How big of breast our Mother Gaea laughed
     At sight of her boy Giants on the leap
     Each over other as they neighboured home,
     Fronting the day’s descent across green slopes,
     And up fired mountain crags their shadows danced. 
     Close with them in their fun, she scarce could guess,
     Though these two billowy urchins reeked of craft,
     It signalled some adventurous master-trick
     To set Olympians buzzing in debate,
     Lest it might be their godhead undermined,
     The Tyranny menaced.  Ephialtes high
     On shoulders of his brother Otos waved
     For the bull-bellowings given to grand good news,
     Compact, complexioned in his gleeful roar
     While Otos aped the prisoner’s wrists and knees,
     With doleful sniffs between recurrent howls;
     Till Gaea’s lap receiving them, they stretched,
     And both upon her bosom shaken to speech,
     Burst the hot story out of throats of both,
     Like rocky head-founts, baffling in their glut
     The hurried spout.  And as when drifting storm
     Disburdened loses clasp of here and yon
     A peak, a forest mound, a valley’s gleam
     Of grass and the river’s crooks and snaky coils,
     Signification marvellous she caught,
     Through gurglings of triumphant jollity,
     Which now engulphed and now gave eye; at last
     Subsided, and the serious naked deed,
     With mountain-cloud of laughter banked around,
     Stood in her sight confirmed:  she could believe
     That these, her sprouts of promise, her most prized,
     These two made up of lion, bear and fox,
     Her sportive, suckling mammoths, her young joy,
     Still by the reckoning infants among men,
     Had done the deed to strike the Titan host
     In envy dumb, in envious heart elate: 
     These two combining strength and craft had snared,
     Enmeshed, bound fast with thongs, discreetly caged
     The blood-shedder, the terrible Lord of War;
     Destroyer, ravager, superb in plumes;
     The barren furrower of anointed fields;
     The scarlet heel in towns, foul smoke to sky,
     Her hated enemy, too long her scourge: 
     Great Ares.  And they gagged his trumpet mouth
     When they had seized on his implacable spear,
     Hugged him to reedy helplessness despite
     His godlike fury startled from amaze. 
     For he had eyed them nearing him in play,
     The giant cubs, who gambolled and who snarled,
     Unheeding his fell presence, by the mount
     Ossa, beside a brushwood cavern; there
     On Earth’s original fisticuffs they called
     For ease of sharp dispute:  whereat the God,
     Approving, deemed that sometime trained to arms,
     Good servitors of Ares they would be,
     And ply the pointed spear to dominate
     Their rebel restless fellows, villain brood