Page:The Poems of Henry Kendall (1920).djvu/156

 Across a naked strait of land

Blown sleet and surge were humming;

But trammelled with the shifting sand,

She heard the monster coming!

A thing of hoofs and horns and lust:

A gaunt, goat-footed stranger!

She bowed her body in the dust

And ealled on Zeus to change her;

And ealled on Hermes, fair and fleet,

And her of hounds and quiver,

To hide her in the thickets sweet

That sighed above the river.

So he that sits on flaming wheels,

And rules the sea and thunder,

Caught up the satyr by the heels

And tore his skirts asunder.

While Areas, of the glittering plumes,

Took Ladon's daughter lightly,

And set her in the gracious glooms

That mix with moon-mist nightly;

And touched her lips with wild-flower wine,

And changed her body slowly,

Till, in soft reeds of song and shine,

Her life was hidden wholly.

As when the strong stream of a wintering sea

Rolls round our coast, with bodeful breaks of storm,

And swift salt rain, and bitter wind that saith

Wild things and woeful of the White South Land

Alone with God and silence in the cold—

As when this cometh, men from dripping doors