Yet safe return’d—Ulysses led the way.

Learn courage hence, and in my care confide;

Lo! still the same Ulysses is your guide.

Attend my words! your oars incessant ply;

Strain every nerve, and bid the vessel fly.

If from yon jostling rocks and wavy war

Jove safety grants, he grants it to your care.

And thou, whose guiding hand directs our way,

Pilot, attentive listen and obey!

Bear wide thy course, nor plough those angry waves

Where rolls yon smoke, yon tumbling ocean raves;

Steer by the higher rock; lest whirl’d around

We sink, beneath the circling eddy drown’d.’

While yet I speak, at once their oars they seize,

Stretch to the stroke, and brush the working seas.

Cautious the name of Scylla I suppress’d;

That dreadful sound had chill’d the boldest breast.


“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