Ely

Of all the Marshland Isles, I Ely am the queen:
For winter, eachwhere sad, in me looks fresh and green.
The horse, or other beast, o'erweighed with his own mass,
Lies wallowing in my fens, hid over head in grass:
And in the place where grows rank fodder for my neat,
The turf which bears the hay is wondrous needful peat:
My full and batning earth needs not the plowman's pains;
The rills which run in me are like the branched veins
In human bodies seen; those ditches cut by hand
From the surrounding meres to win the measured land.
To those choice waters I most fitly may compare,
Wherewith nice women use to blanch their beauties rare.
Hath there a man been born in me that never knew
Of Watersey the Leame, or the other called the New?
The Frithdike near'st my midst; and of another sort,
Who ever fished or fowled that cannot make report
Of sundry meres at hand, upon my western way,
As Ramsey Mere, and Ug, with the great Whittelsey?
Of the aboundant store of fish and fowl there bred.
Which whilst of Europe's isles Great Britain is the head,
No meres shall truly tell, in them, than at one draught,
More store of either kinds hath with the net been caught:
Which though some petty isles do challenge them to be
Their own, yet must those isles likewise acknowledge me
Their sovereign. Nor yet let that islet Ramsey shame,
Although to Ramsey Mere she only gives the name;
Nor Huntingdon, to me though she extend her grounds,
Twit me that I at all usurp upon her bounds.
Those meres may well be proud that I will take them in,
Which otherwise perhaps forgotten might have been,
Besides my towered fane, and my rich citied seat,
With villages and dorps, to make me most compleat.