attention to the Coliseum, feeling the ‘‘power / And
magic in the ruin’d battlement,’’ he writes (stanza
CXXX) an apostrophe to time as ‘‘the beautifier of
the dead, / Adorner of the ruin.’’ His first descrip-
tion of the Coliseum puts in mind the later apos-
trophe to the ocean because it presents the ruin—
the work of man—in the light of the eternity of
nature. He views it at night, illumined by the
moon ‘‘As ’twere its natural torches, for divine /
Should be the light which streams here.’’ It is the
‘‘azure gloom / Of an Italian night’’ that ‘‘shadows
forth its [the Coliseum’s] glory’’ (stanzas CXXX
and CXXIX).
Byron was not the only English Romantic
poet to turn to this theme of the transience of
human civilization and the vanity and smallness
of man’s life and his hopes. Byron’s friend Shel-
ley did the same in his famous sonnet ‘‘Ozyman-
dias,’’ which was inspired by the granite head of
the Egyptian king Ramases II that was put on
display at the British Museum in March 1818,
only a month before the publication of Canto IV
ofChilde Harold’s Pilgrimage. ‘‘Ozymandias,’’
which was actually written before the statue
went on public display, reflects on the contrast
between the inscription on the pedestal of the
statue, in which Ozymandias (as Ramses II was
known at the time) boasts of his mighty works,
and the fact that none of those works remains in
existence.
Although a theme of Byron and used by Shel-
ley in that sonnet, the notion of the ephemeral
nature of all man’s works when set against the
relentless march of time is not an especially typical
one for the English Romantics, although it was
very congenial to Byron, who gave another, even
more celebrated, description of the ruined Coli-
seum in his verse dramaManfred.The Romantics
were more inclined to see the infinite potential of
man (the pessimism of Shelley’s ‘‘The Triumph of
Life’’ notwithstanding) than bemoan the transi-
ence of man and of all his doings. What then, is
specifically Romantic, about the apostrophe to
the ocean, which takes as its central theme the
contrast between the eternity represented by the
unchangeable ocean and the fragility and transi-
ence of human civilization?
First, it should be pointed out that the English
romantic movement was not a unified one in which
all poets subscribed to the same philosophy or
poetic creed. In many ways, Byron was different
from the other Romantics. He disliked the later
poetry of Wordsworth, and he was no admirer of
Keats, with the exception of Keats’s unfinished
epic poem,Hyperion. Coleridge’s intellectual spec-
ulations were alien to Byron, and although he
respected his friend Shelley, he did not share
Shelley’s interest in transcendental Platonic and
Neoplatonic metaphysics. Byron knew nothing of
William Blake. Indeed, rather than making com-
mon cause with his contemporaries, Byron was an
admirer of the Augustan poets of the first half of
the eighteenth century, especially Alexander Pope,
to whom he felt poetically inferior.
Despite Byron’s perhaps exaggerated antip-
athy toward Wordsworth, however, the apostro-
phe to the ocean has some very Wordsworthian
(as well as Shelleyan) elements, and it is these that
make the poem romantic. The first stanza is a
case in point, with its warmly expressed love
of nature: ‘‘There is a pleasure in the pathless
woods, / There is a rapture on the lonely shore.’’
The beauty of nature enables the speaker to
move out of or beyond himself and ‘‘mingle
with the Universe.’’ This is a thoroughly Words-
worthian sentiment, although without the meta-
physical elaboration which Wordsworth gives
such moments inThe Prelude(1850), for exam-
ple. The last line also owes much to Shelley,
although curiously, the sentiment expressed is
not the most typical of Byron, whose mind was
not usually drawn to transcendental notions of
human life, the idea that man could be united
with the universe, beyond any subject-object
relationship, through the faculty Wordsworth
and Coleridge called the imagination. However,
although such sentiments may not have been
typical of Byron, they did occur in other passages
in his poetry. Indeed, the fruits of Byron’s most
mystical phase, if it might be called that, can be
found not in Canto IV of Childe Harold’sWHAT MAKES THE APOSTROPHE TO THEOCEAN A ROMANTIC POEM, THEN, IS THE AMOUNT
OF FEELING THERE IS IN IT. BYRON DOES NOT
MERELY DESCRIBE THE SCENE AS IT APPEARS TO
HIS EYES, HE INTERACTS WITH IT IN TERMS OF HIS
FEELINGS.’’
Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage