112
BIRTHDAY ODE.
As earth bare never for her loathliest child,
Rose, brooded, reddened, broke, and with its breath
Put France to poisonous death; 230
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 ep. 6
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
One hand appointed shook the reddening scourge of song.240
And through the lightnings of the apparent word str. 7
Dividing shame's dense night
