The keys? Who loosed these dead to break your sleep?
SALVE REGINA, cry, yea, cry aloud.
AVE MARIA! Ye have sown: shall ye not reap?
SALVE REGINA! Christ, what fiery cloud
Suddenly rolls to windward, high o'er mast and shroud?

Are hell-gates burst at last? For the black deep
To windward burns with streaming crimson fires!
Over the wild strange waves, they shudder and creep
Nearer--strange smoke-wreathed masts and spars, red
spires
And blazing hulks, vast roaring blood-red pyres,
Fierce as the flames ye fed with flesh of men
Amid the imperial pomp and chanting choirs
Of Alva--from El Draque's red hand again
Sweep the wild fire-ships down upon the Fleet of Spain.

Onward before the freshening wind they come
Full fraught with all the terrors, all the bale
That flamed so long for the delight of Rome,
The shrieking fires that struck the sunlight pale,
The avenging fires at last! Now what avail
Your thousand ranks of cannon? Swift, cut free,
Cut your scorched cables! Cry, reel backward, quail,
Crash your huge huddled ranks together, flee!
Behind you roars the fire, before--the dark North Sea!

Dawn, everlasting and omnipotent
Dawn rolled in crimson o'er the spar-strewn waves,
As the last trumpet shall in thunder roll
O'er heaven and earth and ocean. Far away,
The ships of Spain, great ragged piles of gloom
And shaggy splendour, leaning to the North
Like sun-shot clouds confused, or rent apart
In scattered squadrons, furiously plunged,
Burying their mighty prows i' the broad grey rush
Of smoking billowy hills, or heaving high
Their giant bowsprits to the wandering heavens,
Labouring in vain to return, struggling to lock
Their far-flung ranks anew, but drifting still
To leeward, driven by the ever-increasing storm
Straight for the dark North Sea. Hard by there lurched
One gorgeous galleon on the ravening shoals,
Feeding the white maw of the famished waves
With gold and purple webs from kingly looms
And spilth of world-wide empires. Howard, still
Planning to pluck the Armada plume by plume,
Swooped down upon that prey and swiftly engaged
Her desperate guns; while Drake, our ocean-king,
Knowing the full worth of that doom-fraught hour,
Glanced neither to the left nor right, but stood
High on his poop