

With loud cross-countering currents, where the ship

Flags, flickering like a wind-bewildered leaf,

The densest weft of waves that prow may pierce

Coils round the sharpest warp of shoals that dip

Suddenly, scarce well under for one brief

Keen breathing-space between the streams adverse,

Scarce showing the fanged edge of one hungering lip

Or one tooth lipless of the ravening reef;

And midmost of the murderous water's web

All round it stretched and spun,

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