The Ocean

Lord Byron
The fourth canto of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage continues the poet’s journey
into Italy: Venice, Arqua, Ferrara, Florence, and finally Rome. Again the
narrator laments the fall of older civilizations—this time the subject is Venice.
The city is depicted as a cultural ghost town, peopled by the “mighty
shadows” of literary giants such as William Shakespeare (who placed scenes
in Venice). Literature is noted as being more enduring than even the cultures
which produce it; similarly, sculpture endures after civilizations fall.
The poet visits Arqua, home of the famous poet Petrarch. Here, at least, the
people of the city maintain Petrarch’s tomb and even his home (stanza 31).
In Ferrara, beloved town of the poet Tasso, Byron pays homage to the mind
of his fellow poet. After considering Italy’s own checkered history of carnage,
Byron turns to Florence, where he pays homage to the great men buried in
the Basilica of Santa Croce. The poet expresses outrage that Dante, who was
exiled, was therefore not buried in “ungrateful Florence” (stanza 57). Nor is
the great poet Boccaccio to be found there.

The poet pauses to decry his education, whose Latin drills gave him a
distaste for certain poets, not because of their inherent failings but because
of the way he had to learn them.

Finally, the poet’s visit to Rome makes up about half the canto. Once the
narrator reaches Rome, he spends time listing and describing the various
dictators from ancient times until the recent past. In this context he
compares Napoleon to “a kind / Of bastard Caesar,” once again returning to
his theme of liberty’s struggle against tyrants. He also considers the long
march of men and suffering and time, of heroes, pain, ruin, redemption, and
how this march has shaped his own wandering spirit.

The canto ends at the ocean, harking once again to Nature as an image of
freedom and sublimity in its “eloquent proportions.” Yet, Byron encourages
us not to surrender to the overwhelming power of the great and sublime but
instead to visit great places and try to understand them. The ocean also
serves as a contrast to the lost civilizations Byron has visited: “Thy shores
are empires, changed in all save thee— / Assyria, Greece, Rome, Carthage,
what are they?”

Childe Harold is long gone, transcended, and in this sense the pilgrimage is
complete. Byron bids us farewell, encouraging us to leave Harold’s pain
behind and move forward with the lessons gleaned from his travels.
Analysis
Canto IV continues Byron’s autobiographical journey, this time throughout
Italy. By now, Byron has completely given up the conceit that Childe Harold is
anyone but the author himself; in his introductory notes (dedicated to this
longtime friend John Hobhouse), Byron states that he “had become weary of
drawing a line which every one seemed determined not to perceive.” While
he once vociferously defended Childe Harold as a creation of the
imagination, Byron now concedes that his best work is truly autobiographical
in nature and sees no reason to keep up the pretense of any narrator but
himself.
Canto IV follows the earlier Cantos in its description of fallen civilizations, but
here instead of merely bemoaning the loss of the past, Byron seeks to draw a
lesson from their destruction. Even the mightiest of empires eventually falls
—a fact brought home to Byron particularly during his time spent in Rome—
so military and political greatness are not necessarily the measure of
permanence or virtue. The work of human hands and that of human political
institutions are ephemeral, and therefore even the suffering one might
undergo at the hands of a tyrant is impermanent as well.

Byron finds permanence and stability elsewhere, particularly in Nature and in

Art. Stanzas 47 through 61 of this canto extol the virtues and lasting qualities
of art, be it sculpture, painting, or literature. By way of contrast, Byron
mentions the fates of those who have added so much to human art and
knowledge—Dante, Boccaccio, Galileo, and others—whose reputations or
remains have been sullied by jealous men even as their contributions carry
on long beyond their mortal lives. Great architectural achievements, such as
the Colosseum, the Pantheon, and St. Peters’ Basilica, still hold wonder for
the world-weary Byron.

Stanzas 61 and 62 redirect the reader away from Art, which imitates, to its
subject, Nature, with which the poem concludes. Manmade beauty is a great
and everlasting thing, but it is Nature which holds the highest place in
Byron’s admiring heart. His visits to Nature on his travels have been
interrupted by visits to pay homage to the long roll of heroes, poets, and
dictators’ energetic passions who represent the strong minds and
personalities of mankind.

The litany of tyrants in the section on Rome points to the persistence of

tyranny even as it accentuates the brevity of any single tyrant’s reign. Byron
concludes his study of despotism with a comparison: Napoleon was “a fool /
of false dominion,” and the French Revolution failed through “vile Ambition,”
whereas the contemporary American Revolution sprang from “undefiled”
beginnings and thus will continue to thrive. This is just one of many lessons
that Byron seems to hope his readers absorb by contemplating the
pilgrimage. Childe Harold has been transcended and subsumed into Byron,
and his travels have brought him into contact with the sublime in things both
human and natural, but when faced with overwhelming concepts or just the
overwhelming power of life itself, Byron’s answer has been to keep his mind
active in appreciation of all that is great.

In “Apostrophe to the Ocean,” Lord Byron gives his most explicit answer to this question in
the final stanza, where the speaker confesses that, as a boy, the ocean’s “breakers…were
to me a delight,” and that any fear caused by the untameable nature of the sea was “a
pleasing fear.” He adds that, “For as it was, I was a child of thee.” Lord Byron spent his
formative years in Aberdeen, near the ocean, and it seems that his speaker had a similar
youth; from this poem we can assume that the water was his chief source of play and sport.

Consider the first stanza of the poem, with its iconic line, “I love not Man the less, but
Nature more.” This ties in well with the nostalgia of the final verse, and sets the tone for the
rest of the poem. The speaker loves and, perhaps more importantly, respects the ocean, for
man cannot conquer it. The speaker loves nature more than man, he states, and therefore
loves beyond the rest the one element of nature with which man has resigned himself to an
oft-compromised truce. In the second verse, Byron writes,

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.

Lord Byron continues in the third verse to emphasize this point by describing the
effortlessness with which the ocean can destroy a man. No matter what man does upon its
waves, the ocean is not a “field” and does not play by the same rules. The sea will always
win, and the speaker revels in its noble, awesome constancy.

The ocean is hostile in its indifference to land and city, heaving and roiling and outlasting
even the fairest of civilizations – the speaker lists them: “Assyria, Greece, Rome, Carthage
– what are they?...their decay has dried up realms to deserts: not so thou/Unchangeable
save to thy wild waves play.” So the speaker loves the ocean as well because it is
enduring; while time changes the earth and all living beings soon succumb to its caresses,
the ocean remains as itself, and so as it has always been. The speaker muses that “Such
as creation’s dawn beheld, thou rollest now.” The sea represents stability in a changing
world, and this indeed is something to be admired.

So, in this poem we see three main reasons the speaker loves the sea: he played in it as a
child, and came to love its capricious ways and the excitement and uncertainty its waves
espoused; he, a lover of nature, is awed by its destructive capacities and the inability of
man to exert his dominance over it; and he admires it for its longevity and unchanging
nature in a world that has decayed and been reconstructed countless times over its history.
Ode to Simplicity

ODE TO SIMPLICITY.

THE measure of the ancient ballad seems to have been made choice of for this
ode, on account of the subject, and it has, indeed, an air of simplici|ty, not
altogether unaffecting.

By all the honey'd store

On Hybla's thymy shore,
By all her blooms, and mingled murmurs dear,
By her whose love-lorn woe,
In evening musings slow,
Sooth'd sweetly sad Electra's poet's ear.

This allegorical imagery of the honey'd store, the blooms, and mingled murmurs
of Hybla, alluding to the sweetness and beauty of the attic poetry, has the finest
and the happiest effect: yet, possibly, it will bear a question whether the ancient
Greek tragedians had a general claim to simplicity in any thing more than the
plans of their drama. Their language, at least, was infinitely metaphorical; yet it
must be own|ed that they justly copied nature and the passions, and so far,
certainly, they were entitled to the palm of true simplicity: the following most
beautiful speech of Polynices will be a monument of this so long as poetry shall
last.

But staid to sing alone

To one distinguish'd throne.

The poet cuts off the prevalence of Simplicity among the Romans with the reign
of Augustus; and indeed, it did not continue much longer, most of the
compositions, after that date, giving into false and artificial ornament.

No more in hall or bower,

The passions own thy power,
Love, only love her forceless numbers mean.

In these lines the writings of the Provencial poets are principally alluded to, in
which, simplicity is gene|rally sacrificed to the rapsodies of romantic love.
William Collins was born at Chichester in Sussex in December, 1721. His early years seem
to have been those of a favored child. Whether Collins attended a school or learned his first
letters at home or under the tutelage of a local curate, he was well enough prepared by the
time he was eleven to be admitted as a scholar to Winchester College. His years at
Winchester were important. It was there that he made friendships with Joseph Warton,
William Whitehead, and James Hampton, and studied mythology and legend in Homer and
Vergil. He wrote and published his first poems while at Winchester.

Some scholars believe that it was Warton’s friendship and influence that led Collins to
become interested in literature. The Warton family was thoroughly literary, and it is possible
that Joseph’s example first persuaded the youth from his Chichester home and encouraged
him to begin cultivating his literary interests. In any case, Collins’s literary powers developed
while he was at Winchester. One of the poems he wrote during these years, “Sonnet,” was
published in the Gentlemen’s Magazine in October, 1739.

After completing his studies at Winchester, Collins was admitted to Queen’s College,
Oxford, on March 21, 1740. On July 29, 1741, he was appointed demy of Magdalen
College, allowing him some stipend, and in 1743, he took the bachelor’s degree and left
Oxford. Before leaving college, he had published his Persian Eclogues, and although the
work was published anonymously, the publication was Collins’s first serious claim to public
notice and ironically remained his chief popular accomplishment during his lifetime.