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Then tell us of the storm. How, when God hurled

His anger, did it rise? How did it die?

It likes me not, a day of presage high

With dolorous tongue to stain. Those twain, I vow,

Stand best apart. When one with shuddering brow,

From armies lost, back beareth to his home

Word that the terror of her prayers is come;

One wound in her great heart, and many a fate

For many a home of men cast out to sate

The two-fold scourge that worketh Ares' lust,

Spear crossed with spear, dust wed with bloody dust;

Who walketh laden with such weight of wrong,

Why, let him, if he will, uplift the song

That is Hell's triumph. But to come as I

Am now come, laden with deliverance high,

Home to a land of peace and laughing eyes,

And mar all with that fury of the skies

Which made our Greeks curse God—how should this be?

Two enemies most ancient. Fire and Sea,

A sudden friendship swore, and proved their plight

By war on us poor sailors through that night

Of misery, when the horror of the wave

Towered over us, and winds from Strymon drave

Hull against hull, till good ships, by the horn

Of the mad whirlwind gored and overborne,

One here, one there, 'mid rain and blinding spray,

Like sheep by a devil herded, passed away.

And when the blessèd Sun upraised his head,

We saw the Aegean waste a-foam with dead,