Lyric Poem · Nature
The Revenge - A Ballad of the Fleet
1At Flores in the Azores Sir Richard Grenville lay,
2And a pinnace, like a fluttered bird, came flying from far away:
3'Spanish ships of war at sea! we have sighted'
4Then sware Lord Thomas Howard: ''Fore God I am no coward;
5But I cannot meet them here, for my ships are out of gear,
6And the half my men are sick. I must fly, but follow quick.
7We are six ships of the line; can we fight with ?'
8Then spake Sir Richard Grenville: 'I know you are no coward;
9You fly them for a moment to fight with them again.
10But I've ninety men and more that are lying sick ashore.
11I should count myself the coward if I left them, my Lord Howard,
12To these Inquisition dogs and the devildoms of Spain.'
13So Lord Howard passed away with five ships of war that day,
14Till he melted like a cloud in the silent summer heaven;
15But Sir Richard bore in hand all his sick men from the land
16Very carefully and slow,
17Men of Bideford in Devon,
18And we laid them on the ballast down below;
19For we brought them all aboard,
20And they blest him in their pain, that they were not left to Spain,
21To the thumbscrew and the stake, for the glory of the Lord.
22He had only a hundred seamen to work the ship and to fight,
23And he sailed away from Flores till the Spaniard came in sight,
24With his huge sea-castles heaving upon the weather bow.
25'Shall we fight or shall we fly?
26Good Sir Richard, tell us now,
27For to fight is but to die!
28There'll be little of us left by the time this sun be set.'
29And Sir Richard said again: 'We be all good English men.
30Let us bang these dogs of Seville, the children of the devil,
31For I never turned my back upon Don or devil yet.'
32Sir Richard spoke and he laughed, and we roared a hurrah, and so
33The little Revenge ran on sheer into the heart of the foe,
34With her hundred fighters on deck, and her ninety sick below;
35For half of their fleet to the right and half to the left were seen,
36And the little Revenge ran on through the long sea-lane between.
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“The Revenge - A Ballad of the Fleet” by Alfred, Lord Tennyson — quilloak.com/poems/the-revenge-a-ballad-of-the-fleet
Quick facts
- Poem
- The Revenge - A Ballad of the Fleet
- Poet
- Alfred, Lord Tennyson
- Length
- 40 lines
- Form
- Lyric Poem
- Themes
- Nature, War & Remembrance, Peace
Craft notes
How this poem works
Measured from the text on this page, not copied from a summary. Counts are approximate: syllables and rhymes come from the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary, which models General American English, so dialect, older pronunciation, and performance can all change what you hear.
- Shape
- 40 lines · 6 stanzas of 4–10 lines
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Text, source & rights
A traceable edition
Full-text display is based on the committed source record and a United States term-expiry review.
- Author record
- Alfred, Lord Tennyson1809–1892
- Source record
- PoetryDBThe Revenge - A Ballad of the Fleet by alfred-lord-tennyson, PoetryDB transcription
- Display decision
- Full text · United States · reviewed 2026-07-18
- Publication record
- Not recorded in the imported source
- Text fingerprint
- SHA-256 956c92f5717f27bb…
- Editorial handling
- Whitespace and stanza breaks normalized for web display; no material wording change recorded.