"There is a pleasure in the pathless woods" by George Gordon, Lord Byron

Byron is well-known for satirical work like Don Juan (wherein he rhymed "Juan" with "new one"), but I admire his quiet, passionate poetry just as much. "There is a pleasure..." is an excerpt from a long, partly autobiographical poem entitled Childe Harold's Pilgrimage.

The poem is a Spenserian stanza (named for its inventor Edmund Spenser), and Byron manages the form brilliantly. It features an internal rhyming couplet--which he makes sing--and the final line has an extra beat which helps emphasize the ending.

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.



One of the great poets of the British Romantic Period, Lord Byron was born in Aberdeen, Scotland in 1788. With the publication of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, he became quite famous. He lived passionately (and scandalously) until his death in 1824.