Roll On

I was reading, of all things, a romance novel when I came across this famous excerpt from Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage:

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.

There are few poets that affect me like Lord Byron does… or, more likely, they are lots of poets whose work would affect me similarly if I knew of them.