For all worst wants of all most miserable [Str. 11. 
  With divine hands to deal
  All balms and herbs that heal,
  Among all woes whereunder poor men dwell
  Our Master sent his servant Love, to be
  On earth his witness; but the strange deep sea,
  Mother of life and death inextricate,
  What work should Love do there, to war with fate? 
  Yet there must Love too keep
  At heart of the eyeless deep 410
  Watch, and wage war wide-eyed with all its wonders,
  Lower than the lightnings of its waves, and thunders
  Of seas less monstrous than the births they bred;
  Keep high there heart and head,
  And conquer:  then for prize of all toils past
  Feel the sea close them in again at last.

  A day of direr doom arisen thereafter [Ant. 11. 
  With cloud and fire in strife
  Lightens and darkens life
  Round one by man’s hand masked with living laughter, 420
  A man by men bemonstered, but by love,
  Watched with blind eyes as of a wakeful dove,
  And wooed by lust, that in her rosy den
  As fire on flesh feeds on the souls of men,
  To take the intense impure
  Burnt-offering of her lure,
  Divine and dark and bright and naked, strange
  With ravenous thirst of life reversed and change,
  As though the very heaven should shrivel and swell
  With hunger after hell, 430
  Run mad for dear damnation, and desire
  To feel its light thrilled through with stings of fire.

        Above a windier sea, [Ep. 11. 
        The glory of Ninety-three
    Fills heaven with blood-red and with rose-red beams
        That earth beholding grows
        Herself one burning rose
    Flagrant and fragrant with strange deeds and dreams,
      Dreams dyed as love’s own flower, and deeds
Stained as with love’s own life-blood, that for love’s sake bleeds. 440

  And deeper than all deeps of seas and skies [Str. 12. 
  Wherein the shadows are
  Called sun and moon and star
  That rapt conjecture metes with mounting eyes,
  Loud with strange waves and lustrous with new spheres,
  Shines, masked at once and manifest of years,
  Shakespeare, a heaven of heavenly eyes beholden;
  And forward years as backward years grow golden
  With light of deeds and words
  And flight of God’s fleet birds, 450
  Angels of wrath and love and truth and pity;
  And higher on exiled eyes their natural city
  Dawns down the depths of vision, more sublime
  Than all truths born of time;
  And eyes that wept above two dear sons dead
  Grow saving stars to guard one hopeless head.