Poems and Ballads (Third Series) | Page 6

this year.
L
With just and sacred jubilation
Let earth sound answer to the sea

For witness, blown on winds as free,
How England, how her
crowning nation,
Acclaims this jubilee.
THE ARMADA
1588: 1888
I
I
England, mother born of seamen, daughter fostered of the sea, Mother
more beloved than all who bear not all their children free, Reared and
nursed and crowned and cherished by the sea-wind and
the sun,
Sweetest land and strongest, face most fair and mightiest
heart

in one,
Stands not higher than when the centuries known of earth
were less
by three,
When the strength that struck the whole world pale fell back
from
hers undone.
II
At her feet were the heads of her foes bowed down, and the
strengths of the storm of them stayed,
And the hearts that were
touched not with mercy with terror were
touched and amazed and affrayed:
Yea, hearts that had never been
molten with pity were molten with
fear as with flame,
And the priests of the Godhead whose temple is
hell, and his heart
is of iron and fire,
And the swordsmen that served and the seamen
that sped them, whom
peril could tame not or tire,
Were as foam on the winds of the waters
of England which tempest
can tire not or tame.
III
They were girded about with thunder, and lightning came forth of
the rage of their strength,
And the measure that measures the wings of
the storm was the
breadth of their force and the length:
And the name of their might
was Invincible, covered and clothed

with the terror of God;
With his wrath were they winged, with his
love were they fired,
with the speed of his winds were they shod;
With his soul were they
filled, in his trust were they comforted:
grace was upon them as night,
And faith as the blackness of darkness:
the fume of their balefires
was fair in his sight,
The reek of them sweet as a savour of myrrh in
his nostrils: the
world that he made,
Theirs was it by gift of his servants: the wind, if
they spake in
his name, was afraid,
And the sun was a shadow before it, the stars
were astonished with
fear of it: fire
Went up to them, fed with men living, and lit of men's
hands for a
shrine or a pyre;
And the east and the west wind scattered their ashes
abroad, that
his name should be blest
Of the tribes of the chosen whose blessings
are curses from
uttermost east unto west.
II
I
Hell for Spain, and heaven for England,--God to God, and man to
man,--
Met confronted, light with darkness, life with death: since
time

began,
Never earth nor sea beheld so great a stake before them set,
Save when Athens hurled back Asia from the lists wherein they
met;
Never since the sands of ages through the glass of history ran
Saw the sun in heaven a lordlier day than this that lights us
yet.
II
For the light that abides upon England, the glory that rests on her
godlike name,
The pride that is love and the love that is faith, a
perfume
dissolved in flame,
Took fire from the dawn of the fierce July when
fleets were
scattered as foam
And squadrons as flakes of spray; when galleon and
galliass that
shadowed the sea
Were swept from her waves like shadows that pass
with the clouds
they fell from, and she
Laughed loud to the wind as it gave to her
keeping the glories of
Spain and Rome.
III
Three hundred summers have fallen as leaves by the storms in their
season thinned,
Since northward the war-ships of Spain came sheer
up the way of the
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

go free?
How shall these that have curbed the seas not feel his bridle
who
made the sea?
God shall bow them and break them now: for what is man in the Lord
God's sight?
Fear shall shake them, and shame shall break, and all the
noon of
their pride be night:
These that sinned