by Byron
Pye come again? No more – no more of that!’
XCIII
The tumult grew; an universal cough
Convulsed the skies, as during a debate,
When Castlereagh has been up long enough
740
(Before he was first minister of state,
I mean — the slaves hear now); some cried ‘Off, off!’
As at a farce; till, grown quite desperate,
The bard Saint Peter pray’d to interpose
(Himself an author) only for his prose.
XCIV
745
The varlet was not an ill-favour’d knave;
A good deal like a vulture in the face,
With a hook nose and a hawk’s eye, which gave
A smart and sharper-looking sort of grace
To his whole aspect, which, though rather grave,
750
Was by no means so ugly as his case;
But that indeed was hopeless as can be,
Quite a poetic felony ‘de se.’
XCV
Then Michael blew his trump, and still’d the noise
With one still greater, as is yet the mode
755
On earth besides; except some grumbling voice,
Which now and then will make a slight inroad
Upon decorous silence, few will twice
Lift up their lungs when fairly overcrow’d;
And now the bard could plead his own bad cause,
760
With all the attitudes of self-applause.
XCVI
He said – (I only give the heads) – he said,
He meant no harm in scribbling; ’twas his way
Upon all topics; ’twas, besides, his bread,
Of which he butter’d both sides; ’twould delay
765
Too long the assembly (he was pleased to dread),
And take up rather more time than a day,
To name his works – he would but cite a few –
‘Wat Tyler’ — ‘Rhymes on Blenheim’ — ‘Waterloo.’
XCVII
He had written praises of a regicide;
770
He had written praises of all kings whatever;
He had written for republics far and wide,
And then against them bitterer than ever:
For pantisocracy he once had cried
Aloud, a scheme less moral than ’twas clever;
775
Then grew a hearty anti-jacobin –
Had turn’d his coat – and would have turn’d his skin.
XCVIII
He had sung against all battles, and again
In their high praise and glory; he had call’d
Reviewing1 ‘the ungentle craft,’ and then
780
Become as base a critic as e’er crawl’d —
Fed, paid, and pamper’d by the very men
By whom his muse and morals has been maul’d:
He had written much blank verse, and blanker prose,
And more of both than any body knows.
XCIX
785
He had written Wesley’s life: – here turning round
To Satan, ‘Sir, I’ m ready to write yours,
In two octavo volumes, nicely bound,
With notes and preface, all that most allures
The pious purchaser; and there’s no ground
790
For fear, for I can choose my own reviewers:
So let me have the proper documents,
That I may add you to my other saints.’
C
Satan bow’d, and was silent. ‘Well, if you,
With amiable modesty, decline
795
My offer, what says Michael? There are few
Whose memoirs could be render’d more divine.
Mine is a pen of all work; not so new
As it was once, but I would make you shine
Like your own trumpet. By the way, my own
800
Has more of brass in it, and is as well blown.
CI
‘But talking about trumpets, here’s my Vision!
Now you shall judge, all people; yes, you shall
Judge with my judgment, and by my decision
Be guided who shall enter heaven or fall.
805
I settle all these things by intuition,
Times present, past, to come, heaven, hell, and all,
Like King Alfonso.1 When I thus see double,
I save the Deity some worlds of trouble.’
CII
He ceased, and drew forth an MS.; and no
810
Persuasion on the part of devils, or saints,
Or angels, now could stop the torrent; so
He read the first three lines of the contents;
But at the fourth, the whole spiritual show
Had vanish’d, with variety of scents,
815
Ambrosial and sulphureous, as they sprang,
Like lightning, off from his ‘melodious twang.’2
CIII
Those grand heroics acted as a spell;
The angels stopp’d their ears and plied their pinions;
The devils ran howling, deafen’d, down to hell;
820
The ghosts fled, gibbering, for their own dominions –
(For ’tis not yet decided where they dwell,
And I leave every man to his opinions);
Michael took refuge in his trump – but, lo!
His teeth were set on edge, he could not blow!
CIV
825
Saint Peter, who has hitherto been known
For an impetuous saint, upraised his keys,
And at the fifth line knock’d the poet down;
Who fell like Phaeton, but more at ease,
Into his lake, for there he did not drown;
830
A different web being by the Destinies
Woven for the Laureate’s final wreath, whene’er
Reform shall happen either here or there.
CV
He first sank to the bottom — like his works,
But soon rose to the surface – like himself;
835
For all corrupted things are buoy’d like corks,1
By their own rottenness, light as an elf,
Or wisp that flits o’er a morass: he lurks,
It may be, still, like dull books on a shelf,
In his own den, to scrawl some ‘Life’ or ‘Vision,’
840
As Welborn says – ‘the devil turn’d precisian.’
CVI
As for the rest, to come to the conclusion
Of this true dream, the telescope is gone
Which kept my optics free from all delusion,
And show’d me what I in my turn have shown;
845
All I saw farther, in the last confusion,
Was, that King George slipp’d into heaven for one;
And when the tumult dwindled to a calm,
I left him practising the hundredth psalm.
On This Day I Complete My Thirty-Sixth Year
Missolonghi, Jan. 22, 1824.
I
’Tis time this heart should be unmoved,
Since others it hath ceased to move:
Yet, though I cannot be beloved,
Still let me love!
II
5
My days are in the yellow leaf;
The flowers and fruits of love are gone;
The worm, the canker, and the grief
Are mine alone!
III
The fire that on my bosom preys
10
Is lone as some volcanic isle;
No torch is kindled at its blaze –
A funeral pile!
IV
The hope, the fear, the jealous care,
The exalted
portion of the pain
15
And power of love, I cannot share,
But wear the chain.
V
But ’tis not thus – and ’tis not here –
Such thoughts should shake my soul, nor now,
Where glory decks the hero’s bier,
20
Or binds his brow.
VI
The sword, the banner, and the field,
Glory and Greece, around me see!
The Spartan, borne upon his shield,
Was not more free.
VII
25
Awake! (not Greece – she is awake!)
Awake, my spirit! Think through whom
Thy life-blood tracks its parent lake,
And then strike home!
VIII
Tread those reviving passions down,
30
Unworthy manhood! — unto thee
Indifferent should the smile or frown
Of beauty be.
IX
If thou regret’st thy youth, why live?
The land of honourable death
35
Is here: – up to the field, and give
Away thy breath!
X
Seek out – less often sought than found –
A soldier’s grave, for thee the best;
Then look around, and choose thy ground,
40
And take thy rest.
NOTES
A Fragment (‘When, to their airy hall, my fathers’ voice’)
Written 1803; printed in Fugitive Pieces (1806); retained in Hours of Idleness (1807).
In this Ossianic ‘fragment’, as Byron called it, he invokes his noble ancestors as ground for a heroic destiny.
Criticism: Jerome J. McGann, Fiery Dust (‘Feeling as He Writes: The Genesis of the Myth’).
To Woman
Written 1805(?); printed in Fugitive Pieces (1806); retained in Hours of Idleness (1807).
In 1820 Byron wrote Thomas Moore that he ‘knew by heart in 1803’ Moore’s Poetical Works of the Late Thomas Little (1801): ‘I believe all the mischief I have ever done, or sung, has been owing to that confounded book of yours’ (BLJ, Vol. 7, p. 117). Moore’s erotic manner leaves traces throughout Byron’s early verse.
The Cornelian
Written 1805 or 1806; printed in Fugitive Pieces (1806); not republished in Hours of Idleness.
The cornelian was a gift from John Edleston, a Cambridge chorister about whom Byron wrote: ‘he has been my almost constant associate since October 1805, when I entered Trinity College… I certainly love him more than any human being’ (BLJ, Vol. 1, p. 124). Edward Noel Long and others knew that Edleston was the subject, but by late February 1807 Byron was urging Long keep this reference ‘a Secret’, adding that although ‘you & all the Girls, I know not why think [it] my best’, he omitted the work and ‘most of the amatory poems’ from Hours of Idleness (BLJ, Vol. 1, pp. 110, 118).
Criticism: Louis Crompton, Byron and Greek Love.
To Caroline (‘You say you love, and yet your eye’)
Written 1806(?); printed in Fugitive Pieces (1806); not republished in Hours of Idleness.
Objections among his Southwell circle to his amorous verses led Byron to drop this and other instances from his first public volume. See note to ‘To Woman’.
ENGLISH BARDS AND SCOTCH REVIEWERS: A Satire
Begun 1807; enlarged and recast 1808–9; published anonymously March 1809.
In 1807 Byron wrote a satire on ‘the poetry of the present Day’ titled British Bards; the condescending notice of Hours of Idleness in the Edinburgh Review (January 1808) goaded him to include the newly powerful critics, and deepened its tone from Horatian to Juvenalian, as the imitation announced in the note to the opening line indicates (‘What! while with one eternal mouthing hoarse, Codrus persists on my vex’d ear to forceHis Theseid, must I, to my fate resign’d/ Hear, ONLY hear, and never pay in kind?’; translated by William Gifford, 11. 1–4). A Whig and half-Scot himself, Byron had not expected scorn from the Whig Edinburgh Review; his title shows Byron positioning himself to draw on accumulated English prejudice against the Scots, a tactic also signalled by echoes of Charles Churchill, whose satire The Prophecy of Famine (1763) contributed to the campaign of his friend John Wilkes against the ministry of the Scots Lord Bute: for example, ‘Time was’ (1. 103), a recurrent marker in Churchil’s The Times (1764), and the echo of the repeated ‘Health to great Gloster’ of Churchill’s Dedication to the Sermons (1765) in Byron’s ‘Health to great Jeffrey!’ (1. 460; cf. 1. 438). Censure of the debased state of contemporary literature was conventional; The Baeviad (1794) and The Maeviad (1795), by William Gifford, attacking the English Della Cruscans, led by Robert Merry, were recent precursors (11. 94, 702–3, 741–64). Byron’s praise of Dryden, Pope and formally conservative contemporaries such as Thomas Campbell and Samuel Rogers (11. 799–818), and his reiterated disdain for ‘sons of song [who] descend to trade’ (1. 175) are attitudes that his later styles and commercial success complicated. Some targets remained lifelong: Byron savaged Robert Southey in the Dedication to Don Juan, which also mocks William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and he parodied Southey’s Vision of Judgement (1821) in The Vision of Judgment (1822) (11. 202–34, 235–54, 255–64); William Lisle Bowles, whose sonnets of ‘sympathy’ (11. 327–62) and 1806 edition of Pope Byron excoriates (11. 363–84), further denigrated Pope in his Invariable Principles of Poetry (1819), sparking Byron to answer in two long essays (see CMP, pp. 120–83). The vigorous defence of traditional taste, carried in verse and notes, against ‘romantic’ tendencies ensured the poem’s popularity: the first edition of 1,000 copies sold out; a second edition, augmented, with a Preface and bearing Byron’s name, appeared in May 1809 and also sold out; by 1811 the poem had reached a fourth edition. Other dismissals were altered by experience: the satire, Byron later told Coleridge, ’was written when I was very young and very angry, and has been a thorn in my side ever since; more particularly as almost all the persons animadverted upon became subsequently my acquaintances, and some of them my friends’ (BLJ, Vol. 4, p. 286): Lord and Lady Holland and Holland House formed the centre of the Whig society Byron joined after his début in Parliament (11. 519, 540–59); M.G. Lewis, author of The Monk (1796) and Tales of Terror (1801) (11. 148, 265–82, 919) became a friend, as did Walter Scott (11. 153–84) and Thomas Moore (‘Thomas Little’; see note to ‘To Woman’) (11. 128, 283–94). Byron’s assault on the editor of the Edinburgh Review, Francis Jeffrey, whose 1806 duel with Moore he burlesques (11. 464 ff.) and whom he compares to the notorious judge of the ‘Bloody Assizes’ of 1685, George Jefferies (11. 438–59), was motivated by the belief that the notice of Hours of Idleness was his; it was rather written by Henry Brougham (1. 524), and Jeffrey later welcomed Byron’s Eastern Tales in the Edinburgh Review. Largely at Hollands request, Byron suppressed the printed but not published fifth edition in 1812; ‘it is not in print for sale – nor ever will be – (if I can help it) – again’ (BLJ, Vol. 4, p. 318), he declared in 1815, but pirated versions continued to appear.
Epigraphs: I Henry IV, III.1.128–9; Essay on Criticism (11. 610—11).
Criticism: on the provocation of the Edinburgh Review by Byron’s self-presentation in Hours of Idleness as ‘Lord Byron, A Minor’, see Kurt Heinzelman, ‘Byron’s Poetry of Politics’.
Lines to Mr Hodgson (Written on Board the Lisbon Packet)
Written 30 June 1809; published in Moore’s Life (1830).
Byron sailed for Lisbon on 2 July; this jeu d’esprit, sent to Francis Hodgson two days earlier, shows that Byron’s Childle Harold mood was not his only one.
Maid of Athens, ere we part
Written 9 February 1810; published with Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage I-II (1812).
Addressed to the twelve-year-old daughter of Byron’s landlady at Athens. Byron described himself as ‘dying for love’ of the three Macri sisters, ‘div
inities all of them under 15’, but their mother viewed the attentions of the English lord more interestedly (BLJ, Vol. 1, p. 240). She was ‘mad enough to imagine I was going to marry the girl’, he reported; ‘I was near bringing away Theresa but the mother asked 30,000 piastres!’ (BLJ, Vol. 2, pp. 13, 46). Byron wrote of the Greek refrain (Zoë mou, sas agapo),
a Romaic expression of tenderness: if I translate it, I shall affront the gentlemen, as it may seem I supposed they could not; and if I do not I may affront the ladies. For fear of any misconstruction on the part of the latter I shall do so, begging pardon of the learned. It means, ‘My Life, I love you!’
Written after Swimming from Sestos to Abydos
Written 9 May 1810; published with Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage I—II (1812).
The poem records Byron’s re-enactment of the exploit, made famous by Ovid (Books XVIII and XIX of the Heroides); Musaeus, an Alexandrian poet of the fifth century AD, whose epyllion was translated by George Chapman in 1616; and the Hero and Leander of Christopher Marlowe and Chapman (1598). See Leslie A. Marchand, Byron: A Biography, Vol. 1, pp. 236–9).
To Thyrza (‘Without a stone to mark the spot’)
Dated 11 October 1811; published with Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage I-II (1812).
The first of a series of elegies for John Edleston, of whose death in May Byron had just heard. Moore maintained in his biography of Byron that Thyrza was ‘imaginary’; others assumed from the feminine name that the subject was a woman, an impression in which Byron colluded. Compare Childe Harold II.73–81, 891–9. See note to ‘The Cornelian’.
Criticism: Louis Crompton, Byron and Greek Love.
CHILDE HAROLD’S PILGRIMAGE:
A Romaunt, Cantos I—II
Written from 31 October 1809 to 28 March 1810; published 10 March 1812.
Byron’s travels in 1809—11 provided the materials for this poem, one largely written, as the Preface declares, ‘amidst the scenes which it attempts to describe’. Byron left England for Portugal and Spain on 2 July 1809, accompanied by his friend from Cambridge, John Cam Hobhouse, his valet William Fletcher (I.158), the young son of one of his Newstead tenants, Robert Rushton (1.134) and an old servant, Joe Murray. The itinerary was partly determined by the wartime closing of the Continent, though the Iberian Peninsula too had been invaded by Napoleon in 1807, where local resistance was augmented by a British expeditionary force. On 4 July the party reached Gibraltar, whence Murray and Rushton returned to England; the others proceeded on 19 August to Malta, where Byron had a brief affair with Constance Spencer Smith (II.264–97). They arrived in Albania on 28 September, journeying to Janina and Tepelini, where they met Ali Pasha (II.554), the fierce local overlord, and Byron began the poem. From Christmas until March their centre was Athens. In spring 1810 they sailed to Smyrna, and visited Ephesus and the plains of Troy; on 13 May they arrived in Constantinople, returning to Greece on 17 July. Hobhouse then departed for England, and Byron settled in Athens until 21 April, when he returned to England by way of a month’s stay in Malta, landing at Portsmouth on 11 July 1811.