Of dead men’s bones, their wither’d skins and all Hung all along upon it; and these men Were such as they had fawn’d into their fen, And then their skins hung on their hedge of bones. Sail by them therefore, thy companions Beforehand causing to stop ev’ry ear With sweet soft wax, so close that none may hear A note of all their charmings. Yet may you, If you affect it, open ear allow To try their motion; but presume not so To trust your judgment, when your senses go So loose about you, but give strait command To all your men, to bind you foot and hand Sure to the mast, that you may safe approve How strong in instigation to their love Their rapting tunes are. If so much they move, That, spite of all your reason, your will stands To be enfranchis’d both of feet and hands, Charge all your men before to slight your charge, And rest so far from fearing to enlarge That much more sure they bind you. When your friends Have outsail’d these, the danger that transcends Rests not in any counsel to prevent, Unless your own mind finds the tract and bent Of that way that avoids it. I can say That in your course there lies a twofold way, The right of which your own, taught, present wit, And grace divine, must prompt. In gen’ral yet Let this inform you: Near these Sirens’ shore Move two steep rocks, at whose feet lie and roar The black sea’s cruel billows; the bless’d Gods Call them the Rovers. Their abhorr’d abodes No bird can pass; no not the doves, whose fear[1] Sire Jove so loves that they are said to bear Ambrosia to him, can their ravine ’scape, But one of them falls ever to the rape Of those sly rocks; yet Jove another still Adds to the rest, that so may ever fill The sacred number. Never ship could shun The nimble peril wing’d there, but did run With all her bulk, and bodies of her men, To utter ruin. For the seas retain Not only their outrageous æsture there, But fierce assistants of particular fear, And supernatural mischief, they exspire, And those are whirlwinds of devouring fire Whisking about still. Th’ Argive ship alone, Which bore the care of all men, got her gone,[2] Come from Areta. Yet perhaps ev’n she Had wrack’d at those rocks, if the Deity, That lies by Jove’s side, had not lent her hand To their transmission; since the man, that mann’d In chief that voyage, she in chief did love. Of these two spiteful rocks, the one doth shove Against the height of heav’n her pointed brow. A black cloud binds it round, and never show Lends to the sharp point; not the clear blue sky Lets ever view it, not the summer’s eye, Nor fervent autumn’s. None that death could end Could ever scale it, or, if up, descend, Though twenty hands and feet he had for hold, A polish’d ice-like glibness doth enfold The rock so round, whose midst a gloomy cell Shrouds so far westward that it sees to hell. From this keep you as far, as from his bow An able young man can his shaft bestow. For here the whuling Scylla shrouds her face,[3]