O CAPTAIN! MY CAPTAIN ! WALT WHITMAN. I. O CAPTAIN! my Captain! our fearful trip is done; The ship has weathered every wrack, the prize we sought is won; The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exult ing, While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring: But O heart! heart! heart! O the bleeding drops of red, Where on the deck my Captain lies, II. O Captain! my Captain! rise up and hear the bells; Rise up for you the flag is flung, for you the bugle - trills; For you bouquets and ribboned wreaths, for you the shores a-crowding; For you they call, the swaying mass, their eager faces turning; Here Captain! dear father! This arm beneath your head; It is some dream that on the deck You've fallen cold and dead. III. My Captain does not answer, his lips are pale and still; My father does not feel my arm, he has no pulse nor will; The ship is anchored safe and sound, its voyage closed and done: From fearful trip the victor ship comes in with object won; Exult, O shores! and ring, O bells! But I, with mournful tread, Walk the deck my Captain lies Fallen cold and dead. THE OCEAN. GEORGE NOËL GORDON, Lord Byron. From Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Canto IV, stanzas clxxviii-clxxxiv. Throughout Childe Harold's Pilgrimage the writer poses as one who has "not loved the world, nor the world him." It was after the publication of the first two cantos of this poem that Byron "woke one morning to find himself famous." He once called himself "the grand Napoleon of the realms of rhyme." THERE is a pleasure in the pathless woods; 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 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, When, for a moment, like a drop of rain, He sinks into thy depths with bubbling groan, Without a grave, unknelled, uncoffined, and unknown. His steps are not upon thy paths; thy fields And shake him from thee; the vile strength he wields For earth's destruction thou dost all despise, And dashest him again to earth: there let him lay.1 The armaments which thunderstrike the walls 1 "This use of lay has caused considerable comment. Byron, whether carelessly or intentionally, employs lay several times in his poems as an intransitive verb. He might find authority for this confusion of lie and lay in writers of the middle English period; but it must be confessed that no great poet of the language is so careless of his grammar as Byron." - Byron's Poems, Cambridge Edition. These are thy toys, and, as the snowy flake, They melt into thy yeast of waves, which mar Alike the Armada's1 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 obey The stranger, slave, or savage; their decay 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 form Calm or convulsed; in breeze or gale or storm, Of the Invisible; even from out thy slime And I have loved thee, Ocean! and my joy 1 Armada, the fleet of Philip II of Spain defeated by Sir Francis Drake. • Trafalgar, the famous battle in which Lord Nelson de feated Napoleon's navy. Made them a terror-'t was a pleasing fear, And trusted to thy billows far and near, And laid my hand upon thy mane,1— as I do here. PORTIA'S SPEECH ON MERCY. From the Merchant of Venice, Act iv, Scene 1. The quality of mercy is not strained; Wherein doth sit the dread and fear of kings; It is enthroned in the hearts of kings, It is an attribute to God himself; And earthly power doth then show likest God's Should see salvation: we do pray for mercy; 1 Mane, cf. Scott's lines in The Lay of the Last Minstrel : "Each wave was crested with tawny foam, Like the mane of a chestnut steed." |