And the waves flashing seem to burn with fires.

Scarce the famed Argo pass’d these raging floods,

The sacred Argo, fill’d with demigods!

E’en she had sunk, but Jove’s imperial bride

Wing’d her fleet sail, and push’d her o’er the tide.


“‘High in the air the rock its summit shrouds

In brooding tempests, and in rolling clouds;

Loud storms around, and mists eternal rise,

Beat its bleak brow, and intercept the skies.

When all the broad expansion, bright with day,

Glows with the autumnal or the summer ray,

The summer and the autumn glow in vain,

The sky for ever lowers, for ever clouds remain.

Impervious to the step of man it stands,

Though borne by twenty feet, though arm’d with twenty hands;

Smooth as the polish of the mirror rise

The slippery sides, and shoot into the skies.

Full in the centre of this rock display’d,

A yawning cavern casts a dreadful shade:

Nor the fleet arrow from the twanging bow,

Sent with full force, could reach the depth below.

Wide to the west the horrid gulf extends,

And the dire passage down to hell descends.

O fly the dreadful sight! expand thy sails,

Ply the strong oar, and catch the nimble gales;

Here Scylla bellows from the dire abodes,

Tremendous pest, abhorr’d by man and gods!

Hideous her voice, and with less terrors roar

The whelps of lions in the midnight hour.

Twelve feet, deform’d and foul, the fiend dispreads;

Six horrid necks she rears, and six terrific heads;

Her jaws grin dreadful with three rows of teeth;

Jaggy they stand, the gaping den of death;

Her parts obscene the raging billows hide;

Her bosom terribly o’erlooks the tide.

When stung with hunger she embroils the flood,

The sea-dog and the dolphin are her food;

She makes the huge leviathan her prey,

And all the monsters of the watery way;

The swiftest racer of the azure plain

Here fills her sails, and spreads her oars in vain;

Fell Scylla rises, in her fury roars,