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The Dark Blue Sea

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

From all I may be, or have been before,

To mingle with the universe, and

What 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

Stops with the shore;-upon the watery

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,

Without a grave, unknell'd, uncoffin'd, and unknown.

His steps are not upon thy paths-thy

Are not a spoil for him-thou dost

And shake him from thee; the vile strength he

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,

And howling, to his gods, where haply

His petty hope in some near port or bay,

And dashest him again to earth: there let him lay.

The armaments which thunderstrike the

Of rock-built cities, bidding nations quake,

And monarchs tremble in their capitals,

The oak leviathans, whose huge ribs

Their clay creator the vain title

Of lord of thee, and arbiter of war;

These are thy toys, and, as the snowy flake,

They melt into thy yeast of waves, which

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,

And many a tyrant since: their shores

The stranger, slave or savage; their

Has 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

Glasses itself in tempests; in all

Calm or convulsed-in breeze, or gale, or storm,

Icing the pole, or in the torrid

Dark-heaving; boundless, endless and sublime-The image of eternity-the

Of the invisible; even from out thy

The monsters of the deep are made; each

Obeys thee; thou goest forth, dread, fathomless, alone.

And I have loved thee, ocean!

And my

Of youthful sports was on thy breast to

Borne, like thy bubbles, onward: from a boyI wanton'd with thy breakers-they to

Were a delight; and if the freshening

Made 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.

From "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage."

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George Gordon Byron

George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron, FRS (22 January 1788 – 19 April 1824), known simply as Lord Byron, was a British peer, who was a poet and …

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