Mountain High Ocean Deep

Byron’s “Apostrophe to the Ocean” conveys his admiration and love for the ocean. The exclamation “Roll on, thou deep and dark blue Ocean – roll!” (10) is where this is first established in the poem. In the second stanza, he shows the insignificance of man compared to the vastness of the ocean. Although men are the destroyer of nature – “man marks the earth with ruin” (12), their “control / Stops with the shore” (12-13), and becomes only as trivial as “a drop of rain” (16) when they sink into the ocean. The last line of the stanza further stresses the insignificance of humanity.

In the fifth stanza, Byron compares the ocean’s power with that of great empires in history. He suggests that empires like “Assyria, Greece, Rome, Carthage” (38) received power from the ocean, but then they brought tyrants to rule. Now that their “decay / Has dried up realms to desert” (41-42), the power of the ocean remains unchangeable regardless of the passage of time – “Time writes no wrinkle on thine azure brow” (44).

The last stanza is a bit different from others because Byron expresses his personal relationship with the ocean – “I have loved thee, Ocean!” (55) Being an excellent swimmer, he has trust in the waves and tides of the ocean that he compares swimming in it to riding a horse. I agree with Byron about the power of the ocean, but I dread it more than I admire it. So many accidents can happen in the ocean and as the poem itself suggests, people can die in the ocean “Without a grave, unknelled, uncoffined, and unknonwn” (18) and never be found again.