Page:Songs of the Springtides - Swinburne (1880).pdf/127

 As earth bare never for her loathliest child, Rose, brooded, reddened, broke, and with its breath Put France to poisonous death; Yea, far as heaven's red labouring eye could glance, France was not, save in men cast forth of France.

Then,—while the plague-sore grew Two darkling decades through, And rankled in the festering flesh of time,— Where darkness binds and frees The wildest of wild seas In fierce mutations of the unslumbering clime, There, sleepless too, o'er shuddering wrong

And through the lightnings of the apparent word Dividing shame's dense night