by Byron
PENGUIN ENGLISH POETS
GENERAL EDITOR: CHRISTOPHER RICKS
LORD BYRON
SELECTED POEMS
GEORGE GORDON BYRON was born on 22 January 1788 and he inherited the barony in 1798. He went to school in Dulwich, and then in 1801 to Harrow. In 1805 he went up to Trinity College, Cambridge, later gaining a reputation in London for his startling good looks and extravagant behaviour. His first collection of poems, Hours of Idleness (1807), was not well received, but with the publication of the first two cantos of Childe Harol’s Pilgrimage (1812) he became famous overnight and increased this fame with a series of wildly popular ‘Eastern Tales’. In 1815 he married the heiress Annabella Milbanke, but they were separated after a year. Byron shocked society by the rumoured relationship with his half-sister, Augusta, and in 1816 he left England for ever. He eventually settled in Italy, where he lived for some time with Teresa, Contessa Guiccioli. He supported Italian revolutionary movements and in 1823 he left for Greece to fight in its struggle for independence, but he contracted a fever and died at Missolonghi in 1824.
Byron’s contemporary popularity was based first on Childe Harold and the ‘Tales’, and then on Don Juan (1819–24), his most sophisticated and accomplished writing. He was one of the strongest exemplars of the Romantic movement, and the Byronic hero was a prototype widely imitated in European and American literature.
SUSAN J. WOLFSON received her PhD at the University of California, Berkeley, where she met Peter Manning. She taught at Rutgers University between 1978 and 1991, and is now Professor of English at Princeton University. A noted interpreter of British Romanticism, she has published several essays on Byron. She is the author of The Questioning Presence: Wordsworth, Keats, and the Interrogative Mode in Romantic Poetry (1986) and Formal Charges: The Shaping of Poetry in English Romanticism (1996). Borderlines: The Shiftings of Gender in British Romanticism (with a chapter on Don Juan) will appear in 2006.
PETER J. MANNING graduated from Harvard University and received his PhD from Yale University. He taught at the University of California from 1967 to 1975, at the University of Southern California from 1975 to 2000, and is now Professor and Chair of English at Stony Brook University. A widely recognized authority on Byron, he is the author of Byron and His Fictions (1978) and Reading Romantics (1990), which includes further essays on Byron. He has numerous other publications on various aspects of English Romanticism. His current project is The Late Wordsworth, a culturally situated study of Wordsworth’s career.
LORD BYRON
Selected Poems
Edited with an Introduction by SUSAN J. WOLFSON and PETER J. MANNING
PENGUIN BOOKS
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First published 1996
This edition with Introduction and updated Further Reading published 2005
6
Selection, Preface and Notes copyright © Susan J. Wolfson and Peter J. Manning, 1996
Introduction and updated Further Reading copyright © Susan J. Wolfson and Peter J. Manning, 2005
All rights reserved
The moral right of the editors has been asserted
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
ISBN: 978-0-14-196033-3
CONTENTS
Introduction
Table of Dates
Further Reading
A Note on This Edition
A Fragment (‘When, to their airy hall, my fathers’ voice’)
To Woman
The Cornelian
To Caroline (‘You say you love, and yet your eye’)
ENGLISH BARDS AND SCOTCH REVIEWERS:
A Satire
Lines to Mr Hodgson (Written on Board the Lisbon Packet)
Maid of Athens, ere we part
Written after Swimming from Sestos to Abydos
To Thyrza (‘Without a stone to mark the spot’)
CHILDE HAROLD’S PILGRIMAGE: A Romaunt, Cantos I-II
Preface to the First and Second Canto
To Ianthe
Canto the First
Canto the Second
Appendix to Canto the Second
An Ode to the Framers of the Frame Bill
Lines to a Lady Weeping
THE WALTZ: An Apostrophic Hymn
Remember Thee! Remember Thee!
THE GIAOUR: A Fragment of a Turkish Tale
THE BRIDE OF ABYDOS: A Turkish Tale
THE CORSAIR: A Tale
Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte
Stanzas for Music
She walks in beauty
LARA: A Tale
The Destruction of Sennacherib
Napoleon’s Farewell (From the French)
From the French (‘Must thou go, my glorious Chief’)
THE SIEGE OF CORINTH
When we two parted
Fare thee well!
Prometheus
THE PRISONER OF CHILLON: A Fable and Sonnet on Chillon
Darkness
CHILDE HAROLD’S PILGRIMAGE: A Romaunt Canto III
Epistle to Augusta (‘My sister! my sweet sister!’ &c.)
Lines (On Hearing that Lady Byron was Ill)
MANFRED: A Dramatic Poem
So, we’ll go no more a roving
CHILDE HAROLD’S PILGRIMAGE: A Romaunt, Canto IV
Epistle from Mr Murray to Dr Polidori (‘Dear Doctor, I have read your play’)
BEPPO: A Venetian Story
Epistle to Mr Murray (‘My dear Mr Murray’)
MAZEPPA
Stanzas to the Po
The Isles of Greece
Francesca of Rimini. From the Inferno of Dante Canto the Fifth
Stanzas (‘When a man hath no freedom’)
SARDANAPALUS: A Tragedy
Who kill’d John Keats?
THE BLUES: A Literary Eclogue
THE VISION OF JUDGMENT
On This Day I Complete My Thirty-Sixth Year
Notes
Works Cited in the Notes
Index of Titles
Index of First Lines
INTRODUCTION
I
As the famous portrait by Thomas Phillips of Byron in Albanian costume makes clear, Byron himself impersonated his most famous poetic creation: the exotic, dashingly handsome, dangerous and seductive Byronic Hero. When visiting Trevesa he had been delighted by the ‘very “magnifique” Albanian dresses,’ as he wrote his mother, and purchased ‘some’ f
or himself: ‘the only expensive articles in this country they cost 50 guineas each & have so much gold they would cost in England two hundre’.1 It is no wonder that he commissioned Phillips to paint him in this theatrical pose, but it was not the only image in circulation: another Phillips portrait, with the open collar that Byron made the vogue, was also exhibited in 1814; a portrait by Richard Westall of the previous year showed the poet in staged profile, his chin resting in his hand; in 1817 in Rome Byron sat for a bust by Bertel Thorwaldsen, who grumbled that the began immediately to assume quite another countenance to what was customary to him’ and commanded ‘you must not make these faces’. The sculptor reported that ‘everybody said, when it was finished, that I had hit the likeness’, but Byron himself objected: ‘It does not resemble me at all; I look more unhappy.’2 The American William Edward West, who painted Byron in Italy in 1822, noted the same elision of the poet and his protagonist: ‘I found him a bad sitter. He talked all the time… When he was silent, he was a better sitter than before; for he assumed a countenance that did not belong to him, as though he were thinking of a frontispiece for Childe Harold’, as though, that is, he were imitating one of his own portraits.3
West understood Byron’s self-conscious role-playing, for the portraits were engraved, widely reproduced and disseminated, as frontispieces, in annuals and as images purchasable separately. Alfred Lord Tennyson’s Ulysses sighs (half boastfully, half elegiacally) that he is ‘become a name’;4 by age twenty-five Byron had entered the public imagination in the language of Byromania (a term coined by his future wife on beholding his adoring female fans), Byronism, and Byronic – this adjective describing not only him and his gallery of heroes, but destined to be applied to their lineage throughout the century, the progenitor of Emily Brontë’s Heathcliff and later, a figure in Bertrand Russell’s A History of Western Philosophy (1945). He was the epitome of mysterious glamour and also a commodity opportunistically manufactured by his publisher, the celebrity machinery of the newspapers, reviews, magazines and caricaturists, and his own eye for the dramatic. The force was felt across Europe, and beyond, generating fresh inspiration not only in literature but also in the other arts: in Théodore Géricault’s vivid illustrations of the Eastern tales (a watercolour of The Giaour led to a suite of lithographs executed in 1823 with Eugène Lami illustrating Mazeppa, The Giaour, The Bride of Abydos and Lara), in numerous paintings by Eugène Delacroix (including The Death of Sardanapalus (1827)), the apex of French high Romantic painting), in Hector Berlioz’s Harold in Italy (1834), in which the composer determined to ‘make [the solo viola] a kind of melancholy dreamer in the style of Byron’s Childe Harold’,5 in Robert Schumann’s setting of Manfred (1848–9) and in Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s symphony Manfred (1885). In all these figures Byron awakened, in Delacroix’s phrase, ‘that insatiable desire to create’.6
The magnetism apparent in the visual and verbal representations proceeded from, and rebounded upon, the man. Walter Scott, fellow Scot, fellow literary lion, fellow sufferer from lameness, was transfixed:
A countenance, exquisitely modeled to the expression of feeling and passion, and exhibiting the remarkable contrast of very dark hair and eyebrows, with light and expressive eyes, presented to the physiognomist the most interesting subject for the exercise of his art. The predominating expression was that of deep and habitual thought, which gave way to the most rapid play of features when he engaged in interesting discussion; so that a brother poet compared them to the sculpture of a beautiful alabaster vase, only seen to perfection when lighted up from within… but those who had an opportunity of studying his features for a length of time, and upon various occasions, both of rest and emotion, will agree with us that their proper language was that of melancholy.
Scott was writing anonymously in 1816 for the most widely read periodical of the day, the Quarterly Review, not coincidentally published by Byron’s publisher, John Murray: the anonymity, expressed in the inclusive editorial first person, assumed universal agreemen.7 In a giddy suspension of disbelief, fellow poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge had rhapsodized to a friend in April of the same year – the month Byron left England forever amid the scandal surrounding his separation from his wife (see Part II):
if you had seen Lord Byron, you could scarcely disbelieve him – so beautiful a countenance I scarcely ever saw – his teeth so many stationary smiles – his eyes the open portals of the sun – things of light, and for light – and his forehead so ample, and yet so flexible, passing from marble smoothness into a hundred wreathes and lines and dimples correspondent to the feelings and sentiments he is uttering.8
Reading the countenance for its animating sentiments and passions, Scott and Coleridge were part of a burning Romantic-era romance with Byron, involving not only brother poets but also women poets, among them Felicia Hemans and Letitia Landon, enthralled by his dark and dazzling celebrity. Society belles who couldn’t possess the lord nonetheless felt the theatrics. Margaret Mercer Elphinstone borrowed Byron’s Albanian dress for a masquerade the same year that he donned the costume for the Phillips portrait,9 and Byron did not at all mind the layered transvestite spectacle: a Regency ‘Beauty’ decked out as an Albanian dandy, and a female impersonation of Phillips’s ‘Byron’. ‘The more the merrier,’ he said in the last year of his life in portraits, anticipating the diverse interpretations that would multiply and prolong his fascination:
One will represent me as a sort of sublime misanthrope, with moments of kind feeling. This, par example, is my favourite rôle. Another will portray me as a modern Don Juan; and a third… will, it is to be hoped, if only for opposition sake, represent me as an amiable, illused gentleman ‘more sinned against than sinning.’ Now, if I know myself, I should say, that I have no character at all… I am so changeable, being every thing by turns and nothing long.10
If Byron suggests a certain unease at the distance between a mercurial nature and public perception, he is here largely unthreatened by it, understanding the series of portraits as extending the grasp of Byronism.
Others were sharply critical of such Byronic performances. John Scott, the influential editor of the London Magazine, objected to the ‘confusion’ between the ‘poetical sympathies’ of readers and their ‘recollection of some fact of the author’s life, or a conviction of an analogy to the author’s own character’. He continued:
The impression left on the mind, is neither strictly that of a work of art, to be pronounced upon according to the rules applicable to art, – nor of a matter-of-fact, appealing to the principles of sound judgment in such cases; – but what is striking in poetry is made a set-off against what is objectionable in morals, – while that which would be condemned as false, theatrical, or inconsistent, according to the laws of poetical criticism, is often rendered the most taking part of the whole composition by its evident connection with real and private circumstances, that are of a nature to tickle the idle, impertinent, and most unpoetical curiosity of the public. This sort of balancing system is not fair.11
In underscoring Byron’s play at the borders between art and life, Scott identified one of the springs of Byron’s hold on his public. John Wilson teased out the paradox that nourished the fascination:
It might, on a hasty consideration, seem to us, that such undisguised revelation of feelings and passions, which the becoming pride of human nature, jealous of its own dignity, would, in general, desire to hold in unviolated silence, could produce in the public mind only pity, sorrow, or repugnance. But, in the case of men of real genius, like Rousseau or Byron, it is otherwise. Each of us must have been aware in himself of a singular illusion, by which these disclosures, when read with that tender or high interest which attaches to poetry, seem to have something of the nature of private and confidential communications. They are not felt, while we read, as declarations published to the world, – but almost as secrets whispered to chosen ears. Who is there that feels, for a moment, that the voice which reaches the inmost recesses of his heart is s
peaking to the careless multitude around him? Or, if we do so remember, the words seem to pass by others like air, and to find their way to the hearts for whom they were intended, – kindred and sympathizing spirits, who discern and own that secret language, of which the privacy is not violated, though spoken in hearing of the uninitiated, – because it is not understood. There is an unobserved beauty that smiles on us alone; and the more beautiful to us, because we feel as if chosen out from a crowd of lovers.12
An exotic spectacle and an erotically intimate friend: Byron had the power to enthrall.
II
Byron was born in London on 22 January 1788, the son of Captain John (‘Mad Jack’) Byron and his second wife, Catherine Gordon, a Scots heiress. The Captain having squandered her fortune, the family withdrew to Aberdeen in 1789, and he soon decamped to the Continent. Byron passed the next ten years in straitened circumstances; sensitive to the club-foot with which he had been born, left with a mother who displaced resentment against her absconded husband on to him, and with a Calvinist nurse whom he later said had early awakened his sexuality. In 1798 the fifth Baron Byron, ‘the wicked Lord’, died, and Byron unexpectedly inherited his title. Told that he was now the sixth Baron Byron of Rochdale, he asked his mother (according to his friend and memoirist Moore), ‘whether she could perceive any difference in him since he had been made a lord, as he perceived none himself’.13 Yet the difference, the more powerful for remaining elusive, helped to shape the poet.
Byron and his mother returned to England and moved into the debt-ridden Newstead Abbey, near Nottingham, the estate presented to the Byrons by Henry VIII in the sixteenth century. The profound impact made on the lonely boy by the Gothic hall and its embodiment of a tempestuous family heritage can be seen in his first poems. In 1801 Byron was sent to school at Harrow; in the same year he probably met Augusta Byron, his half-sister from his father’s first marriage. Byron entered Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1805 and embarked upon dissipations that threatened his health and obligated him to moneylenders, but he also made enduring friends, such as John Cam Hobhouse, later a prominent politician, who strengthened his interest in liberal Whiggism.
