The Daily Odyssey: June 25
“Meantime, forgetful of the voice divine,
All dreadful bright my limbs in armour shine;
High on the deck I take my dangerous stand,
Two glittering javelins lighten in my hand;
Prepared to whirl the whizzing spear I stay,
Till the fell fiend arise to seize her prey.
Around the dungeon, studious to behold
The hideous pest, my labouring eyes I roll’d;
In vain! the dismal dungeon, dark as night,
Veils the dire monster, and confounds the sight.
“Now through the rocks, appall’d with deep dismay,
We bend our course, and stem the desperate way;
Dire Scylla there a scene of horror forms,
And here Charybdis fills the deep with storms.
When the tide rushes from her rumbling caves,
The rough rock roars, tumultuous boil the waves;
They toss, they foam, a wild confusion raise,
Like waters bubbling o’er the fiery blaze;
Eternal mists obscure the aërial plain,
And high above the rock she spouts the main;
When in her gulfs the rushing sea subsides,
She drains the ocean with the refluent tides;
The rock re-bellows with a thundering sound;
Deep, wondrous deep, below appears the ground.
“Struck with despair, with trembling hearts we view’d
The yawning dungeon, and the tumbling flood;
When lo! fierce Scylla stoop’d to seize her prey,
Stretch’d her dire jaws, and swept six men away.
Chiefs of renown! loud-echoing shrieks arise;
I turn, and view them quivering in the skies;
They call, and aid with outstretch’d arms implore;
In vain they call! those arms are stretch’d no more.
As from some rock that overhangs the flood
The silent fisher casts the insidious food,
With fraudful care he waits the finny prize,
And sudden lifts it quivering to the skies:
So the foul monster lifts her prey on high,
So pant the wretches struggling in the sky;
In the wide dungeon she devours her food,
And the flesh trembles while she churns the blood.
Worn as I am with griefs, with care decay’d,
Never, I never scene so dire survey’d!
My shivering blood, congeal’d, forgot to flow;
Aghast I stood, a monument of woe!