‘You seize Tornado by his locks of mist,
Burst his dense clouds, his wheeling spires untwist;
Wide o’er the West when borne on headlong gales,
Dark as meridian night, the Monster fails,
‘Howls high in air, and shakes his curled brow,
Ladling with serpent-train the waves below,
Whirls his black arm, the forked lightning flings,
And showers a deluge from his demon-wings.’
From ‘The Economy of Vegetation’, one of two poems in The Botanic Garden (1791) by naturalist Erasmus Darwin, grandfather of Charles Darwin.
Tornado–Zeus Battling Typhon, an engraving by William Blake for a 1795 publication of Erasmus Darwin’s The Botanic Garden.