A father’s love and mortal’s agony
With an immortal’s patience blending;—vain
The struggle! vain against the coiling strain
And gripe and deepening of the dragon’s grasp
The old man’s clinch; the long envenomed chain
Rivets the living links; the enormous asp
Enforces pang on pang and stifles gasp on gasp.”
The comic poets will also occasionally borrow a classical allusion. The following is from Swift’s “Description of a City Shower”:
“Boxed in a chair the beau impatient sits,
While spouts run clattering o’er the roof by fits,