Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, ed. Poems of Places: An Anthology in 31 Volumes.
England: Vols. I–IV. 1876–79.

Introductory

The Ocean

By Lord Byron (1788–1824)

(From Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage)

ROLL on, thou deep and dark blue Ocean, roll!

Ten thousand fleets sweep over thee in vain;

Man marks the earth with ruin; his control

Stops with the shore; upon the watery plain

The wrecks are all thy deed, nor doth remain

A shadow of man’s ravage, save his own,

When, for a moment, like a drop of rain,

He sinks into thy depths with bubbling groan,

Without a grave, unknelled, uncoffined, and unknown.

His steps are not upon thy paths; thy fields

Are not a spoil for him; thou dost arise

And shake him from thee; the vile strength he wields

For earth’s destruction thou dost all despise,

Spurning him from thy bosom to the skies,

And send’st him, shivering in thy playful spray,

And howling, to his gods, where haply lies

His petty hope in some near port or bay,

And dashest him again to earth: there let him lay.

The armaments which thunderstrike the walls

Of rock-built cities, bidding nations quake,

And monarchs tremble in their capitals,

The oak leviathans, whose huge ribs make

Their clay creator the vain title take

Of lord of thee, and arbiter of war,—

These are thy toys, and, as the snowy flake,

They melt into thy yeast of waves, which mar

Alike the Armada’s pride or spoils of Trafalgar.

Thy shores are empires, changed in all save thee:

Assyria, Greece, Rome, Carthage, what are they?

Thy waters washed them power while they were free,

And many a tyrant since; their shores obey

The stranger, slave, or savage; their decay

Has dried up realms to deserts: not so thou,

Unchangeable save to thy wild waves’ play;

Time writes no wrinkle on thine azure brow;

Such as creation’s dawn beheld, thou rollest now.

Thou glorious mirror, where the Almighty’s form

Glasses itself in tempests; in all time,

Calm or convulsed; in breeze or gale or storm,

Icing the pole, or in the torrid clime

Dark-heaving, boundless, endless, and sublime,—

The image of Eternity, the throne

Of the Invisible; even from out thy slime

The monsters of the deep are made; each zone

Obeys thee; thou goest forth, dread, fathomless, alone.

And I have loved thee, Ocean! and my joy

Of youthful sports was on thy breast to be

Borne, like thy bubbles, onward: from a boy

I wantoned with thy breakers; they to me

Were a delight; and if the freshening sea

Made them a terror, ’t was a pleasing fear,

For I was as it were a child of thee,

And trusted to thy billows far and near,

And laid my hand upon thy mane, as I do here.

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