by Byron
The poem’s popular sales were matched by controversial reviews, the chief issue being the elevation of the Corsair, a criminal and outlaw, to heroic status; Gulnare also proved disturbing. Related to the redefinition of the hero, another point of discussion was Byron’s heroic couplet (a verse form advertised in the Dedication); The Corsair is his first use of the measure for an extended romance tale. Jeffrey’s praise in the Edinburgh Review (April 1814) included admiration for Byron’s verse technique, but other reviewers protested both the impropriety of the heroic measure for this narrative and, more particularly, Byron’s indulgence of non-Augustan effects such as racy enjambment, unorthodox caesurae, and feminine and slant rhymes.
Criticism: Peter J. Manning, Byron and His Fictions, on psychological configurations, and ‘Hone-ing’ and ‘Tales and Politics’ (both in Reading Romantics) on political and social contexts; Jerome Christensen, Lord Byron’s Strength, on political power; Daniel P. Watkins, Social Relations in Byron’s Eastern Tales, on social structure; and Caroline Franklin, Byron’s Heroines, and Cheryl Fallon Giuliano, ‘Gulnare/ Kaled’s “Untold” Feminization’, on gender trouble; Susan Wolfson, Formal Charges, on the location of many of these issues in verse form.
Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte
Written, and published anonymously, in April 1814; Byron’s name appeared in the tenth edition (also 1814).
The allies entered Paris at the end of March 1814 and forced Napoleon’s abdication. The decision of the heroic figure, in whom he saw himself and with whom he was paired in the popular imagination, to capitulate rather than nobly to commit suicide left Byron ‘utterly bewildered and confounded’ (BLJ, Vol. 3, p. 256); he could not know that on 12 April, two days after he composed his first draft, Napoleon did attempt to poison himself. Byron’s disappointment issues in the flood of comparisons: the Greek athlete Milo (1.46); Sulla, who resigned in 79 BC after a cruel dictatorship (1. 55); Charles V, who abdicated in 1556 (1. 64); Dionysius, who fell from tyrant of Syracuse to schoolteacher at Corinth (1. 125); Tamerlane, who confined the captive King Bajazet in a cage (1. 127); Nebuchadnezzar (1. 131); Prometheus (1. 136); Othello, echoed in 1. 142 (Othello IV.i.70); Cincinnatus, the Roman general who returned from triumph to his farm (1. 68). The first motto, from Juvenal’s Satire X, underscores the decay of glory: ‘Produce the urn that Hannibal contains,/And weigh the mighty dust which yet remains:/AND IS THIS ALL!’ (11. 147–8; translated by William Gifford). Stanza V first appeared in the third edition; stanzas XVII—XIX were written in response to Murray’s plea to lengthen the poem to avoid the tax on pamphlets of less than a sheet; Byron did not like these stanzas ‘at all — and they had better be left out’ (BLJ, Vol. 4, p. 107). They did not appear in any of the lifetime editions; despite the violation of Byron’s intentions, their inclusion in the 1832 Works, our base text, governed all subsequent versions of the poem until CPW (see Vol. 3, p. 456).
Stanzas for Music
Written May(?) 1814; published in Fugitive Pieces and Reminiscences of Lord Byron, by Isaac Nathan, containing a new edition of Hebrew Melodies (1829).
‘Thou hast asked me for a song,’ Byron wrote to Thomas Moore on 4 May 1814, ‘and I enclose you an experiment, which has cost me something more than trouble’ (BLJ, Vol. 4, p. 114). Annabella reported in 1817 that Augusta acknowledged herself the subject; Byron gave Nathan permission to publish on the condition that the poem be dated ‘more than two years previously to his marriage’, which Nathan did, adding a protest against ‘calumniators’ who ‘distorted’ Byro’s ‘amatory’ pieces by applying them ‘to the lamented circumstances of his later life’ (Fugitive Pieces, p. 65).
She walks in beauty
Written June 1814; published in Hebrew Melodies (1815).
The subject is Anne Wilmot, the wife of Byron’s first cousin, whom he had seen at a party wearing ‘mourning, with dark spangles on her dress’. Hebrew Melodies was initiated by the Jewish composer Isaac Nathan, and brought out by him in April 1815, in a large folio, with music, priced at a guinea. The volume responded to the vogue for national songs, such as Thomas Moore’s Irish Melodies (1807; many successive editions), and sold 10,000 copies; Murray brought out an edition without music in June. As this poem, placed first, suggests, the collection does not consist solely of biblical lyrics.
Criticism: On the date of composition and Byron’s relations with his cousin, see Noel McLachlan, ‘She Walks in Beauty: Some Byron Mysteries’; on the Hebrew Melodies generally, see T.L. Ashton’s monograph, Byron s Hebrew Melodies, and Frederick Burwick and Paul Douglass’s edition (with music), A Selection of Hebrew Melodies, Ancient and Modern.
LARA: A Tale
Written quickly, May-June 1814; published anonymously August, with Samuel Rogers’s Jacqueline.
The Advertisement prefixed to the first three editions invited a regard of this tale ‘as a sequel’ to The Corsair, proposing affinities in ‘the hero’s character, the turn of his adventures, and the general outline and colouring of the story’ (CPW, Vol. 3, p. 453). The coyness notwithstanding, everyone took the poem to be Byron’s. Not only were there obvious parallels of verse form (heroic couplets) and character – Conrad seemed legible in Lara (returned after a long, mysterious absence) and Gulnare in his disguised page, Kaled – but the extensive set-piece description of Lara in Canto I (stanzas II—VIII; XVI-XIX) even more elaborately delineated the Byronic hero, a portrait that became one of the poem’s most popular passages. Though not matching The Corsair’s, sales were impressive: three editions in 1814 of about 7,000 copies, and a fourth, now under Byron’s name, of about 3,000. Even so, Byron and Murray were disappointed by the relative falling-off. In spring 1815, Byron told Leigh Hunt, ‘I fear you stand almost single in your liking of “Lara” – it is… my last & most unpopular effervescence’; he surmised that the tale had ‘too little narrative – and [was] too metaphysical to please the greater number of readers’ (BLJ, Vol. 4, p. 295).
Criticism: Peter J. Manning, Byron and His Fictions, on psychological configurations; Jerome Christensen, Lord Byron’s Strength, on political power; Daniel P. Watkins, Social Relations in Byron’s Eastern Tales, on social structure; and Caroline Franklin, Byron’s Heroines, and Cheryl Fallon Giuliano, ‘Gulnare/Kaled’s “Untold” Feminization’, on gender.
The Destruction of Sennacherib
Written February 1815; published in Hebrew Melodies (1815).
The biblical sources are 2 Kings 19 and Isaiah 37. Sennacherib may by analogy figure Napoleon, but without topical reference the poem’s captivating anapestic rhythms have secured its place in anthologies. For criticism see note to ‘She walks in beauty’.
Napoleon’s Farewell (From the French)
Written, and published anonymously in the Examiner, July 1815; reprinted in Poems (1816).
Not the translation that the subtitle feigns, the poem obtained wide circulation when William Hone included it in his pirated edition of Byron, Poems on His Domestic Circumstances (1816), for which see note to ‘Fare thee well!’.
From the French (‘Must thou go, my glorious Chief’)
Written 1815; first published in Poems (1816). Not a translation.
The two notes are taken from letters to Byron from John Cam Hobhouse, then in Paris.
THE SIEGE OF CORINTH
Composed, with difficulty, at various points between autumn 1813 and autumn 1815; published with Parisina 13 February 1816. Lines 1–45, here separately numbered, were written in 1813 but first published in Moore’s Life (1830) and first included in the poem in the 1832 Works.
The first edition of 6,000 was followed by two others in 1816, but the poem was severely reviewed for the nihilism of the last stanza and for some ghoulish passages, especially the canine ‘carnival’ (11. 409–33). Byron’s Advertisement sets out the historical co-ordinates: the end of a long competition between the Venetian and Ottoman Empires for the control of Peloponnesus. Byron alters the history to make the explosion of the magazine a sabotage by the Venetian Governor
, Minotti, that destroys everyone. The oedipal contest at the centre of the tale – the love of Alp, a Venetian turned renegade to the Muslims, for Francesca, the daughter of Minotti, who had opposed the match – is also his invention. The nervous note about Christabel in reference to the last twelve lines of stanza XIX recognizes a debt to I.43–8 of Coleridge’s poem, which had been circulating in manuscript for over a decade. When Byron realized the influence, he wrote to Coleridge, attached a note of excuse to the 1816 edition, and subsequently helped Coleridge get Christabel published by Murray in 1816(BLJ, Vol.4, p.321).
Criticism: Peter J. Manning, Byron and His Fictions, on psychological configurations; and Caroline Franklin, Byron s Heroines, on Francesca and gender ideology.
When we two parted
Written and published as a song-sheet in 1815; republished in Poems (1816).
In Poems Byron dated the poem 1808, thus screening its subject, Lady Frances Wedderburn Webster, with whom he had a brief ‘platonic’ affair in 1813, and whose current affair with the Duke of Wellington raised London gossip in 1815. A cancelled stanza –
Then – fare thee well – Fanny –
Now doubly undone –
To prove false unto many –
As faithless to One –
Thou art past all recalling
Even would I recall
For the woman once falling
Forever must fall.
— drew on lines Byron had written in 1812 about Lady Caroline Lamb, casting the two women together in his self-mythologizing erotic drama (BLJ Vol. 10, p. 198; see CPW, Vol. 3, pp. 475–6).
Criticism: Jerome J. McGann, ‘The Significance of Biographical Context’.
Fare thee well!
Written March 1816; printed in an edition of fifty copies for private circulation; published without authorization in the Champion, 14 April 1816, and widely pirated thereafter. The poem was included in Poems (1816), for which Byron added the epigraph from Coleridge’s Christabel (11. 408–13, 419–26).
The preliminary separation agreement between Byron and his wife was signed on 17 March; Byron drafted the poem the next day and sent a copy to her in the next few weeks with a mollifying letter (BLJ, Vol. 5, pp. 51-2). The reprinting of the poem in the Champion marked a reprisal against Byron, as a prominent Whig critic of the Regent’s morality now himself tainted with scandal. The coupling of Byron’s poems on Napoleon with those on his domestic circumstances in the pirated editions emphasizes the inseparability of the personal and the political, but the dissemination of the poems also served Byron’s attempts to shape public opinion in the scandal of the separation.
Criticism: David Erdman, ‘ “Fare thee well!” – Byron’s Last Days in England’, on the political context; and Paul W. Elledge, ‘Talented Equivocation’, on Byron’s treatment of separation.
Prometheus
Written in Switzerland July or August 1816; published with The Prisoner of Chillon (1816).
‘Of the Prometheus of Æschylus I was passionately fond as a boy,’
Byron wrote; ‘[it] has always been so much in my head – that I can easily conceive its influence over all or anything that I have written’ (BLJ, Vol. 5, p. 268); he included in Hours of Idleness a translation of some lines done at Harrow.
Criticism: John Clubbe, ‘The New Prometheus of New Men’, on the biographical background of the Swiss poems and the evolution of Byron’s treatment of this cardinal Romantic figure.
THE PRISONER OF CHILLON: A Fable and Sonnet on Chillon
Written 1816 and published 5 December by Murray in a slender volume, The Prisoner of Chillon and Other Poems, which Murray advertised in advance to capitalize on the success of Childe Harold III, published 18 November. He sold out the first edition of 6,000 at a booksellers’ dinner at which he also marketed Childe Harold III. Scott reviewed both volumes favourably in the February 1817 issue of the Quarterly Review (also published by Murray).
In June 1816, Byron and Shelley visited the Castle of Chillon on Lake Geneva, in whose dungeons had been chained political prisoners for years on end, often for life sentences. ‘These prisons are excavated below the lake… Close to the very walls, the lake is 800 feet deep,’ Shelley wrote to Peacock (12 July 1816). The verse tale, composed within the week, is cast as the dramatic monologue of François Bonnivard, who was imprisoned for six years (1530–36). The sonnet was written later and prefixed, so Byron’s last note indicates, to ‘dignify’ the account of wretched suffering with a celebration of the ‘courage and virtues’ of the political prisoner. With this signal, the pair of poems became widely admired for their expression of defiant spiritual resistance to the tyranny described by Shelley’s letter:
At the commencement of the Reformation, and indeed long after that period, this dungeon was the receptacle of those who shook, or who denied the system of idolatry, from the effects of which mankind is even now slowly emerging… I never saw a monument more terrible of that cold and inhuman tyranny, which it has been the delight of man to exercise over man.
Even so, the sonnet’s stirring anthem remains at odds with the tale’s concentration on the prisoner’s suffering and despair: his last sentence, ‘I/ Regain’d my freedom with a sigh’ is in an entirely different key from the sonnet’s famous first line, ‘Eternal Spirit of the chainless Mind!’
Criticism: Jerome J. McGann, Fiery Dust, on the thematic relations to Childe Harold III; and Andrew Rutherford, Byron: A Critical Study, on dramatic power.
Darkness
Written in Switzerland in July or August 1816; published with The Prisoner of Chillon (1816).
Criticism: Scott, reviewing The Prisoner of Chillon volume in the Quarterly Review, complained that in ‘Darkness’ Byron ‘contented himself with presenting a mass of powerful ideas unarranged, and the meaning of which it is not easy to attain’ (October 1816). On the despair of the poem see Robert F. Gleckner, Byron and the Ruins of Paradise; on the popularity in Byron’s day of such apocalyptic visions and on Byron’s sources, see R.J. Dingley, ‘ “I had a dream…”: Byron’s “Darkness” ’.
CHILDE HAROLD’S PILGRIMAGE:
A Romaunt, Canto III
Written 25 April-4 July 1816; published 18 November 1816.
Byron departed from England on 25 April 1816, and the opening stanzas were written while he was still ‘at Sea’, on the crossing from Dover to Ostend. The melancholy that Harold, the ‘wandering outlaw of his own dark mind’ (1. 20), had embodied in 1809 was repeated in the scandal of the separation. Byron’s daughter Augusta Ada had been born 10 December 1815; Annabella took the unweaned infant with her when she left Byron on 15 January 1816, and he never saw her again (11. 1–4; 1067–102). For the biographical details of the period of composition see note to Manfred; the sublime mode of the poem excluded the range of Byron’s actual moods. His physician, John Polidori, reported that at Ostend ‘Byron fell like a thunderbolt upon the chambermaid’ (Leslie A. Marchand, Byron: A Biography, Vol. 2, p. 610), and he replied to Thomas Moore’s praise of the ‘magnificence’ of the canto by commenting:
I am glad you like it; it is a fine indistinct piece of poetical desolation, and my favourite. I was half mad during the time of its composition, between metaphysics, mountains, lakes, love unextinguishable, thoughts unutterable, and the nightmare of my own delinquencies. I should, many a good day, have blown my brains out, but for the recollection that it would have given pleasure to my mother-in-law; and, even then, if I could have been certain to haunt her – but I won’t dwell upon these trifling family matters. (BLJ, Vol. 5, p. 165)
In Stanzas from the Grand Chartreuse (1855) Matthew Arnold asked,
What helps it now, that Byron bore,
With haughty scorn which mock’d the smart,
Through Europe to the Aetolian shore
The pageant of his bleeding heart?
That thousands quoted every groan,
And Europe made his woe their own? (ll. 133–8)
but in Childe Harold personal experien
ce becomes the register of an era. Byron folded self-reflection into the meditation on Napoleon (ll. 316–78); he was travelling in a replica of Napoleon’s carriage and, having taken the additional surname ‘Noe’ on his marriage, was ‘delighted’, as Leigh Hunt observed, ‘to sign himself N.B.; “because,” said he, “Bonaparte and I are the only public persons whose initials are the same” ’ (quoted in BLJ, Vol. 9, note to p. 171). Byron visited Waterloo, the site of Napoleon’s final defeat (18 June 1815) on 4 May 1816, and his stanzas on the battle and the ball given by the Duchess of Richmond the night before, from the dramatic command – ‘Stop! - for thy tread is on an Empire’s dust!’ - to the elegy for the slain ‘thousands’ represented by ‘young, gallant Howard’ (Byron’s cousin Frederick Howard, son of the Earl of Carlisle, his guardian, satirized in English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (ll. 681–96)) memorialized the events for a generation (ll. 145–405).
Self-analysis and social commentary merge also in the figures of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who appears as the author of the Confessions (posthumously published 1782—9) and of the novel Julie, ou la Nouvelle Héloise (1761) (ll. 725–69), set at Clarens on Lake Geneva (ll. 923–76), as well as a critical thinker whose work, like that of Voltaire, paired with Gibbon, author of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776—88), hastened the French Revolution (ll. 977–1003). Against the costs of ambition and conquest Byron sets the examples of François Marceau, who died defending the French Republic against the Austrians (ll. 536—53), of Morat, where in 1476 the Swiss repulsed the invading Burgundian army (ll. 601-16), and of Julia Alpinula, who, according to a first-century AD legend, died after a futile effort to save her father from execution by the Romans (ll. 626—34). Her role parallels that of Ada, and epitomizes the idealized function of the feminine in the canto.
Byron recurrently opposes to masculine will and warfare (‘rotting from sire to son’) the world of nature; he told Medwin that ‘Shelley, when I was in Switzerland, used to dose me with Wordsworth physic even to nausea’ (Thomas Medwin, Conversations of Lord Byron, p. 194), and Childe Harold III may be seen as testing both Shelleyan ideal love and Wordsworthian nature. Wordsworth enviously insisted that ‘the whole third canto of Childe Harold founded on his style and sentiments - the feeling of natural objects, which is there expressed not caught by B. from Nature herself but from him, Wordsworth, and spoiled in the transmission — Tintern Abbey the source of it all’ (Thomas Moore, Letters and Journals of Lord Byron, Vol. 1, p. 355). Byron’s Titanism, as in the echoes of Coriolanus at 11. 1049–55 (Coriolanus III.i. 66–7), plays against the prescribed cure. Jeffrey noted that the poem displayed ‘the same stern and lofty disdain of mankind’ as Byron’s previous works, ‘but mixed… with deeper and more matured reflections, and a more intense sensibility to all that is grand and lovely in the external world’ (Edinburgh Review, December 1816). Murray paid £2,000 for Childe Harold III and The Prisoner of Chillon; he published the former on 18 November 1817, and on 13 December told Byron that he had sold 7,000 copies of each to the booksellers (Samuel Smiles, A Publisher and His Friends, Vol. 1, p. 369).