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Exploring Freedom, Destruction And Change And The Sublime

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Exploring Freedom, Destruction and Change and the Sublime in Byron and Shelley In his work A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origins of Our Feelings of the Sublime and Beautiful, philosopher Edmund Burke “whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime" (Burke, 86). This notions of the sublime, is one of the most central concepts explored in the works of the romantic, and arguably, the most principle. Largely a reaction and a revolt against the stifling social order and grey confines of reason and technology that followed it, the Romantics valued…show more content…
For Byron, the sublime necessitates of itself deep respect and an even deeper reverence. Commands it even. The natural untamed world, in all its grandeur consumes humanity and all of its achievement. While great empires rise and fall, and humans whether “stranger, slave or savage” are condemned by the raptures of time to fade, the ocean, stretches on indifferent, unaffected, and untouched. For Byron, it is this element of the ocean that, like nothing else encapsulates for him the image of the sublime. “Boundless, endless,” and “fathomless”, are just some of the words that Byron evokes to delineate the sea, . Like the reflection of the “Almighty’s form” the ocean has the ability to both destroy and enthrall. “Roll on, thou deep and dark blue Ocean - roll!/ Ten thousand fleets sweep over thee in vain” the comparison of the great blue sea, in comparison to the ‘ten thousands fleets’ being ‘sweep’(ed) very much denotes Byron feelings of human endeavor in the face of the might of nature. While “man marks the earth with ruin - his control/Stops with the shore”. For Byron, what’s particularly sublime about ocean and all else wild and untamed in nature is the fact that it lays so close and yet so far beyond humanity 's’ control. “Man’s ravage” stops just as the shore. In the deep unfathomable blue sea, he is no longer master but “like a drop of rain”, is at the mercy of the grandness and the waves. As Byron puts it, “he sinks into thy depths with bubbling
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