Byron's Ode to the Ocean

 

George Gordon Byron

I fell in  love with Lord  Byron when i was only six years old.

I loved his address to the sea.  

In fact every year I recited it as I entered the ocean for the first time each summer. 

 I adored his good looks 

and I must admit that I took collections of his work from the  Pawtucket Public Library and cut the  image of him that was often the first page of the collection.

 I put those pictures on  my bedroom wall. 

He was to me the most handsome of men.  

Also I knew many of his shorter poems by heart. 

 I often chose  Byron as the poet to  read aloud and talk about in those weekly poetry sessions with my mother.

 I recited my favorite 

 the verse "They know not I knew thee,  who knew the too well.

Long , long will I rue thee too deeply to tell.

If I should meet you after long years,

 how would I greet thee? In silence and tears."

believe it or not 

seventy years after I first read those lines, on this night, I am writing them down from memory, I did not condescend to check their accuracy.

 You,dear reader, may have that pleasure.

HERE IS WHAT I CHANTED TO THE OCEAN--

"Roll on, Thou..."

(From “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage”, Canto the Second, CLXXIX.)

Roll on, thou deep and dark blue Ocean – roll!
Ten thousand fleets sweep over thee in vain;
Man marks the earth with ruin – his control
Stops with the shore; -- upon the watery plain
The wrecks are all thy deed, not does remain
A 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.

And I have loved thee, Ocean! and my joy

Of youthful sports was on thy breast to be

Borne like thy bubbles, onward: from a boy

I wantoned with thy breakers—they to me
Were a delight; and if the freshening sea
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