Or where Charybdis pours its rapid tide Tempestuous. Thou art not to Jove allied; Nor did the king of gods thy mother meet Beneath a bull’s forged shape, and bear to Crete: That fable of thy glorious birth is feign’d; Some wild outrageous bull thy dam sustain’d. O, father Nisus, now my death behold: Exult, O city, by my baseness sold: Minos, obdurate, has avenged ye all; But ’twas more just by those I wrong’d to fall: For why shouldst thou, who only didst subdue By my offending, my offence pursue? Well art thou match’d to one whose amorous flame Too fiercely raged for humankind to tame; One who, within a wooden heifer thrust, Courted a lowing bull’s mistaken lust, And from whose monster-teeming womb the earth Received, what much it mourn’d, a bi-form birth. But what avail my plaints? the whistling wind, Which bears him far away, leaves them behind. Well weigh’d Pasiphae, when she preferr’d A bull to thee, more brutish than the herd. But ah! time presses, and the labour’d oars