Source of book: I own this.
There aren’t too many authors who go by a single name. Shakespeare, Twain, Austen, and so on. One of those is Byron, or, spelled out in full, George Gordon, Lord Byron.
Likewise, there are few characters more outrageous and larger than life than Byron, which became arguably the bigger reason for his fame than his poetry.
He was prone to falling violently in and out of love, going on crazy adventures, including fighting for Greek independence from the Ottoman Empire - he would eventually die doing so, although of a fever, not injuries. (This would form part of the basis for Mary Shelley’s post-apocalyptic science fiction novel, The Last Man.)
He was bisexual, although this was largely suppressed at the time (homosexuality was criminalized) and afterward. His letters are now more widely known, and thus his many and varied passions are better understood.
He slept with a whole string of married women, one of whom would later characterize him as “mad, bad, and dangerous to know.” He may have knocked up his half sister. He ended up finally leaving England to spend the rest of his life abroad after running up debts and a bunch of enemies eager to duel him after finding themselves on the wrong side of his sharp pen.
His long poem, “Don Juan,” could be read as somewhat autobiographical - if ever a man was the incarnation of the legendary philanderer, it would be Byron.
Byron ran in a literary circle that turned out to contain many of the finest and most revolutionary young writers of his era. Percy Bysshe Shelley is one of the greatest lyric poets of all time. His eventual wife Mary Shelley would invent the genre of science fiction. (No, Jules Verne came later and owed much to Shelley’s pioneering work.) And Byron would, in addition to leaving behind some incredible poetry, become the model for the romantic adventurer archetype that we still see on the big and small screen today, and in the personas of entertainers like Mick Jagger and Johnny Depp and James Deen. The OG brooding hero.
I found a used hardback of Byron up at Powell's last year during our trip to Portland to visit some friends. Oddly, while the book contains most of Byron’s poems, it lacks “Don Juan,” which seems an odd omission. It does, however, include “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage,” his other long work, and that is the one I decided to read this year.
Whether or not you remember the name “Childe Harold” from high school, I can guarantee you that you are familiar with lines from this poem.
The poem is somewhat autobiographical, as it tells of a sensitive young man, disillusioned with the endless Napoleonic wars, wandering around the Mediterranean, musing on life and philosophy. Byron himself took this tour early in life, before writing the poem.
It would become Byron’s first big hit. He released the first two cantos in 1812 reluctantly, worried they revealed too much of himself. As he put it later, he awoke the next day to find himself famous. He then composed the final two cantos later - the third in 1816, and the fourth in 1818.
Altogether, the poem has 486 stanzas, most of them in the Spencerian form. These consist of eight lines of iambic pentameter with the rhyme scheme of ABABBCBCC. It is a complex and intricate form of writing, and Byron was probably the best writer in that form - yes, better than Spencer himself, in my opinion.
There are a few exceptions - passages that revert to simpler forms for a specific purpose - but the overwhelming majority of the work is in this form.
Byron’s philosophical ideas feel strikingly modern. He is deeply skeptical of war in general, but he distinguishes the fight for national independence and freedom from the pursuit of glory and conquest. He expresses similar environmental concerns to those of the Transcendentalists who would be inspired by his writing.
And, interestingly, he was one of the first to protest against the British practice of removing artifacts from foreign lands and displaying them in museums.
This isn’t to say there aren’t some dated ideas in the poem - Byron accepts unquestioningly certain prejudices against women, for example, although he is hardly the worst offender of his era. Likewise, there is the casual racism against black people and indigenous peoples that forms the background noise of the era of colonialism generally.
But overall, I felt like this poem could have been written in a more modern era, rather than over 200 years ago. This is the complexity of Byron: mad, bad, and dangerous to know, perhaps, but also forward-looking and on the side of freedom and democracy.
And, to be sure, this is some truly excellent poetry. Often, with long poems, the inspiration comes and goes, and passages can be more or less inspired in turn. I was pleasantly surprised that “Childe Harold” was consistently good and had a real flow to the music of the language, both within stanzas and the larger structure underlying the work. If anything, I was reminded of Paradise Lost in its ability to move between story and philosophy while keeping the poetic flow.
The work opens with both of Byron’s prefaces - the first one for the first two cantos, and the second addition to the full work. I found interesting his response to critics that his protagonist wasn’t exactly the most “knightly” despite the use of the world “childe,” which is an archaic word referring to a young man likely to become a knight eventually.
The vows of chivalry were no better kept than any other vows whatsoever; and the songs of the Troubadours were not more decent, and certainly were much less refined than those of Ovid.
This is something to keep in mind whenever you hear someone waxing eloquent about “the good old days” when everyone was pure. Um, nope. Never happened.
Early in the poem, we get a description of what our hero is all about.
II
Whilome in Albion's isle there dwelt a youth,
Who ne in virtue's ways did take delight;
But spent his days in riot most uncouth,
And vexed with mirth the drowsy ear of Night.
Ah, me! in sooth he was a shameless wight,
Sore given to revel and ungodly glee;
Few earthly things found favour in his sight
Save concubines and carnal companie,
And flaunting wassailers of high and low degree.
And this one:
VI
And now Childe Harold was sore sick at heart,
And from his fellow bacchanals would flee;
'Tis said, at times the sullen tear would start,
But pride congealed the drop within his e'e:
Apart he stalked in joyless reverie,
And from his native land resolved to go,
And visit scorching climes beyond the sea;
With pleasure drugged, he almost longed for woe,
And e'en for change of scene would seek the shades below.
As he bids goodbye to his native land, the stanzas shift to iambic tetrameter and a simple ABABCDCD rhyme, and the numbering from Roman to Arabic numerals.
1
Adieu, adieu! my native shore
Fades o'er the waters blue;
The night-winds sigh, the breakers roar,
And shrieks the wild sea-mew.
Yon sun that sets upon the sea
We follow in his flight;
Farewell awhile to him and thee,
My Native Land—Good Night!
Later in this passage, there is a line that is heart-wrenching:
My greatest grief is that I leave
No thing that claims a tear.
Perhaps you might have heard that line somewhere?
As Harold begins his exploration, there is this connection of ideas to places and people. St. Honorious (not to be confused with either the Roman emperor or pope of the same name) has a shrine in Portugal which is mentioned here. Clearly Byron did not consider the ascetic lifestyle to be attractive.
XX
Then slowly climb the many-winding way,
And frequent turn to linger as you go,
From loftier rocks new loveliness survey,
And rest ye at 'Our Lady's House of Woe;'
Where frugal monks their little relics show,
And sundry legends to the stranger tell:
Here impious men have punished been; and lo,
Deep in yon cave Honorius long did dwell,
In hope to merit Heaven by making earth a Hell.
The second canto opens with an invocation of Athena, and laments that wisdom seems to inspire fewer songs than love and war.
I
Come, blue-eyed maid of heaven!—but thou, alas,
Didst never yet one mortal song inspire—
Goddess of Wisdom! here thy temple was,
And is, despite of war and wasting fire,
And years, that bade thy worship to expire:
But worse than steel, and flame, and ages slow,
Is the drear sceptre and dominion dire
Of men who never felt the sacred glow
That thoughts of thee and thine on polished breasts bestow.
Byron also notes that nothing lasts forever - and that includes religious ideas, and particularly religious power. Greece in this case has been ruled by believers in the old Greek gods, Christendom, and the Muslim Ottomans. None of this inspires confidence in religion. I am increasingly of Byron’s view here. All is vanity.
III
Son of the morning, rise! approach you here!
Come—but molest not yon defenceless urn!
Look on this spot—a nation's sepulchre!
Abode of gods, whose shrines no longer burn.
E'en gods must yield—religions take their turn:
'Twas Jove's—'tis Mahomet's; and other creeds
Will rise with other years, till man shall learn
Vainly his incense soars, his victim bleeds;
Poor child of Doubt and Death, whose hope is built on reeds.
Harold turns from the monuments of the past and their crumbling gods to a more real joy: that of nature. I love this particular stanza - it captures my own feelings.
XXV
To sit on rocks, to muse o'er flood and fell,
To slowly trace the forest's shady scene,
Where things that own not man's dominion dwell,
And mortal foot hath ne'er or rarely been;
To climb the trackless mountain all unseen,
With the wild flock that never needs a fold;
Alone o'er steeps and foaming falls to lean:
This is not solitude; 'tis but to hold
Converse with Nature's charms, and view her stores unrolled.
There will be more of this idea to come throughout the poem. I will highlight the ones I loved the best.
Harold and Byron also go in for the kind of existentialist angst that we find in Ecclesiastes. Fill in your favorite mopey goth or emo sort today, and I bet this fits.
XXXV
'Tis an old lesson: Time approves it true,
And those who know it best deplore it most;
When all is won that all desire to woo,
The paltry prize is hardly worth the cost:
Youth wasted, minds degraded, honour lost,
These are thy fruits, successful Passion! these!
If, kindly cruel, early hope is crossed,
Still to the last it rankles, a disease,
Not to be cured when Love itself forgets to please.
All is vanity indeed.
And again, Harold looks at religion with ambivalence. With all the evil it has done, is the good worth searching for? The red cross in this case is a reference to the Crusades.
XLIV
Here the red cross, for still the cross is here,
Though sadly scoffed at by the circumcised,
Forgets that pride to pampered priesthood dear;
Churchman and votary alike despised.
Foul Superstition! howsoe'er disguised,
Idol, saint, virgin, prophet, crescent, cross,
For whatsoever symbol thou art prized,
Thou sacerdotal gain, but general loss!
Who from true worship's gold can separate thy dross.
And, for that matter, what good are the oracles? Were they ever any use anyway? Everything dies no matter what.
LIII
Oh! where, Dodona, is thine aged grove,
Prophetic fount, and oracle divine?
What valley echoed the response of Jove?
What trace remaineth of the Thunderer's shrine?
All, all forgotten—and shall man repine
That his frail bonds to fleeting life are broke?
Cease, fool! the fate of gods may well be thine:
Wouldst thou survive the marble or the oak,
When nations, tongues, and worlds must sink beneath the stroke?
Harold comes across a midnight revel on the beach by Turkish troops, and gives a bit of their songs, in another departure from the Spencerian form. In this case, simple quatrains with an AABB scheme. Here are a couple of examples:
2
Oh! who is more brave than a dark Suliote,
To his snowy camese and his shaggy capote?
To the wolf and the vulture he leaves his wild flock,
And descends to the plain like the stream from the rock.
7
I love the fair face of the maid in her youth;
Her caresses shall lull me, her music shall soothe:
Let her bring from her chamber the many-toned lyre,
And sing us a song on the fall of her sire.
Perhaps not the most inspiring - Byron is contrasting his own elevated ideas with the bawdy, jingoistic, and chauvinistic machismo of the soldiers.
After the gap of years, Byron returned to the poem with his third and fourth cantos. The third opens with an interesting reference.
I
Is thy face like thy mother's, my fair child!
Ada! sole daughter of my house and heart?
When last I saw thy young blue eyes, they smiled,
And then we parted,—not as now we part,
But with a hope.—
Awaking with a start,
The waters heave around me; and on high
The winds lift up their voices: I depart,
Whither I know not; but the hour's gone by,
When Albion's lessening shores could grieve or glad mine eye.
Who is Ada? Well, that would be Ada Lovelace, Byron’s one legitimate child. (He had several children out of wedlock after her.) Ada would later become the world’s first computer programmer, and quite the intellectual badass.
Another young woman mentioned in this section is Swiss priestess Julia Alpinula, who tried to sacrifice her life to save her father. Byron’s thought on why this is more notable than all the empires and soldiers is interesting - and definitely modern. Sacrifice for ideals and others rather than for glory and power.
LXVII
But these are deeds which should not pass away,
And names that must not wither, though the earth
Forgets her empires with a just decay,
The enslavers and the enslaved, their death and birth;
The high, the mountain-majesty of worth,
Should be, and shall, survivor of its woe,
And from its immortality look forth
In the sun's face, like yonder Alpine snow,
Imperishably pure beyond all things below.
As it goes on, the journey itself takes a backseat to the exploration of ideas and ideals. Here are some more of my favorites.
LXXXIV
What deep wounds ever closed without a scar?
The heart's bleed longest, and but heal to wear
That which disfigures it; and they who war
With their own hopes, and have been vanquished, bear
Silence, but not submission: in his lair
Fixed Passion holds his breath, until the hour
Which shall atone for years; none need despair:
It came, it cometh, and will come,—the power
To punish or forgive—in ONE we shall be slower.
That’s a classic Byronic hero to be sure. For those of us who feel deeply, though, it really does resonate.
Here is another that celebrates nature - and specifically something I got to do earlier this year, which was sit by an alpine lake and watch the stars above…and reflected in the lake itself.
XCIII
And this is in the night:—Most glorious night!
Thou wert not sent for slumber! let me be
A sharer in thy fierce and far delight—
A portion of the tempest and of thee!
How the lit lake shines, a phosphoric sea,
And the big rain comes dancing to the earth!
And now again 'tis black,—and now, the glee
Of the loud hills shakes with its mountain-mirth,
As if they did rejoice o'er a young earthquake's birth.
The next one may be my favorite stanza from the poem.
XCVII
Could I embody and unbosom now
That which is most within me,—could I wreak
My thoughts upon expression, and thus throw
Soul, heart, mind, passions, feelings, strong or weak,
All that I would have sought, and all I seek,
Bear, know, feel, and yet breathe—into one word,
And that one word were lightning, I would speak;
But as it is, I live and die unheard,
With a most voiceless thought, sheathing it as a sword.
I am reminded so much of N. Scott Momaday’s incredible poem, “Prayer for Words” as well. This blog is in a way my own search for words, for expression, for a voice. It is also a bit of a protest that I have not taken the path of hate and exclusion and, frankly, the spirit of antichrist that pervades what passes for religion in my time and place. Byron talks about that too.
CXIII
I have not loved the world, nor the world me;
I have not flattered its rank breath, nor bowed
To its idolatries a patient knee,—
Nor coined my cheek to smiles, nor cried aloud
In worship of an echo; in the crowd
They could not deem me one of such; I stood
Among them, but not of them; in a shroud
Of thoughts which were not their thoughts, and still could,
Had I not filed my mind, which thus itself subdued.
CXIV
I have not loved the world, nor the world me,—
But let us part fair foes; I do believe,
Though I have found them not, that there may be
Words which are things,—hopes which will not deceive,
And virtues which are merciful, nor weave
Snares for the falling: I would also deem
O'er others' griefs that some sincerely grieve;
That two, or one, are almost what they seem,—
That goodness is no name, and happiness no dream.
Those two stanzas are so powerful. And fitting for our times.
On to the final canto. This next one captures something that has frustrated me endlessly the last few decades. There are so many eager to make their own lives worse, as long as they can look down on someone below them. They “wage war for their chains rather than be free” as Byron puts it.
XCIV
And thus they plod in sluggish misery,
Rotting from sire to son, and age to age,
Proud of their trampled nature, and so die,
Bequeathing their hereditary rage
To the new race of inborn slaves, who wage
War for their chains, and rather than be free,
Bleed gladiator-like, and still engage
Within the same arena where they see
Their fellows fall before, like leaves of the same tree.
I think this one as well is apropos:
CXXVII
Yet let us ponder boldly—'tis a base
Abandonment of reason to resign
Our right of thought—our last and only place
Of refuge; this, at least, shall still be mine:
Though from our birth the faculty divine
Is chained and tortured—cabined, cribbed, confined,
And bred in darkness, lest the truth should shine
Too brightly on the unprepared mind,
The beam pours in, for time and skill will couch the blind.
The right - and the duty - to think. To refuse to abandon reason for superstition or ideology.
At the end of the poem, Byron again turns to nature. This next stanza is one I guarantee you have heard before, even if you didn’t know where it came from.
CLXXVIII
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.
Just a gorgeous lyric, and a profound thought and expression of my own longing.
One final stanza, which also is quite familiar:
CLXXIX
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.
I hadn’t previously read that much Byron, but I was pleasantly surprised at how much I enjoyed this work. It is in some ways a shame that his flamboyant life would overshadow his incredible talent and skill in writing. If you are a fan of traditional poetic forms, but with modern sensibilities, give Byron a try.
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