To prevent blocks or splinters from falling on deck during action.
10.
But not in silence pass Calypso's isles.
[Stanza xxix.] line 1.
Goza is said to have been the island of Calypso.
[Strabo (Paris, 1853), lib. i. cap. ii. 57 and lib. vii. cap. iii. 50, says that Apollodorus blamed the poet Callimachus, who was a grammarian and ought to have known better, for his contention that Gaudus, i.e. Gozo, was Calypso's isle. Ogygia (Odyssey, i. 50) was
"a sea-girt isle,
Where is the navel of the sea, a woodland isle."
It was surely as a poet, not as a grammarian, that Callimachus was at fault.]
11.
Land of Albania! let me bend mine eyes
On thee, thou rugged Nurse of savage men!