Stedman and Hutchinson, comps. A Library of American Literature:
An Anthology in Eleven Volumes. 1891.
Vols. IX–XI: Literature of the Republic, Part IV., 1861–1889
Storm—The King
By Francis Miles Finch (1827–1907)I
I live in a fortess of fire and cloud.
You may hear my batteries, sharp and loud,
In the summer night
When I and my lieges arm for the fight,
And the birches moan,
And the cedars groan,
As they bend beneath the terrible spring
Of Storm—the King!
My troops are the winds and the hail and the rain:
My foes the lakes and the leaves and the grain,
The obstinate oak
That guards his front to my charge and stroke,
The ships on the sea,
The blooms on the lea,
And they writhe and break as the war-guns ring
Of Storm—the King!
My Marshals are four: the swart Simoon,
Sirocco, Tornado, and swift Typhoon.
My realm is the world;
Whenever a sail is spread or furled,
My wide command
Sweeps sea and land,
And doomed and dead who insult fling
At Storm—the King!
I drove the sea o’er the Leyden dikes,
And fighting by side of the burgher pikes,
To the walls I bore
The “ark of Delft” from the ocean shore,
O’er vale and mead
With pitiless speed
Till the Spaniard fled from the deluge ring
Of Storm—the King!
I saw an Armada set sail from Spain
To redden with blood a maiden’s reign.
I baffled the host
With blow in the face on the island coast,
And tore proud deck
To splinters and wreck,
And the Saxon poets the praises sing
Of Storm—the King!
They built them a tower of iron and stone,
And crowned its top with a flashing zone,
And laughed to scorn
The vibrant call of my bugle horn!
I buried it deep
In the sands asleep,
Where the surges rock and the billows swing
Of Storm—the King!
They hire the heralds of lightning now
To warn that I march from the mountain’s brow.
The cowards hide
In the guarded bay or the haven wide:
But I toss them there
In the whirl of the air
Till they seem but stones from the deadly sling
Of Storm—the King!
I scour the earth and the sea and the air,
And drag the writhing trees by the hair,
And chase for game
The desert dust and the prairie flame,
The mountain snow,
And the Arctic floe,
And never is folded plume or wing
Of Storm—the King!