STANZAS IN "CHILDE HAROLD."
There is a famous passage in one of Lord Byron's most famous poems, which I am ashamed to confess that, though I am English born, and a constant reader of poetry, I cannot clearly understand. It seems to present no difficulties to anybody else, for it has been quoted a thousand times over and over, without any intimation that it is not as clear as light. It is in the sublime Address to the Ocean at the end of Canto IV. of Childe Harold, stanza 182.:
"Thy shores are empires, changed in all save thee—
Assyria, Greece, Rome, Carthage, what are they?
Thy waters wasted them 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."
I have copied out to the end of the stanza; for in fact it is not easy to stop the pen when copying such stanzas as these: but my business is with the fourth and fifth lines only. In the fourth line, as you will observe, a semicolon is inserted after the word "since." I find it there in the first edition of the fourth canto of Childe Harold, published in 1818; it is there in the standard edition of Lord Byron's Works, issued by Murray about 1832; it is there in the splendid illustrated edition of Childe Harold published by Murray in 1841,—one of the finest books of the kind, if not the finest, that has yet done honour to the English press. This punctuation is found, therefore, in the earliest edition that was issued, and in those on which the most care has been bestowed. Yet what is the sense which the lines thus punctuated present?
"Thy waters wasted them [i. e. the empires] while they were free,
And many a tyrant since."
They waters wasted many a tyrant? How, in the name of wonder? What sort of an occupation is this to assign to the majestic ocean? Does the poet mean to assert that anciently it wasted empires, and now it only wastes individuals. Absurd! Yet such is the only meaning, as far as I see, that can be assigned to the lines as they stand.
If the punctuation be altered, that is, if the semicolon after "since" be removed, and a comma placed at the end of the line, the whole becomes luminous:
"Thy waters wasted them while they were free,
And many a tyrant since their shores obey."
That is (I beg pardon if I am unnecessarily explanatory), "The waters wasted these empires while they were free, and since they have been enslaved,"—an apt illustration of that indifference to human affairs which the poet is attributing to the ocean. The words, "the stranger, slave, or savage," which follow in the next line, are to be taken in connexion with the phrase "many a tyrant," and as an enumeration of the different sorts of tyrants to which these unhappy empires have been subjected.
This is my view of the sense of this famous passage: if any of your correspondents can point out a better, I can only say "candidus imperti," &c.
There was a very elaborate article on Lord Byron's Address to the Ocean in Blackwood's Magazine for October, 1848; but the writer, who dissects it almost line by line, has somehow, as is the wont of commentators, happened to pass over the difficulty which stands right in his way. To make up for this, however, he contrives to find new difficulties of his own. The following is a specimen:
"Recite," he says, "the stanza beginning,
'Thy shores are empires, changed in all save thee;'
and when the sonorous roll has subsided, try to understand it. You will find some difficulty, if we mistake not, in knowing who or what is the apostrophized subject. Unquestionably the world's ocean, and not the Mediterranean. The very last verse we were far in the Atlantic:
'Thy shores are empires.'
The shores of the world's ocean are empires. There are, or have been, the British empire, the German empire, the Russian empire, and the empire of the Great Mogul, the Chinese empire, the empire of Morocco, the four great empires of antiquity, the French empire, and some others. The poet does not intend names and things in this very strict way, however," &c.
What empires the poet did mean there is surely no difficulty in discovering, for those who wish to understand rather than to cavil. The very next line to that quoted is—
"Assyria, Greece, Rome, Carthage, what are they?"
and it would require some hardihood to assert that these empires were not on the shores of the Mediterranean.
After all, the best commentators are translators: they are obliged to take the difficulties by the horns. I find, in a translation of Byron's Works published at Pforzheim in 1842, the lines thus rendered by Dr. Duttenhofer:
"Du bleibst, ob Reiche schwinden an den Küsten,—
Assyrien, Hellas, Rom, Carthago—schwand,
Die freien könnte Wasserfluth verwüsten
Wie die Tyrannen; es gehorcht der Strand
Dem Fremdling, Sclaven, Wilden," &c.
Duttenhofer has here taken the text as he found it, and has given it as much meaning as he could; but alas for those who are compelled to take their notion of the poetry of Childe Harold from his German, instead of the original English! There is one passage in which the reader finds this reflection driven hard upon him. Who is there that does not know Byron's stanza on the Dying Gladiator, when, speaking of
"The inhuman shout which hail'd the wretch who won,"
he adds, in lines which will be read till Homer and Virgil are forgotten:
"He heard it, but he heeded not—his eyes
Were with his heart, and that was far away;
He reck'd not of the life he lost nor prize,
But where his rude hut by the Danube lay,
There were his young barbarians all at play,
There was their Dacian mother—he, their sire,
Butcher'd to make a Roman holiday—
All this gush'd with his blood—shall he expire
And unavenged? Arise, ye Goths! and glut your ire!"
There are two phrases in this stanza which seem to me to have never been surpassed: "young barbarians," and "all this gushed with his blood." How inimitable is "young barbarians!" The "curiosa felicitas" of Horace never carried him farther,—or perhaps so far. Herr Duttenhofer contents himself by saying—
"fern am Donaustrand
Sind seine Kinder, freuend sich am Spiel."
"Afar on the shore of the Danube are his children, diverting themselves at play." Good heavens! is this translation, and German translation too, of which we have heard so much? Again:
"wie sein Blut
Hinfliesst, denkt er an dies."
"As his blood flows away, he thinks of this!" What could Herr Duttenhofer be thinking of?
To my surprise, on turning to the passage this moment in Byron's poems, I find it stands—
"All this rush'd with his blood,"
instead of "gush'd." It is so in the original edition, in the Works, and in the splendid edition of 1841, all three. Can there be any doubt of the superiority of "gush'd?" To me there seems none; and, singularly enough, it so happens that twice in conversation with two of the most distinguished writers of this age—one a prosaist and the other a poet, whose names I wish I were at liberty to mention—I have had occasion to quote this passage, and they both agreed with me in ascribing the highest degree of poetical excellence to the use of this very word. I wish I could believe myself the author of such an improvement; but I have certainly somewhere seen the line printed as I have given it; very possibly in Ebenezer Elliott the Corn-law Rhymer's Lectures on Poetry, in which I distinctly remember that he quoted the stanza.
T. W.