Theodore Watts-Dunton: Poet, Novelist, Critic

The sea!
Thus did England fight;
And shall not England smite
With Drake’s strong stroke in battles yet to be?
And while the winds have power
Shall England lose the dower
She won in that great hour —
The sea?

Raleigh leaves off his narrative at the point when the Armada is driven out to the open sea. He sits down, and Gwynn, worked into a frenzy of excitement, now starts up and finishes the story in the same metre, but in quite a different spirit. In Gwynn’s fevered imagination the skeleton which he describes in his own narrative now leads the doomed Armada to its destruction: —

Gwynn

With towering sterns, with golden stems
That totter in the smoke before their foe,
I see them pass the mouth of Thames,
With death above the billows, death below!
Who leads them down the tempest’s path,
From Thames to Yare, from Yare to Tweedmouth blown,
Past many a Scottish hill and strath,
All helpless in the wild wind’s wrath,
Each mainmast stooping, creaking like a lath?
The Skeleton!

At length with toil the cape is passed,
And faster and faster still the billows come
To coil and boil till every mast
Is flecked with clinging flakes of snowy foam.
I see, I see, where galleons pitch,
That Inca’s bony shape burn on the waves,
Flushing each emerald scarp and ditch,
While Mother Carey, Orkney’s witch,
Waves to the Spectre’s song her lantern-switch
O’er ocean-graves.

The glimmering crown of Scotland’s head
They pass. No foe dares follow but the storm.
The Spectre, like a sunset red,
Illumines mighty Wrath’s defiant form,
And makes the dreadful granite peak
Burn o’er the ships with brows of prophecy;
Yea, makes that silent countenance speak
Above the tempest’s foam and reek,
More loud than all the loudest winds that shriek,
‘Tyrants, ye die!’

The Spectre, by the Orkney Isles,
Writes ‘God’s Revenge’ on waves that climb and dash,
Foaming right up the sand-built piles,
Where ships are hurled. It sings amid the crash;
Yea, sings amid the tempest’s roar,
Snapping of ropes, crackling of spars set free,
And yells of captives chained to oar,
And cries of those who strike for shore,
‘Spain’s murderous breath of blood shall foul no more
The righteous sea!’

The poem ends with the famous wassail chorus which has been often quoted in anthologies: —

WASSAIL CHORUS

Chorus

Christmas knows a merry, merry place,
Where he goes with fondest face,
Brightest eye, brightest hair:
Tell the Mermaid where is that one place:
Where?

Raleigh

’Tis by Devon’s glorious halls,
Whence, dear Ben, I come again:
Bright with golden roofs and walls —
El Dorado’s rare domain —
Seem those halls when sunlight launches
Shafts of gold through leafless branches,
Where the winter’s feathery mantle blanches
Field and farm and lane.

Chorus

Christmas knows a merry, merry place,
Where he goes with fondest face,
Brightest eye, brightest hair:
Tell the Mermaid where is that one place:
Where?

Drayton

’Tis where Avon’s wood-sprites weave
Through the boughs a lace of rime,
While the bells of Christmas Eve
Fling for Will the Stratford-chime
O’er the river-flags embossed
Rich with flowery runes of frost —
O’er the meads where snowy tufts are tossed —
Strains of olden time.