Seeing you come as friends unto the friar, Resolve you doctors, Bacon can by books Make storming Boreas thunder from his cave, And dim fair Luna to a dark eclipse. The great arch-ruler, potentate of Hell, Trembles, when Bacon bids him, or his fiends, Bow to the force of his pentageron. What Art can work, the frolic friar knows; And therefore will I turn my magic books, And strain out necromancy to the deep: I have contriv'd and fram'd a head of brass (I made Belcephon hammer out the stuff), And that by Art shall read philosophy, And I will strengthen England by my skill, That if ten Cæsars lived and reign'd in Rome, With all the legions Europe doth contain, They should not touch a grass of English ground: The work that Ninus rear'd at Babylon, The brazen walls fram'd by Semiramis, Carv'd out like to the portal of the sun; Shall not be such as rings the English strand, From Dover to the market-place of Rye. | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...WHAT HAVE YOU DONE? by PAUL VERLAINE THE GARDEN OF LOVE, FR. SONGS OF EXPERIENCE by WILLIAM BLAKE IT'S A QUEER TIME by ROBERT RANKE GRAVES CHARACTERS: ELIZABETH RIGBY by ANNA LETITIA BARBAULD THE DRUG-SHOP, OR, ENDYMION IN EDMONSTOUN by STEPHEN VINCENT BENET |