A DISTEMPERED FANCY.
1 Then the wild fancy from her horrid womb
Will senden forth foul shapes. O dreadful sight!
Overgrown toads, fierce serpents, thence will come,
Red-scaled dragons, with deep burning light
In their hollow eye-pits: with these she must fight:
Then think herself ill wounded, sorely stung.
Old fulsome hags, with scabs and scurf bedight,
Foul tarry spittle tumbling with their tongue
On their raw leather lips, these near will to her clung,
2 And lovingly salute against her will,
Closely embrace, and make her mad with woe:
She'd lever thousand times they did her kill,
Than force her such vile baseness undergo.
Anon some giant his huge self will show,
Gaping with mouth as vast as any cave,
With stony, staring eyes, and footing slow:
She surely deems him her live, walking grave,
From that dern hollow pit knows not herself to save.
3 After a while, tossed on the ocean main,
A boundless sea she finds of misery;
The fiery snorts of the leviathan,
That makes the boiling waves before him fly,
She hears, she sees his blazing morn-bright eye:
If here she 'scape, deep gulfs and threatening rocks
Her frighted self do straightway terrify;
Steel-coloured clouds with rattling thunder knocks,
With these she is amazed, and thousand such-like mocks.