By Lord Byron (1816)
Once more upon the waters! yet once more!
And the waves bound beneath me as a steed
That knows his rider. Welcome to their roar!
Swift be their guidance, wheresoe’er it lead;
Though the strain’d mast should quiver as a reed,
And the rent canvas fluttering strew the gale,
Still must I on — for I am as a weed,
Flung from the rock, on Ocean’s foam to sail
Where’er the surge may sweep, the tempest’s breath prevail.
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 steal
From all I may be, or have been before,
To mingle with the Universe, and feel
What I can ne’er express, yet cannot all conceal.
Originally published in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1816) by Lord Byron. Public domain.
Analysis
Byron’s Spenserian stanzas make exile sound grandly elective. The sea is both stage and solvent — a place where identity dissolves into sublimity only to return charged with new voltage. The pilgrim rejects society even as he seeks a different society in waves and woods, a paradox Byron resolves with that perfect hinge: “I love not man the less, but Nature more.”
The stanza form — interlaced rhyme culminating in a long alexandrine — enables Byron’s sweeping turns from philosophy to spectacle. Self-fashioning here requires risk, a willingness to be “as a weed” torn free from the rock. The poem invents a modern hero whose journey is inward and elemental at once.