Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 64 No. 396 October 1848

BYRON'S ADDRESS TO THE OCEAN

Childe Harold's Pilgrimage undertakes an Idea – that of a proud spirit, born in a castle, self-driven from the bosom of home, seeking refuge, solace, renovation, from Nature, of sensibilities worn out with enjoyment. Or, he brings into play a neglected, unused sensibility – the joy of the Sublime and the Beautiful. We receive, as given, a mind gifted with extraordinary powers of will and understanding – by the favour of birth, nursed upon the heights of society – conversant with pleasure and passion; and, bearing all this constantly in mind, we must read the poem. From it large passages might be selected, in which the scorn, despite, bitterness that elsewhere break in, disfeaturing beauty and sublimity, are silent; and the passion of divine beholding stands out alone. Is this the character – or what is the character, of the celebrated concluding Address to the Ocean? Few things in modern poetry have been more universally – more indiscriminately admired; be it ours now to recite with you the famous Stanzas – and here, sitting beneath the sea-fronting porch of our Marine Villa, indulge in a confabulatory critique.

The Wanderings are at an end. The real and the imaginary pilgrim, standing together upon Mount Albano, look out upon the blue Mediterranean. He has generously, honourably, magnanimously, thrown upon the ground the checkered mantle of scorn, anger, disappointment, sorrow, and ennui, which had wrapped in disguise his fair stature and features; and he stands a restored, or at least an escaped man, gazing with eye and soul upon the beautiful and majestic sea rolling in its joy beneath his feet. He looks; and he will deliver himself up, as Nature's lone enthusiast, to the delicious, deep, dread, exulting, holy passion of – vary the word as he varies it – The Ocean.

Let us chant – with broken, though haply not unmusical voice – what may be called – the Hymn. That is a high term – let us not anticipate that it has been misapplied. Childe Harold, or Lord Byron – for it here little matters whether a grace of pleased fancy resolve the Two into One, or show the Two side by side, noble forms in brotherly reflection – here is at last the powerful but self-encumbered Spirit with whom we have journeyed so long in sunlight and in storm – delighted, sympathising, wondering at least, or confounded and angry when he will not let us wonder – here He is at last himself, in unencumbered strength, setting like the sun upon the sea he gazes on – the clouds broken through, dispersed, and vanquished, even if a half-tinge of melancholy remembrance hang in the atmosphere, radiant in majestic farewell.

"But I forget. – My pilgrim's shrine is won,And he and I must part – so let it be, —His task and mine alike are nearly done;Yet once more let us look upon the sea;The midland ocean breaks on him and me,And from the Alban Mount we now beholdOur friend of youth, that Ocean, which when weBeheld it last by Calpe's rock unfoldThose waves, we follow'd on till the dark Euxine roll'd"Upon the blue Symplegades: long years —Long, though not very many, since have doneTheir work on both; some suffering and some tearsHave left us nearly where we had begun:Yet not in vain our mortal race hath run,We have had our reward – and it is here;That we can yet feel gladden'd by the sun,And reap from earth, sea, joy almost as dearAs if there were no man to trouble what is clear."Oh! that the Desert were my dwelling-placeWith one fair Spirit for my minister,That I might all forget the human race,And, hating no one, love but only her!Ye Elements! – in whose ennobling stirI feel myself exalted – can ye notAccord me such a being? Do I errIn deeming such inhabit many a spot?Though with them to converse can rarely be our lot."There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,There is a rapture on the lonely shore,There is society, where none intrudes,By the deep Sea, and music in its roar:I love not Man the less, but Nature more,From these our interviews, in which I stealFrom all I may be, or have been before,To mingle with the Universe, and feelWhat I can ne'er express, yet cannot all conceal."Roll on, thou deep and dark blue Ocean! – roll!Ten thousand fleets sweep over thee in vain;Man marks the earth with ruin – his controlStops with the shore; – upon the watery plainThe wrecks are all thy deed, nor doth remainA 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, unknell'd, uncoffin'd, and unknown."His steps are not upon thy paths – thy fieldsAre not a spoil for him – thou dost arise,And shake him from thee; the vile strength he wieldsFor earth's destruction thou dost all despise,Spurning him from thy bosom to the skies,And send'st him, shivering in thy playful sprayAnd howling, to his Gods, where haply liesHis petty hope in some near port or bay,And dashest him again to earth; – there let him lay."The armaments which thunderstrike the wallsOf rock-built cities, bidding nations quake,And monarchs tremble in their capitals,The oak leviathans, whose huge ribs makeTheir clay creator the vain title takeOf lord of thee, and arbiter of war;These are thy toys, and, as the snowy flake,They melt into thy yeast of waves, which marAlike 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 wasted them while they were free,And many a tyrant since; their shores obeyThe stranger, slave, or savage; their decayHas 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 formGlasses itself in tempests; in all time,Calm or convulsed – in breeze, or gale, or storm,Icing the pole, or in the torrid climeDark-heaving; – boundless, endless, and sublime —The image of Eternity – the throneOf the Invisible; even from out thy slimeThe monsters of the deep are made; each zoneObeys thee; thou goest forth, dread, fathomless, alone."And I have loved thee, Ocean! and my joyOf youthful sports was on thy breast to beBorne, like thy bubbles, onward: from a boyI wanton'd with thy breakers – they to meWere a delight; and if the freshening seaMade them a terror – 'twas 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."

These Stanzas may be separated from the Poem – the feeling of readers innumerable so separates them – as a Hymn to the Ocean. The passage, a great effort of a great poet, intends a final putting forth of all his power – it has been acknowledged and renowned as such; and, if it has failed, a critique showing this, and showing the ground of the failure, maybe useful to you, inexperienced yet in the criticism of poetry, though all alive to its charm.

We observe you delight in the first Four Stanzas – ay, you recite them over again after us – and the voice of youth, tremulous in emotion, is pathetic to the Old Man. He will not seek, by what might seem to you, thus moved, hypercritical objections to some of the words; but, pleased with your pleasure, he is willing to allow you to believe the stanzas entirely good in expression as in thought. For here the morbid disrelish of the sated palate is cleansed away. The obscuring cloud of the overwhelmed heart is dispersed. The joy of the wilderness here claimed is not necessarily more or other than that of every powerful and imaginative spirit, which experiences that solitude is, in simple truth, by a steadfast law of our nature, the condition under which our soul is able to wed itself in impassioned communion effectually to the glorious Universe – where, too, the subjugating footsteps of man, impairing the pure domain of free nature, are not. "Pathless," "lonely," – of themselves bespeak neither satiety nor hostility: there is "society by the deep sea, and music in its roar!" all quite right. Here is a heart, in its thirst for sympathy, peopling the desert with sympathisers. Here is expansion of the heart; and the spirit that rejoices in the consciousness of life roused into creative activity. For an ear untuned and untuning, here is one that listens out harmonies which you, languid or inept, might not discern. "Pleasure!" "rapture!" "society!" "music!" – a chain of genialities!

"I love not man the less, but nature more,

From these our interviews."

What will you require of kindliest humanity from any poet, from any lover of nature, that is not here? The savage grandeur of earth and sea have their peril – the fleeing of human homes and haunts – the voluptuous banishment self-imposed – the caressing of dear fancies in secret invisible recesses inviolable – these tend all to engendering and nurturing an excessive self-delight akin to an usurping self-love; and the very sublimities of that wonderful intercourse, in which, upon the one part, stands the feeble dwarf Man, in his hour-lived weakness, and upon the other, as if Infinitude itself putting on cognisable forms, the imperishable Hills and the unchangeable Sea – that intercourse in which he, the pigmy, conscious of the divinity within him, feels himself the greater – he infinite, immortal, and these finite and vanishing – the power and exultation of that intercourse may well engender and nourish Pride. Self-love and Pride, tempting, decoying, bewildering, devouring demons of the inhuman Waste! But the self-reproved, repentant pilgrim has well understood these dangers. He knows that the delight of woods and waterfalls, of stars and storms, may alienate man from his fellow-man. He has guarded himself by some wise temperance. He has found here his golden mean. From thus conversing, he "loves not man the less, but nature more." Is this a young Wordsworth, beginning, in the school of nature, to learn the wisdom of humanity?

At all events, here is, for the occasion, the most express and earnest disclaimer of the mood of misanthropy; and we rejoice to hear the Pilgrim speak of interviews

"in which I steal

From all I may be, or have been before."

From all! that is, from all the ungracious, the harsh, the unkind, the sore, the embittered, the angry, the miserable! Not, surely, from all the amiable and all the gladsome; and especially not from the whole personality and identity of his character. The picture he had given us of himself was that of a powerful mind, self-set at war with its kind, yet within an exasperated hate ever and anon unfolding undestroyed, sometimes hardly vitiated, some portion of its original ingenerate faculty of love. Here we behold him now as God made him, and no longer possessed by a demon. Change his rhyme into our prose – and you do not dislike our prose – and in sober and sincere sadness the Childe thus speaks – "I steal, under the power of these delicious, renovating, gladdening, hallowing influences, out of myself – out of that evil thing which man had made me – rather, alas! which I had made myself into; – and if long wandering, disuse of humanity, separation from the scene of my wrongs, and this auspicious dominion of inviolate nature have in these past years already amended me – if I have been worse than I am – even that worse and that worst these 'interviews' obliterate and extinguish." The soured milk of human kindness is again sweetened. Or, if that be too much to say, at least man, with all the dissonance that hangs by his name and recollections, is forgotten, suspended – for the time absolutely lost. If this be not the meaning, what is?

"And feel

What I can ne'er express, yet cannot all conceal,"

is indeed powerless writing, and the stanza merited a better close. But the whole stanza protests, proclaims the glad healing power of the natural world over him. He has described this as well as he could, and sums up with saying that by him it is indescribable. "I derive from these communions a rapturous transformation – so great, so wondrous, that my ignorant skill of words is utterly unable to render it; but, at the same time, so self-powerful, that, in despite of this my concealing inability, tones of it will outbreak, make themselves heard, felt, and understood." Thus Byron sets the tune of his Address to the Ocean. The first Four Stanzas, therefore, be their poetry more or less, required, upon this account, enucleation; and further, dear Neophyte, inasmuch as they are particularly humane, they should take their effectual place among evidences which separate him personally from some of his poetical Timons.

You – dear Neophyte – have called the Four Stanzas beautiful, – that is enough for us, – and they recall to your heart – you say – the kindred lines of Coleridge – which we call "beautiful exceedingly." —

"With other ministrations thou! O Nature!Healest thy wandering and distemper'd child.Thou pourest on him thy soft influences,Thy sunny hues, fair forms, and breathing sweets,Thy melodies of woods, and winds, and waters,Till he relent, and can no more endureTo be a jarring and a dissonant thingAmid this general dance and minstrelsy;But, bursting into tears, wins back his way,His angry spirit heal'd and harmonisedBy the benignant touch of love and beauty."

Thus – we repeat our words – "Byron sets the tune of his Address to the Ocean."

The poem, then, is an Address to the Ocean by a Lover of the Ocean. It seems reasonable, then, to ask, first, what is it natural to expect that such a poem should be? And if it proves to be something remarkably different, then to inquire whether any particular circumstance or condition has intervened which justifies the poet in following an unexpected course.

Now, for natural expectation, the theme is one of eulogy; and one may say, therefore, that praise customarily expresses itself in one or other of two principal ways – namely, directly or indirectly. We praise directly, for instance, when, moved by the contemplation of some great or interesting subject, we single forth, one after another, the qualities of its character, or the facts in its history, which have provoked our love, our admiration, our joy, our gratitude. Upon the other hand, we praise indirectly when we extol the subject of our eulogy by dispraising another foreign subject, which we oppose to the chosen one in the way of relief or foil; whether we establish mere comparison of contrast between the two, or cite an opposition of actual enmity between them – as if, in hymning Apollo, we should insist upon the horror and fury, the earth-pollution and the earth-affliction, of the monster Python.

A moment of reflection satisfies us that both ways are alike natural – both, with occasion, alike unavoidable; but it is impossible to help equally seeing that these two ways of eulogy differ materially from each other in two respects, – the temper of inspiration which dictates, animates, and supports the one or other manner of attributing renown, and the motive justifying the one eulogistic procedure or the other. The temper of direct praise is always wholly genial; that of lauding by illaudation has in it perforce an ungenial element. The motive to direct praise eternally subsists and is there, as long as the subject eulogised subsists and is there. This, then, is the ordinary method. If any thing has just happened that provokes the indirect way – as if Python has just been vanquished – then good and well; or if the poet, by some personal haunting sorrow, or by an unvanquished idiosyncrasy, must arrive at pleasure through pain, so be it: but this method is clearly extraordinary and exceptive to the rule; and the reason for using it must be prominent, definite, and flashing in all men's eyes. The other method never can require justifying – this does always; and if it fail conspicuously in aught, the very opposite effect to that intended is produced, and the eulogy is no laud. You may say, indeed, and say truly, that all eulogy shall be mixed – that naturally and necessarily every subject has its title to favour by sympathy and by antipathy. Which of the two shall predominate? We need scarcely answer that question. The mood of mind in which the Poet sings must be genial and benign, though he may have to deal in fierce invective.

Read then, dearest Neophyte, the first Four Stanzas – recite them again, for you have them by heart. It is not easy to imagine any thing more completely at variance with all that preamble for the hymn than the hymn itself. The poet, imbued, as we have seen, with the love of nature and of man, will breathe on both his benediction. He will glorify the Sea. And how does he attain the transported and affectionate contemplation of the abyss of waters? By the opposition of man's impotence to the might of the sea; by the opposition of the land subjected to man, mixed up in his destinies, and changeable with him, to the ocean free from all change, excepting that of its own moods, the free play of its own gigantic will. For though, philosophically speaking, the immense mass of waters is in itself inert and powerless; lifted into tides by the sun and moon; lifted into storm by raging and invisible winds; yet the poet, lawfully, and by a compulsion which lies alike upon all our minds, apprehends in what is involuntary, self-willed motion, wild changeable moods, a pleasure of rolling – sun, moon, and winds, being for the moment left utterly out of thought; and it may be that Byron here does this well. But, what is the worth, what the meaning of the first Four Stanzas – in which you have delighted, because in them the Bard you love had deliberately and passionately rejected all hostile regard of man, and reclaimed for himself his place among the brotherhood – when we see that hostile regard in all its bitterness, instantaneously return and become the predominating characteristic of the whole wrathful and scornful song?

Was his previous confession of faith utterly false and hollow? If sincere and substantial, what in a moment shattered it?

"Roll on, thou deep and dark blue ocean – roll!

Ten thousand fleets sweep over thee."

This is good in temper so far – nor in aught inconsistent with the spirit pervading the introductory Stanzas; if the ten thousand fleets are presented for the magnificence of the picture. But are they? No, already for spleen. The full verse is

"Ten thousand fleets sweep over thee —in vain!"

In vain! for what end in vain? Why for one that never was contemplated by them, nor by any rational being – that of leaving the bosom of the deep permanently furrowed by their wakes! This is a minuteness of thinking we shudder to put down – but mend the matter if you can. Try to imagine something great, if not intelligible – that the attempt which has failed was, in some titanic and mysterious way, to have established a dominion of man over the sea, to have yoked it like the earth under his hand, ploughed it, set vines and sown corn fields, and built up towered cities. But "that thought is unstable, and deserts us quite." "In vain," whatever it means, or if it means nothing – (and will no one tell us what it means?) – still proposes the sea in conflict with an adversary, and does not contemplate it for its own pure great self. The whole Hymn is founded on contrast, and therefore of indirect inspiration. To aggrandise the sea, Byron knows of no other way than to disparage the earth; and there is equally a want of truth, and of imagination and passion. If he had the capacity of worthily praising nature, if he had the genuine love and admiration for her beauty and greatness which he proudly claims, he has not shown this here; and we are induced to think that there were in his mind, faculties, intellectual and moral, stronger there than the poetical, and upon which the poetical faculty needed to stay itself – from which it needed to borrow a factitious energy – say wit and scorn, the faculties of the satirist.

"In vain," indeed! Imagination beholds ten thousand fleets sweeping over the ocean – or a hundred of them, or one – and man's exulting spirit feels that it was not in vain. The purposes for which fleets do sail – to carry commerce, to carry war, to carry colonies, to carry civilisation, to bring home knowledge, have triumphantly prospered; and, of course, are not in the meaning of the poet, although properly they alone are in the meaning of the word. But, perversely enough, the imagination of the reader accepts for an instant the pomp of the representation – "ten thousand fleets sweep over thee" – for good, as an adjunct of the ocean's magnificence; and in the confusion of thought and feeling which characterises the passage, this verse of mockery tells to the total resulting impression, in effect, like a verse of passion. The reverence which is not intended – not the contempt which is intended – for these majestic human creations, is acknowledged at last. The poet, with his living fraternal shadow beside him, is sitting upon the Italian promontory – love and wonder look through his eyes upon that sea rolling under that sky – and he speaks accordingly, —

"Roll on, thou deep and dark blue ocean – roll!"

Roll thy gentle tides on, sweet Mediterranean Sea! to beat in murmurs at my weary feet! Roll, in thine own unconfined spaces, Atlantic Ocean! with placid swell or with mounting billows, from pole to pole! Roll, circumambient World-Ocean! embracing in thy liquid arms our largest continents as thine islands, and immantling our whole globe. A fair, gentle, sedate beginning; and at the very next step – war to the knife!

The confused, unstudied impression left upon you is that of a powerful mind moving in the majesty of its power. But it is not moving in the majesty of power, after one step taken straight forwards, at the second to wheel sharply round and march off in the opposite direction. How otherwise, Homer, Pindar, Milton! They walk as kings, heroes, bards, archangels. The first canon of great, impassioned, profound writing – that the soul, filled with its theme, and with affection fitted for its theme, moves on slowly or impetuously – with a glide, or with a rush, or with a bound – but that it ever moves consistently with itself, pouring out its affection, and, in pouring it out, displaying its theme, and so evolving its work from itself in unity – is here sinned against by movements owning no law but mere caprice.

How, then, is the glorification of his subject sought here to be attained by Byron? By means of another subject shown us in hostility, and quelled. Man, in his weakness, is put in contrast and in conflict with ocean's omnipotence. Man sends out his fleets, apparently for the purpose of ruining the ocean. He cannot: he can ruin the land; but on the land's edge his deadly dominion is at an end. There the reign of a mightier and more dreadful Ruler, a greater Destroyer, a wilder Anarch, begins. The sea itself rises, wrecks the timbered vessels, drowns the crews – or at least those who fall overboard – tosses the mariner to the skies and on to shore, and swallows up fleets of war.

Such is the first movement or strain. What is the amount relatively to the purport of the poem? Why, that the first point of glorification chosen, the first utterance of enthusiastic love and admiration from the softened heart and elevated soul of a poet, who has just told us that there is such music in its roar, that by the deep sea he loves not man the less, but nature more, is, "All hail, O wrathful, dire, almighty, and remorseless destroyer!" – surely a strange ebullition of tenderness – an amatory sigh like a lion's roar – something in Polyphemus' vein – wooing with a vengeance. All this, mark ye, dear neophyte, following straight upon a proclamation of peace with all mankind – upon an Invocation to Nature for inward peace!

Grant for a moment that Man is properly to be viewed as Earth's ravager, not its cultivator, and that "his control stops with the shore," is good English in verse for "his power of desolating, or his range of desolation, is bounded by the sea-shore;" grant for a moment that it is a lawful and just practical contemplation to view him ravaging and ranging up to that edge, and to view in contrast the glad, bright, universally-laughing Ocean beyond – unravaged, unstained, unfooted, no smoke of conflagration rising, only the golden morning mist seeming all one diffused sun. Grant all this – and then what we have to complain of is, that the contrast is prepared, but not presented; and that the natural replication to "Man marks the earth with ruin," is not here. Instead of picture for picture – instead of, look on this picture and on that – we have

"on the watery plain

The wrecks are all thy deed."