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

That is to say, peace, happiness, beauty, nowhere! Man wrecks up to the shore. There the tables are turned upon him. There the sea ravages the land, and wrecks him in return. Merciful Heaven! nothing but wrecking; as if evil spirits only possessed the universe – as if the only question to be asked any where were, Who wrecks here?

Is not this a glaring instance of a false intellectual procedure arising out of a false moral temper? The unceasing call of the Hymn is for the display of the subject extolled. And here the beautiful, or the proud superiority of the "peaceful, immeasurable plain," or of the indignant, independent, thundrous sea, was imperiously suggested for some moments surely, if the Poem be one of glorification. But no! We may imagine for ourselves, if we please, the beauty, splendour, joy, tempestuous liberty of the unfettered waters; but the love of the ocean is not in the Poet's mind, as it ought to have been – only the hate of man.

As it ought to have been? Yea, verily. Had he not taken the pledge? To drink but of the purest spring of inspiration – the Fount of Love. And may he, without reproach, break it when he chooses, and we not dare to condemn? Of all promises, the promise made by poet of world-wide fame before the wide world, in his soul's best mood, and in nature's noblest inspiration, is the most sacred – to break it is a sin, and a sin that brings its appropriate punishment along with it, – loss or abeyance of the faculty divine. Byron had sworn to love man and nature, and to glorify their works, on the very instant he seeks to degrade and vilify. We listen to a religious overture – to the Devil's March. We are invited to enter with him a temple of worship – and praise and prayer become imprecations and curses. It is as if a hermit, telling his beads at the door of his cell, retired into its interior to hold converse with a blaspheming spirit. Fear not to call it by its right name – this is Hypocrisy.

So much as to the fitness of the mood; now as to the truth of the matter.

What is, justly considered, the relation of man to the sea? Is it here truly spoken? Certainly not. The Facts and the Songs of the world are all the other way. In history, the ocean is the giant slave of the magician Man – with some difficulty brought under thraldom – humorous, and not always manageable – mischievous when he gets his own way. But compare statistically the service and the detriment, for Clio must instruct Calliope and Erato. Passion that cannot sustain itself but by hiding that which has been, and accrediting that which has not been, is personal, not poetical – is mad, not inspired. The truth is, that the Ship is the glory of man's inventive art and inventive daring – the most splendid triumph of heroical art. And – for the history of man – the service of the sea to his ship has been the civilising of the earth. The wrecks are occasional – so much so that, in our ordinary estimate, they are forgotten. It would be as good poetry to say that all the inhabitants of the land live by wrecking.

In this first movement or strain, then, two great relations upheld by man are put in question, – his relation to the land, and his relation to the sea. The Basis of Song to the true and great poet is the truth of things – the truth as the historian and the philosopher know them. Over this he throws his own affection and creates a truth of his own – a poetical truth. But the truth, as held in man's actual knowledge, is recognisable through the transparent veil. Here it is distorted, not veiled. The two relations are alike falsified. For in order to bring man into conflict with the sea, where he and not the sea is to be worsted, he must first be made the foe of the earth! "Man marks the earth with ruin." Is this the history of man on the earth? Man has vanquished the Earth, but for its benefit as well as his own. He has displaced the forest and the swamp, the wild beast and the serpent. He has adorned the earth like a bride; as if he had made captive a wild Amazon, charmed her with Orphean arts, wedded and made her a happy mother of many children. Whatever impressive effect such verses may have on the inconsiderate mind, it has been illegitimately attained by a preposterous and utterly unprovoked movement of tempestuous passion, and by two utterly false contemplations of man's posture upon the globe, which two embrace about his whole mortal existence. Eloquence might condescend to this – poetry never.

Note well, O Neophyte! that the calm, contemplative, loving first line,

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

precludes all comparison with such sudden bursts as "Ruin seize thee, ruthless king!" &c., and "Quousque tandem abutêre, Catilina," &c.; but it does not preclude, it invites the killing comparison with

"O Thou that with surpassing glory crown'dLook'st from thy sole dominion, like the GodOf this new world, – at whose sight all the starsHide their diminish'd heads, to thee I call,But with no friendly voice, and add thy name,O Sun! to tell thee how I hate thy beams,That bring to my remembrance from what stateI fell – how glorious once above thy sphere!" &c.

Where the speaker is fraught with personal, not as a poet with impersonal affection – where he comes charged with hate, not with love; and yet how slowly, how sedately, through how many thoughts, how much admiration, and how many verses, he reaches his hate at last, which is his object! But on that soliloquy, dear Neophyte, we must discourse another day.

We must go a little – not very much – into particulars; for otherwise, O Neophyte! believe thou, whatever wiseacres say, there can be no true criticism of poetry. Let us – and that which might have been expected will appear, – a detail of moral and intellectual disorder. The stanza of which we have been speaking begins well – as we have seen and said. Thenceforth all is stamped with incongruity, and shows an effect like power, by violently bringing together, in a most remarkable manner, things that cannot consist – by the transition from the Universal to the Individual, when for

"The wrecks are all thy deed,"

which shows us a thousand ships foundering in mid ocean, and the earth's shores all strewn with fragments of oak-leviathans, we have instantaneously substituted, as if this were the same thing,

"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."

What has happened? What is meant? Is this literally the representation of some single human being actually dropping, as unfortunately happens from time to time, from a ship's side into the immensity of waters? And is this horrible game and triumph of Ocean, which threatened to annihilate the species, upon a sudden confined to "a man overboard?" Or are we to understand that, by a strong feat of uncreating and recreating imagination, this one man, dropped as if naked from the clouds into the sea and submerged, impersonates and impictures, by some concentration of human agony and of human impotence, that universally diffused annihilation of Man in his ships which was the matter in hand? We do not believe that any reader can give a satisfactory explanation or account of the course of thinking that has been here pursued. Upon the face of the words lies that natural pathos which belongs to the perishing of the individual, which serves to blind inquiry, and stands as a substitute for any reasonable thinking at all; and thus a grammatical confusion between Man and a man makes the whole absolute nonsense.

Then look here: —

"Upon the watery plain

The wrecks are all thy deed."

This is not only not true – it is false. If man, clothed in the thunder of war, is able to strew ruin upon the land, he, militant, by the same power, strews wreck and ruin upon the waters; and so the distinction pretended, whatever it might be worth, fails. And does not the swallowing of the unknelled and uncoffined, which is attributed to the sea as the victor of man, take place as effectually when beak or broadside sends down a ship with her hundreds of souls, when the great sea, willing or unwilling, appears merely as the servile minister of insulting man's hate and fury?

"Alike the Armada's pride and spoils of Trafalgar."

"Rule Britannia" rings in our ears, and gives that assertion the lie. Does Macaulay's Ode idly recount an ineffectual muster? Did the Lord High Admiral of England, with all his commodores and captains, do nothing to the Armada? With what face dared an English Poet say to the sea that on all those days "the wrecks were all thy deed?" The storms were England's allies indeed, from Cape Clear to the Orcades. But only her allies; and, much as we respect the storms and their services, we say to the English fleet, "The wrecks were all thy deed." At Trafalgar the storms finally sided with the Spaniards. "Let the fleet be anchored," said Nelson ere he died; and, had that been possible, it had been done by Collingwood. After the fight Gravina came out to the rescue – but the sea engulfed the spoils. Yet, spite of that, we say again to the English fleet, "The wrecks were all thy deed;" and the sea answers – and will answer to all eternity – "Ay, ay, ay!"

Byron, we verily believe, was the first Great Poet that owned not a patriot's heart. No pride ever had he in his Country's triumphs either on land or sea. It seems as if he were impatient of every national and individual greatness that, however far aloof from his sphere, might eclipse his own. He has written well – but not so well as he ought to have done – of Waterloo. The glory of Wellington overshadowed him; and, by keeping his name out of his verses, he would keep the hero himself out of sight. But there he is resplendent in spite of the Poet's spleen. Verbum non amplius for Trafalgar! not one for Nelson. Not so did Cowper – the pious, peace-loving Cowper – regard his country's conflicts. At thought of these the holy Harper's soul awoke. He too sung of the sea: —

"What ails thee, restless as the waves that roar,And fling their foam against thy chalky shore?Mistress at least, while Providence shall please,And trident-bearing Queen of the wide seas."

That is majestic – and this is sublime: —

"They trust in navies, and their navies fail —God's curse can cast away ten thousand sail."

Ay, then, indeed, "ten thousand fleets sail over Thee in vain." Had Byron Cowper's great line in his mind? The copy cannot stand comparison with the original.

If we will try the poet by his words, and know whether he has mastered the consummation of his art by "writing well," we may cull from several instances of suspicious language, in this stanza, the following —

"Nor doth remain

A shadow of man's ravage save his own."

What is the meaning – the translation? "There is not on the ocean to be found a shadow of ravage in which man is the agent. The only ravage known on the ocean, in which man is concerned, is that which he suffers from the ocean." This, if false, is nevertheless an intelligible proposition. But "ravage" is a strange word – a shocking bad one – applied, as you presently find that it must be, to one drowning man being "ravaged" by being drowned; and even more strange still is the grammatical opposition of "his ravage," as properly signifying, the ravage which he achieves, to "his own ravage" as properly signifying the ravage which he endures!

Moreover, what is meant by "remain"? Properly, to linger for a moment ere disappearing. But the proposition is, that ruin effected by man has no place at all on the waters. The poet means, that as long as you, the contemplator, tread the land, you walk among ruins made by man. When you pass on to the sea, no shadow of such ruin any longer accompanies you, – that is, any longer remains with you.

One great fault of style which the Hymn shows is Equivocation. The words are equivocal. Hence the contradiction – as in this stanza especially – between what is promised and what is done. Weigh for a moment these lines —

"Upon the watery plain,The 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,"

&c., and tell us what they seem to describe. You will find yourself in a pretty puzzle. A ship? a fleet? myriads of ships lost? or one drowning man? Surely one drowning man. His own phrase,

"the bubbling cry

Of some strong swimmer in his agony,"

here pre-appears. But he had bound himself quite otherwise. By his pledge he should, in contrast with man's wreck active upon shore, have given man's wreck passive upon the flood, – the earth strewn with ruin by man's hand, the sea strewn with ruin of man himself, —magnis excidit ausis.

The words "remain" and "man" have played the part here of juggling fiends, —

"They palter with us in a double sense,They keep the word of promise to the ear,And break it to our hope."

For lend us your ear for a few minutes. The word "remain" is originally and essentially a word of time, and means to "continue" in some assigned condition through a certain duration of time; as, for example, he "remained in command for a year." In this clause of Byron's, it has become essentially a word that has regard to space without regard to time. To see that it is so, you must begin with possessing the picture that has been set before you, and which is here the basis and outset of the thinking. This picture is – "man marks the earth with ruin." Realise the picture at the height of the words without flinching. For example, from the Atlantic eastward to the Pacific, man ravages. Here Napoleon – a little farther on Mahomet the Second – farther, the Crusaders – beyond these Khuli Khan or Timour Leng – lastly, the Mogul conquerors of the Celestial Empire, – a chain of desolation from Estremadura to Corea. Had land extended around the globe, it had been a belt of desolation encircling the globe. Corn fields, vineyards, trampled under foot of man and horse, – villages, towns, and great cities, reeking with conflagration, like the smoke ascending from some enormous altar of abomination to offend the nostrils of heaven – armed hosts lying trampled in their blood – the unarmed lying scattered every where in theirs; for man has trodden the earth in his rage, and before him was as the garden of Eden, behind him is the desolate wilderness. This is a translation of the hemistich, – "Man marks the earth with ruin," – into prose. It is a faithful, a literal translation – Byron meant as much: and you, neophyte, in an instantaneous image receive as much – perhaps with more faith or persuasion, because leaden-pacing, tardy-gaited exposition goes against such faith; but some belief will remain if we, who have put ourselves in the place of the poet, have used colours that seize upon your imagination.

Well, then, if your imagination has done that which the summary word-picture of the poet required of you, you have swept the earth, or one of its continents, with instantaneous flight from shore to shore, and seen this horrible devastation – this widely-spread ravage. You have not staid your wing at the shore, but have swept on, driven by your horror, till you have hung, and first breathed at ease, over the Mid Pacific, over the wide OCEAN OF PEACE – over the unpolluted, everlasting ocean, murmuring under your feet – the unpolluted, everlasting heavens over your head. Here is no ravage of man's: no! nor the shadow of it —

– "Nor doth remain

A shadow of man's ravage."

But how "nor doth remain?" The ravage has gone along with you from sea-marge to sea-marge. At sea it is no longer with you. Traversing the land it remained your companion. It remained the continual and loathed object of your eyes. Now no shadow of it is to be seen – it haunts your flight no longer. No shadow of it any longer accompanies your aerial voyage – any longer stays, abides, remains with you. If the word has not this meaning, it has no meaning here in this clause. In this clause it cannot mean this – "upon the ocean, the ravage made by man appears like a flash of lightning, seen and gone, – upon the ocean this ravage, or some shadow of this ravage, has a momentary duration, but no more than momentary, no abiding, no remaining." This cannot be the meaning, since of man it has been expressly said 'his control stops with the shore' – that is, ends there, is not on the ocean at all. Manifestly the question at issue is, not whether destruction effected by man lasts upon the waters, but whether it is at all upon the waters; and Byron's decision is plainly that it is not at all. For he has already said "upon the watery plain the wrecks are all thy deed." That is to say, any sort of wreck effected by man upon the flood at all has been twice rejected in express words; and this word "remain" must imperatively be understood consonantly to this rejection.

Byron, then, we see, in denying that wrecks made by man "remain" upon the "watery plain," takes a word which properly sets before you an extending in time, and uses it for setting before you an extending in space. The ravage of which man is the agent does not extend over the "watery plain" – no, not a shadow of it.

But pray attend to this – no sooner does the sequent clause "save his own," take its place in the verse, than the word "remain" shifts its meaning back, from the signification accidentally forced upon it as has been explained, and reverts to its original and wonted power as a word of time! The force of the united clauses now stands thus – "upon the water there cannot be found a trace of the ruin executed by man. But of the ruin suffered by him there is an apparition, a vestige, a shadow, a vanishing display, namely —

"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."

He plunges, and all is over. The "bubbling groan" is the momentarily remaining notice of his extinction.

Now this first equivocation has an immediate moral consequence – namely, a reaction upon the feelings of the poet. "Remain," as an "extending in space," acts upon the imagination expansively here, if it were suffered to act – and if room were given it to act upon the imagination – inasmuch as "nor doth remain," as a word of extending in space, marks or helps to mark out the two great regions into which his lordship divides the terraqueous globe – ravaged land and unravaged water. But "remain," as an "extending in time," acts here contractively; and "nor remain" means now "does not outlive the moment!" and in this manner an entirely new direction or tenor is given to thought and feeling – for the zeal of diminishing seizes on the imagination of the writer. He is led to making man insignificant by the momentariness of his perishing! He has contracted, by power of scorn, and by the trick of a word, the seventy years of man into an instant. That is one diminution, and another follows upon it. The Fleets, wrecked whenever they fight against the water, vanish from his fancy, as in the shifting of a dream; and he sees, amidst the troubled world of waters —one man perishing! One mode of insignificancy admitted, induces another. With the shrinking of time to a moment goes along, the shrinking of multitude to one!

The same double-dealing takes place with the word "Man." Man signifies the individual human being – or the race. "Of man's first disobedience" – mankind's. "Man marks the earth with ruin" – mankind does so. "Nor doth remain a shadow of man's ravage" – of mankind's ravage. "When for a moment, like a drop of rain, he sinks into thy waves " – that is now the single sailor, whom a roll of the ship has hurled from the topmast into the waters; or, when the ship has gone down, some strong swimmer who has fought in vain upon the waters, and, spent in limb and heart, sinks. And thus the reader, after stumbling for two or three steps in darkness and perplexity, within a moment of having left mankind in the annihilating embrace of Ocean, upon a sudden finds himself set face to face with one man, we shall suppose "The last man," drowning!

In the Stanza now commented on, there was a struggle depicted, a question proposed between Man and the Ocean – which shall be the Wrecker? The Ocean prevails; Man is wrecked. In the succeeding Stanza there is, it would seem, another question moved between the same disputants. No, it is the same. Let us examine well. A moment before, Man appeared as treading the earth as a Destroyer, his proud step stayed at high water-mark. Now he appears upon the earth as a traveller and a reaper – by implication or allusion – by the figure of "not."

"His steps are not upon thy paths, thy fields

Are not a spoil for him."

He walks and reaps the earth; he does not walk and reap the ocean. This is plainly the process of the "worthy cogitation;" and unquestionably the assertion is true – true to the letter, but only to the letter. For, standing on Mount Albano, or on the Land's End, or here sitting beneath the porch of our Marine Villa fronting the Firth of Forth, we are poets every one of us, and we will venture beyond the letter; —

"His steps are not upon thy paths!"

– reply – chaunter of Man's Hope, and of England's Power, —

"Thy march is o'er the mountain wave,

Thy home is on the deep."

There is a dash of sea-craft for you; and, "cheered by the grateful sound, for many a league old ocean smiles."

And for the sickle! What! must the net and the harpoon go for nothing? No harvests on the barren flood! What else are pearl-fisheries, herring-fisheries, cod-fisheries, and whale-fisheries? "The sea! The deep, deep sea!" Why, the sea cannot keep its own; cannot defend the least or the mightiest of its nurselings from the hand of the gigantic plunderer Man.

– "thy fields,

Are not a spoil for him."

The fields of earth are not. For he ploughed and sowed ere he reaped, and earned back his own. But on thy fields, no ploughing, no sowing – all reaping! Sheer spoil. Poor, helpless, tributary, rifled, ravaged Ocean!

Then follows a very eminent instance of the fault which has been urged as radical in these Stanzas – forced, unnatural, wilful, or false sequence of thought; a deliberate intention in the mind of the writer, taking the place of the spontaneous free suggestion proper to poetry. We have had man trying to produce ruin on the ocean, and wrecked, swallowed up. Now, man tries to walk and reap the ocean. The poet has outraged mother earth, and her vengeance is upon him. He has wrongfully and wilfully brought in the Earth, for its old alliance with man to hear hard words; and he suffers the penalty. Cease, rude Boreas, blustering railer, for you are out of breath. Mere mouthing is not command of words; the sound we hear now is but the echo of the last stanza, and the angry Childe is unwittingly repeating himself, —

– "Thou dost ariseAnd 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 spray,And 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!"

Here is again the contest, again the ruining upon earth, – nay, he destroys the earth itself – again the wrecking of the ship. Surely there is great awkwardness in stepping on from the proof of man's impotence in the sinking of his ship, to the proof of man's impotence in the sinking of his ship. "Spurning him from thy bosom to the skies" may be a vigorous verse, though we doubt it; but if the ship outlive the storm, which many a ship has done many a thousand times, it can be turned against the ocean, who has done his worst in vain. What is man's "petty hope?" and what means "again to earth?" Is it again from the skies – or back to the earth from which he embarked? Not one expression is precise; and so, with some scorn of man's old ally, who now so roughly receives him, – "there let him lay!" There is something very horrible indeed in insulting a dead man in the Cockney dialect.

In all this there is no dignity, no grandeur; Byron does not well to be angry – it is seldom that any man or poet does – for, though anger is a "short madness," it is not a "fine frenzy." Such Te Deum true Poetry never yet sang, for true Poetry never yet was blasphemous – never yet derided Man's Dread or Man's Hope, when sinking in multitudes in the sea, which God holds in the hollow of his hand.