| |
(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 | 5 |
| 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 | 10 |
| 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, | 15 |
| 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, | 20 |
| 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, | 25 |
| 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, | 30 |
| 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; | 35 |
| 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 | 40 |
| 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. | 45 |
| |
| 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 | 50 |
| 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. | |
| |
