Explore "The Island" by Lord Byron on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
I / The fight was o'er; the flashing through the gloom, / Which robes the cannon as he wings a tomb, / Had ceased; and sulphury vapours upward driven / Had left the Earth, and but polluted Heaven: / The rattling roar which rung in every volley / Had left the echoes to their melancholy; / No more they shrieked their horror, boom for boom; / The strife was done, the vanquished had their doom; / The mutineers were crushed, dispersed, or ta'en, / Or lived to deem the happiest were the slain. / Few, few escaped, and these were hunted o'er / The isle they loved beyond their native shore.
No further home was theirs, it seemed, on earth, / Once renegades to that which gave them birth; / Tracked like wild beasts, like them they sought the wild, / As to a Mother's bosom flies the child; / But vainly wolves and lions seek their den, / And still more vainly men escape from men.