Alice Rotini - FedOA - Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II

Stretch’d on her mossy couch, in trackless deeps,
Queen of the coral groves, Zostera sleeps;
The silvery sea-weed matted round her bed,
And distant surges murmuring o’er her head.
High in the flood her azure dome ascends,
The crystal arch on crystal columns bends;
Roof’d with translucent shell the turrets blaze,
And far in ocean dart their colour’d rays;
O’er the white floor successive shadows move,
As rise and break the ruffled waves above.
Around the nymph her mermaid-trains repair,
And wave with orient pearl her radiant hair;
With rapid fins she cleaves the watery way,
Shoots like a silver meteor up to day;
Sounds a loud conch, convokes a scaly band,
Her sea-born lovers, and ascends the strand.
A stanza dedicated to seagrasses from the poem ‘The Loves of the Plants’
written by Erasmus Darwin (1789), father of Charles Robert