“Time's fell hand defac'd”
'Fell' means fierce, savage, or cruel (OED 'fell' adj. 1a, 'ruthlessly cruel; savage'). 'Defac'd' means erased or disfigured — literally, had its face removed, its identity destroyed. Together the phrase names Time not as an abstract force but as a violent agent that strips the world of its past.
“rich-proud cost of outworn buried age”
'Cost' here means costly display or magnificence — the grand monuments and ornaments of civilizations long dead (OED 'cost' n. 3, 'pomp, magnificence, splendour'). 'Outworn buried age' is the era that has been used up and buried. The phrase describes the ruins of past empires: expensive, ostentatious, and now erased.
- TLN 886classical allusion
“brass eternal slave to mortal rage”
Brass (bronze) was the most durable material antiquity could produce for monuments and inscriptions; Roman writers promised their verse would outlast bronze. The line turns that boast on its head: even brass is a 'slave' to the destructive force ('rage') of mortal time. Ovid's Pythagoras teaches in 'Metamorphoses' XV that nothing in nature is permanent, no matter how hard the substance.
- TLN 887classical allusion
“hungry ocean gain / Advantage on the kingdom of the shore”
The second quatrain watches sea and land trade ground in a ceaseless, purposeless exchange: the ocean erodes the shore, then the shore reclaims from the sea. This was Ovid's great image of universal flux. In 'Metamorphoses' XV, Pythagoras observes that what was once dry land is now sea, and what was once sea is now land — nothing stays fixed.
classical Ovid's Metamorphoses