The Armada (Part II)

I.

Hell for Spain, and heaven for England,--God to God, and man to
man,--
Met confronted, light with darkness, life with death: since time
began,
Never earth nor sea beheld so great a stake before them set,
Save when Athens hurled back Asia from the lists wherein they
met;
Never since the sands of ages through the glass of history ran
Saw the sun in heaven a lordlier day than this that lights us
yet.

II.

For the light that abides upon England, the glory that rests on her
godlike name,
The pride that is love and the love that is faith, a perfume
dissolved in flame,
Took fire from the dawn of the fierce July when fleets were
scattered as foam
And squadrons as flakes of spray; when galleon and galliass that
shadowed the sea
Were swept from her waves like shadows that pass with the clouds
they fell from, and she
Laughed loud to the wind as it gave to her keeping the glories of
Spain and Rome.

III.

Three hundred summers have fallen as leaves by the storms in their
season thinned,
Since northward the war-ships of Spain came sheer up the way of the
south-west wind:
Where the citadel cliffs of England are flanked with bastions of
serpentine,
Far off to the windward loomed their hulls, an hundred and
twenty-nine,
All filled full of the war, full-fraught with battle and charged
with bale;
Then store-ships weighted with cannon; and all were an hundred and
fifty sail.
The measureless menace of darkness anhungered with hope to prevail
upon light,
The shadow of death made substance, the present and visible spirit
of night,
Came, shaped as a waxing or waning moon that rose with the fall of
day,
To the channel where couches the Lion in guard of the gate of the
lustrous bay.
Fair England, sweet as the sea that shields her, and pure as the
sea from stain,
Smiled, hearing hardly for scorn that stirred her the menace of
saintly Spain.