This is the fourteenth of a series of essays meant to
introduce (or re-introduce) non-scholarly readers to the work of important
poets. In Every Reader’s Poets I limit my focus to the discussion of only a few
of each writer’s best-known works while providing a bit of context and
biography, eschewing most byways and all footnotes. A general introduction “Why
Read Poetry?” is also posted on this site.
Byron was doubtless
the best-known poet of his age, a celebrity widely admired and excoriated for
his life and opinions as well as for his work.
The young aristocrat had very much the reputation of a bad boy rock star
in which extravagant adulation for his work mixed with attacks on his morals
and his lack of religion. His detractors
had plenty to criticize. Byron seems to
have felt lustful toward most anything on two legs: women, men, other people’s
lovers, his own half-sister, he pursued them all. A habitual critic of organized religion, he
expressed sentiments that sound pantheistic at times, while more often savoring
of the intellectual Deism common in his day.
Still, the poet remained haunted by concepts of original sin and
predestination that he had imbibed when young.
Byron wrote a
great deal. The 1833 collected works
amounted to seventeen volumes. Today, apart
from a handful of brief love lyrics, his work is neglected. In his day not only did poetry sell well,
readers enjoyed long verse narratives and closet dramas as much as they did
novels. Byron wrote a good many such
substantial pieces. The defiant,
rebellious antiheroes of works like Cain and Manfred which once
seemed exciting and outrageous still find readers who value what they believe
they see of their author in them. Though
Byron’s version of Don Juan is hilarious, dazzling with wit and verbal
inventiveness, a work more liable to the charge of frivolity than that of
pedantry, most of its readers are Ph. D. candidates.
One of the most
familiar of the short and rather conventional love poems popular in Byron‘s day
and now is “She Walks in Beauty” the enduring appeal of which is suggested by
the fact that a sung version is included in Marianne Faithfull’s forthcoming
album.
She walks in beauty like the night Of cloudless climes and starry skies, And all that's best of dark and bright Meet in her aspect and her eyes; Thus mellowed to the tender light Which heaven to gaudy day denies. One ray the more, one shade the less Had half impaired the nameless grace Which waves in every raven tress Or softly lightens o'er her face, Where thoughts serenely sweet express How pure, how dear their dwelling place. And on that cheek and o'er that brow So soft, so calm yet eloquent, The smiles that win, the tints that glow But tell of days in goodness spent A mind at peace with all below, A heart whose love is innocent. |
Using a folksy, informal iambic tetrameter
line and a reassuring ababab rhyme scheme, Byron opens with a clever and
memorable statement, the stronger for its simplicity and so slightly odd that
the reader is charmed without knowing just why.
The lady is not said to be beautiful; rather she “walks in beauty,”
somewhat like the glow of pure excellence of a divine apparition in Homer or a
Victorian spiritualist’s aura.
While using a simple and comfortable form,
Byron still teases conventional expectations.
The woman he praises does not, as in earlier poets, possess a dazzling
radiance, so bright and sunlike as to cause the other stars to vanish. The poet is an aesthete and appreciates
subtlety. His ideal represents a perfect
chiaroscuro, mixing darkness and light in exquisitely designed proportions, far
superior to the glare of “gaudy” daytime.
The conceit is well-accommodated to his
subject as she, contrary to some narrow notions of British beauty, is
dark-haired, with “raven tress.” He is
naturally moved to such ingenuity by her “nameless grace,” which, being
ineffable, requires a figure of speech.
With a kind of Platonic afflatus at the end of the second stanza, he
generalizes her perfect physical beauty into moral excellence. She is exceedingly “pure,” a literal
desideratum for females, all the more perhaps when their masculine admirers
feel themselves somewhat corrupt.
The final stanza reinforces the
point. Her smile, her “tint,” her very
being testify to her virtue, her “days in good ness spent.” With an immaculate conscience, she must be “at
peace with all below” because she possesses “a heart whose love is innocent.” Surely Byron is here projecting a
self-portrait in negative. The author
was, the reader knows, vulnerable to attacks on his sexual morality and very
likely experienced mental turmoil arising from a less than innocent love. He expresses here a dream of an uplifting
affection through which one might hope to improve oneself. The lady in question, biographers tell us, was
his cousin’s wife Anne Beatrix Wilmot, and she may have been a woman he did not
try to seduce.
Like other
popular poets such as Amy Lowell, Dylan Thomas, and Allen Ginsberg, Byron was
known as much for his public persona as for his writing. After the publication in 1812 of the first
two cantos of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, the poet said, "I awoke
one morning and found myself famous."
Readers celebrated Byron as a poet who spoke his heart’s truth directly and,
as the poem described a journey which in part resembled Byron’s recent travels,
most conflated the author and his hero.
Both were considered dissolute, guilty, passionate, and rebellious, and
dangerously beautiful. The opening
stanzas offer not the best poetry on the work, but the clearest portrait of the
“Byronic hero.”
The poem was written in the elaborate
Spenserian form using the archaic language that had been obsolete even for
Spenser and had been favored by eighteenth century writers. In his peculiar archaizing language though with
a very modern irony he notes that Harold “ne in virtue's ways did take
delight,” but was rather “sore given to revel and ungodly glee.” His family, though noble had, like Byron’s
own, something of a bad reputation. His
dissipation leads, however, to world-weariness.
Worse than adversity the Childe befell;
He felt the fulness of satiety:
Then loathed he in his native land to dwell,
Which seem'd to him more lone than Eremite's sad cell.
Though Harold “through Sin's long
labyrinth had run,” he feels nonetheless an honorable attachment toward a woman
too pure for him. Since their marriage
is impossible due to his inconstancy, he considers “calm domestic peace” to be
unavailable to such as him, causing him to settle for “vulgar bliss” in more
common arms.
Though libertine, he feels so sensitively
the loss of this ideal wife that he finds himself “sore sick at heart” to the
point of suicidal ideation.
And from his native land resolv'd to go,
And visit scorching climes beyond the sea;
With pleasure drugg'd, he almost long'd for woe,
And e'en for change of scene would seek the shades below.
Byron’s own case was but little
different. He had several years earlier
taken the Grand Tour of Europe customary for upper class youth but in 1816,
driven into a sort of exile by a combination of adventurous restless
instability and public disapproval of his morals following a scandalous divorce,
ending with his death in Greece where he had joined the revolt against the
Ottoman overlords. The poem abounds in
travelogue details and political reflections, but occasionally, as in the following
three stanzas, pauses for philosophic reflection.
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.
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.
CLXXX.
His steps are not upon thy paths,—thy fields
Are not a spoil for him,—thou dost arise
And shake him from thee; the vile strength he wields
For earth's destruction thou dost all despise,
Spurning him from thy bosom to the skies,
And send'st him, shivering in thy playful spray
And howling, to his gods, where haply lies
His petty hope in some near port or bay,
And dashest him again to earth:—there let him lay.
Harold and his writer and his reader here
contemplate the void, figured in nature and most emphatically in the ocean.
While recognizing the indifference of the cosmos, imagining death as a shipwreck
and drowning at sea, he calls out an affirmation: “Roll on!” The spirit as in ancient tragedy has its
victory not in turning suffering aside, but in maintaining one’s composure in
accepting it. Human life is momentary
before each sinks to the ocean depths “with a bubbling groan.” We end all alike “without a grave, unknelled,
uncoffined, and unknown.” This is looking
at the terms of life straight on, a kind of early nineteenth century
Existentialism, oddly thrilling to the poem’s original audience.
The tone of Don Juan, a wonderful
poem to read aloud, is clear at the start.
Byron satirically dedicated the poem to Robert Southey, the same Poet Laureate
Lewis Carroll was later to ridicule.
III
Here a footnote is useful. Vergil’s Eclogue II begins Formosum pastor Corydon ardebat Alexim (Corydon, the shepherd, was aflame for the fair Alexis), a line not only erotic but homoerotic. The fun of the passage is Byron’s quite justified irony in pointing out that Classical literature, given its privileged position in the education of the English ruling class (who would have known Vergil’s poem), was considerably less moralistic than the Established Church of the poet’s day. The very literature that people regarded as uplifting, civilizing, and refined in fact openly promoted sexual pleasures of a shocking variety. (I recall the old Loeb Library editions of Greek poetry with facing English translations. When the content required censorship, the English would become Latin, as though one who could adequately read the Latin was probably highly enough educated to be trusted in reading a smutty joke.)
Another short piece might be described not as a love poem, but as an anti-love poem. It was originally contained in a letter to Thomas Moore which describes the occasion of its writing.
At present, I am on the invalid regimen myself. The
Carnival--that is, the latter part of it, and sitting up late o' nights--had
knocked me up a little. But it is over--and it is now Lent, with all its
abstinence and sacred music... Though I did not dissipate much upon the whole,
yet I find “the sword wearing out the scabbard,” though I have just turned the
corner of twenty-nine.
Whether from world-weariness, ennui, or a recurring hangover, the poet is not inclined to carouse. His body has been abused by intemperance in both drink and sex during Carnival; he must rest.
So, we’ll go no more a roving
So late into the night,
Though the heart be still as loving,
And the moon be still as bright.
For the sword outwears its sheath,
And the soul wears out the breast,
And the heart must pause to breathe,
And love itself have rest.
Though the night was made for loving,
And the day returns too soon,
Yet we’ll go no more a roving
By the light of the moon.
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