The difficulty which your correspondent T. W. finds in Lord Byron's
celebrated Address to the Ocean is occasioned by his having taken up a
wrong notion of the construction at the first reading; and the solution
of his perplexity is so obvious, when this is once pointed out, that it
must have already occurred to many of your readers, and very probably,
by this time, to T. W. himself. The lines that puzzle him are--
"Thy waters wasted them while they were free,
And many a tyrant since; their shores obey
The stranger, slave, or savage."
"What!" exclaims T. W., "The waters wasted many a tyrant? How, in the
name of wonder?" How indeed! Probably more readers at once caught the
sense:--
"_Thy waters_ wasted them while they were free
And many _a tyrant_ since--_has wasted them_."
The word "wasted" is used in a somewhat different sense in the two
cases, but this is the price of the antithesis; and the result follows,
that their shores _now_ obey the stranger, the slave, or the savage, as
exemplified in Greece, Asia and Africa respectively. And here we may
observe, that the writer in _Blackwood's Magazine_, whom T. W. quotes,
and who thinks the ocean appealed to is the world's ocean, and not the
Mediterranean, has been just as blind to the train of thought in the
other part as T. W. in this.
But in the way of doing something beyond the solution of this particular
obscurity, so far as there is any, I would remark, that Byron's efforts
at concentration and point not unfrequently give rise to an obscurity of
this kind; which for a moment produces a perplexity that seems laughable
as soon as the true sense occurs to us. For instance, on first reading
these verses in the _Corsair_,--
"Be the edge sharpen'd of my boarding brand,
And give its guard more room to fix my hand.
This let the armourer with speed dispose;
Last time, it more fatigued my arm than foes:"
I exclaimed, like T. W., "What! his sword _fatigued_ his foes? What a
most absurd expression! To be sure, one may imagine that when Conrad was
killing his enemies one after another without stopping, they would say,
What a _tiresome_ man he is! but this does not seem to be in the vein of
the narration." And then, reading the passage again, and considering
that the pirate complains of the guard of his sword being too narrow, I
saw plainly that, with whatever damage to the rhythm, the verse was to
be read--
"Last time, _it_ more fatigued my arm than _foes_" (did).
My sword, by its not fitting to my hand, fatigued my arm more than all
the resistance that foes could offer.
I will give another example of the same kind, again taken from the
Pirate. In the enthusiastic description of a ship, he says:
"Who would not brave the battle-fire--the wreck--
To move the monarch of her peopled deck?"
"Who?" I exclaimed; "but who wants to move him? This monarch is, I
suppose, the captain; but why should men in general wish to move _him_?"
I suppose most of your readers see at the first what I saw at the second
glance, that Byron meant "to move _as_ the monarch of this deck," that
is, to be the captain.
If I have satisfied T. W. and the rest of your readers of the
construction of the first passage, I have, I think, also shown that the
tendency to such transient mistakes in reading Byron is not uncommon.