Escape and What the Waves Cast Up

There was something of a reverberation in the line about the lonely shore and the rapture.

Henri Cole
“The Constant Leaf”
Nothing to Declare

[…]
It is strange how the past holds on to us

how the rapture of the lonely shore
is agreeable only if we can
at any moment escape it,

and how the night feels
so indispensable, soothing.
[…]

The allusion tracked down to a stanza in Byron’s fourth canto of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage.

     There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,
     There is a rapture on the lonely shore,
     There is society, where none intrudes,
     By the deep Sea, and music in its roar:
     I love not Man the less, but Nature more,
     From these our interviews, in which I steal
     From all I may be, or have been before,
     To mingle with the Universe, and feel
What I can ne’er express, yet cannot all conceal.

the rapture … a rapture … the shift from indefinite to definite article makes possible the re-orientation of escape from to to from

And so for day 2588
13.01.2014