In flaming heaps the raging ocean rolls,
Whose livid waves involve despairing souls;
The liquid burnings dreadful colours shew,
Some deeply red, and others faintly blue.
And a war-horse!
His eye-balls burn, he wounds the smoking plain,
And knots of scarlet ribbon deck his mane.
And a demon!
Provoking demons all restraint remove.
Here is more eighteenth-century “propriety”:
The hills forget they’re fixed, and in their fright
Cast off their weight, and ease themselves for flight.
The woods, with terror winged, out-fly the wind,
And leave the heavy, panting hills behind.
Again, from Nat Lee’s Alexander the Great:
When Glory, like the dazzling eagle, stood
Perched on my beaver in the Granic flood;
When Fortune’s self my standard trembling bore,
And the pale Fates stood ’frighted on the shore.
Of these lines, with another couplet, Dr. Warburton said that they “contain not only the most sublime but the most judicious imagery that poetry could conceive or paint.” And here are lines from a tragedy, for me anonymous: