Lord Byron - Delphi Poets Series

by Lord Byron

  And this too was I born to bear!

  ‘Tis true, that, like that bird of prey,

  With havock have I marked my way:

  But this was taught me by the dove,

  To die — and know no second love.

  This lesson yet hath man to learn,

  Taught by the thing he dares to spurn:

  The bird that sings within the brake,

  The swan that swims upon the lake, 1170

  One mate, and one alone, will take.

  And let the fool still prone to range,

  And sneer on all who cannot change,

  Partake his jest with boasting boys;

  I envy not his varied joys,

  But deem such feeble, heartless man,

  Less than yon solitary swan;

  Far, far beneath the shallow maid

  He left believing and betrayed.

  Such shame at least was never mine — 1180

  Leila! each thought was only thine!

  My good, my guilt, my weal, my woe,

  My hope on high — my all below.

  Each holds no other like to thee,

  Or, if it doth, in vain for me:

  For worlds I dare not view the dame

  Resembling thee, yet not the same.

  The very crimes that mar my youth,

  This bed of death — attest my truth!

  ‘Tis all too late — thou wert, thou art 1190

  The cherished madness of my heart!

  “And she was lost — and yet I breathed,

  But not the breath of human life:

  A serpent round my heart was wreathed,

  And stung my every thought to strife.

  Alike all time, abhorred all place,

  Shuddering I shrank from Nature’s face,

  Where every hue that charmed before

  The blackness of my bosom wore.

  The rest thou dost already know, 1200

  And all my sins, and half my woe.

  But talk no more of penitence;

  Thou seest I soon shall part from hence:

  And if thy holy tale were true,

  The deed that’s done canst thou undo?

  Think me not thankless — but this grief

  Looks not to priesthood for relief.

  My soul’s estate in secret guess:

  But wouldst thou pity more, say less.

  When thou canst bid my Leila live, 1210

  Then will I sue thee to forgive;

  Then plead my cause in that high place

  Where purchased masses proffer grace.

  Go, when the hunter’s hand hath wrung

  From forest-cave her shrieking young,

  And calm the lonely lioness:

  But soothe not — mock not my distress!

  “In earlier days, and calmer hours,

  When heart with heart delights to blend,

  Where bloom my native valley’s bowers, 1220

  I had — Ah! have I now? — a friend!

  To him this pledge I charge thee send,

  Memorial of a youthful vow;

  I would remind him of my end:

  Though souls absorbed like mine allow

  Brief thought to distant Friendship’s claim,

  Yet dear to him my blighted name.

  ‘Tis strange — he prophesied my doom,

  And I have smiled — I then could smile —

  When Prudence would his voice assume, 1230

  And warn — I recked not what — the while:

  But now Remembrance whispers o’er

  Those accents scarcely marked before.

  Say — that his bodings came to pass,

  And he will start to hear their truth,

  And wish his words had not been sooth:

  Tell him — unheeding as I was,

  Through many a busy bitter scene

  Of all our golden youth had been,

  In pain, my faltering tongue had tried 1240

  To bless his memory — ere I died;

  But Heaven in wrath would turn away,

  If Guilt should for the guiltless pray.

  I do not ask him not to blame,

  Too gentle he to wound my name;

  And what have I to do with Fame?

  I do not ask him not to mourn,

  Such cold request might sound like scorn;

  And what than Friendship’s manly tear

  May better grace a brother’s bier? 1250

  But bear this ring, his own of old,

  And tell him — what thou dost behold!

  The withered frame, the ruined mind,

  The wrack by passion left behind,

  A shrivelled scroll, a scattered leaf,

  Seared by the autumn blast of Grief!

  “Tell me no more of Fancy’s gleam,

  No, father, no,’twas not a dream;

  Alas! the dreamer first must sleep,

  I only watched, and wished to weep; 1260

  But could not, for my burning brow

  Throbbed to the very brain as now:

  I wished but for a single tear,

  As something welcome, new, and dear:

  I wished it then, I wish it still;

  Despair is stronger than my will.

  Waste not thine orison, despair

  Is mightier than thy pious prayer:

  I would not, if I might, be blest;

  I want no Paradise, but rest. 1270

  ‘Twas then — I tell thee — father! then

  I saw her; yes, she lived again;

  And shining in her white symar

  As through yon pale gray cloud the star

  Which now I gaze on, as on her,

  Who looked and looks far lovelier;

  Dimly I view its trembling spark;

  To-morrow’s night shall be more dark;

  And I, before its rays appear,

  That lifeless thing the living fear. 1280

  I wander — father! for my soul

  Is fleeting towards the final goal.

  I saw her — friar! and I rose

  Forgetful of our former woes;

  And rushing from my couch, I dart,

  And clasp her to my desperate heart;

  I clasp — what is it that I clasp?

  No breathing form within my grasp,

  No heart that beats reply to mine —

  Yet, Leila! yet the form is thine! 1290

  And art thou, dearest, changed so much

  As meet my eye, yet mock my touch?

  Ah! were thy beauties e’er so cold,

  I care not — so my arms enfold

  The all they ever wished to hold.

  Alas! around a shadow prest

  They shrink upon my lonely breast;

  Yet still ‘tis there! In silence stands,

  And beckons with beseeching hands!

  With braided hair, and bright-black eye — 1300

  I knew ‘twas false — she could not die!

  But he is dead! within the dell

  I saw him buried where he fell;

  He comes not — for he cannot break

  From earth; — why then art thou awake?

  They told me wild waves rolled above

  The face I view — the form I love;

  They told me — ‘twas a hideous tale! —

  I’d tell it, but my tongue would fail:

  If true, and from thine ocean-cave 1310

  Thou com’st to claim a calmer grave,

  Oh! pass thy dewy fingers o’er

  This brow that then will burn no more;

  Or place them on my hopeless heart:

  But, Shape or Shade! whate’er thou art,

  In mercy ne’er again depart!

  Or farther with thee bear my soul

  Than winds can waft or waters roll!

  “Such is my name, and such my tale.

/>   Confessor! to thy secret ear 1320

  I breathe the sorrows I bewail,

  And thank thee for the generous tear

  This glazing eye could never shed.

  Then lay me with the humblest dead,

  And, save the cross above my head,

  Be neither name nor emblem spread,

  By prying stranger to be read,

  Or stay the passing pilgrim’s tread.”

  He passed — nor of his name and race

  He left a token or a trace, 1330

  Save what the Father must not say

  Who shrived him on his dying day:

  This broken tale was all we knew

  Of her he loved, or him he slew.

  THE BRIDE OF ABYDOS.

  A TURKISH TALE.

  “Had we never loved sae kindly,

  Had we never loved sae blindly,

  Never met — or never parted,

  We had ne’er been broken-hearted.” —

  Burns [Farewell to Nancy].

  THE BRIDE OF ABYDOS

  INTRODUCTION

  Many poets — Wordsworth, for instance — have been conscious in their old age that an interest attaches to the circumstances of the composition of their poems, and have furnished their friends and admirers with explanatory notes. Byron recorded the motif and occasion of the Bride of Abydos while the poem was still in the press. It was written, he says, to divert his mind, “to wring his thoughts from reality to imagination — from selfish regrets to vivid recollections” (Diary, December 5, 1813, Letters, ii. 361), “to distract his dreams from …” (Diary, November 16) “for the sake of employment” (Letter to Moore, November 30, 1813). He had been staying during part of October and November at Aston Hall, Rotherham, with his friend James Wedderburn Webster, and had fallen in love with his friend’s wife, Lady Frances. From a brief note to his sister, dated November 5, we learn that he was in a scrape, but in “no immediate peril,” and from the lines, “Remember him, whom Passion’s power” (vide ante, ), we may infer that he had sought safety in flight. The Bride of Abydos, or Zuleika, as it was first entitled, was written early in November, “in four nights” (Diary, November 16), or in a week (Letter to Gifford, November 12) — the reckoning goes for little — as a counter-irritant to the pain and distress of amour interrompu.

  The confession or apology is eminently characteristic. Whilst the Giaour was still in process of evolution, still “lengthening its rattles,” another Turkish poem is offered to the public, and the natural explanation, that the author is in vein, and can score another trick, is felt to be inadequate and dishonouring — “To withdraw myself from myself,” he confides to his Diary(November 27), “has ever been my sole, my entire, my sincere motive for scribbling at all.”

  It is more than probable that in his twenty-sixth year Byron had not attained to perfect self-knowledge, but there is no reason to question his sincerity. That Byron loved to surround himself with mystery, and to dissociate himself from “the general,” is true enough; but it does not follow that at all times and under all circumstances he was insincere. “Once a poseur always a poseur” is a rough-and-ready formula not invariably applicable even to a poet.

  But the Bride of Abydos was a tonic as well as a styptic. Like the Giaour, it embodied a personal experience, and recalled “a country replete with the darkest and brightest, but always the most lively colours of my memory” (Diary, December 5, 1813).

  In a letter to Galt (December 11, 1813, Letters, 1898, ii. 304, reprinted from Life of Byron, pp. 181, 182) Byron maintains that the first part of the Bride was drawn from “observations” of his own, “from existence.” He had, it would appear, intended to make the story turn on the guilty love of a brother for a sister, a tragic incident of life in a Harem, which had come under his notice during his travels in the East, but “on second thoughts” had reflected that he lived “two centuries at least too late for the subject,” and that not even the authority of the “finest works of the Greeks,” or of Schiller (in the Bride of Messina), or of Alfieri (in Mirra), “in modern times,” would sanction the intrusion of the μισητὸν into English literature. The early drafts and variants of the MS. do not afford any evidence of this alteration of the plot which, as Byron thought, was detrimental to the poem as a work of art, but the undoubted fact that the Bride of Abydos, as well as the Giaour, embody recollections of actual scenes and incidents which had burnt themselves into the memory of an eye-witness, accounts not only for the fervent heat at which these Turkish tales were written, but for the extraordinary glamour which they threw over contemporary readers, to whom the local colouring was new and attractive, and who were not out of conceit with “good Monsieur Melancholy.”

  Byron was less dissatisfied with his second Turkish tale than he had been with the Giaour. He apologizes for the rapidity with which it had been composed — stans pede in uno — but he announced to Murray (November 20) that “he was doing his best to beat the Giaour,” and (November 29) he appraises the Bride as “my first entire composition of any length.”

  Moreover, he records (November 15), with evident gratification, the approval of his friend Hodgson, “a very sincere and by no means (at times) a flattering critic of mine,” and modestly accepts the praise of such masters of letters as “Mr. Canning,” Hookham Frere, Heber, Lord Holland, and of the traveller Edward Daniel Clarke.

  The Bride of Abydos was advertised in the Morning Chronicle, among “Books published this day,” on November 29, 1813. It was reviewed by George Agar Ellis in the Quarterly Review of January, 1814 (vol. x. p. 331), and, together with the Corsair, by Jeffrey in the Edinburgh Review of April, 1814 (vol. xxiii. p. 198).

  ‘The Bride of Abydos’ by Eugène Delacroix, 1857

  TO

  THE RIGHT HONOURABLE

  LORD HOLLAND,

  THIS TALE

  IS INSCRIBED, WITH

  EVERY SENTIMENT OF REGARD

  AND RESPECT,

  BY HIS GRATEFULLY OBLIGED

  AND SINCERE FRIEND,

  BYRON.

  THE BRIDE OF ABYDOS

  CANTO THE FIRST

  I.

  Know ye the land where the cypress and myrtle

  Are emblems of deeds that are done in their clime?

  Where the rage of the vulture, the love of the turtle,

  Now melt into sorrow, now madden to crime?

  Know ye the land of the cedar and vine,

  Where the flowers ever blossom, the beams ever shine;

  Where the light wings of Zephyr, oppressed with perfume,

  Wax faint o’er the gardens of Gúl in her bloom;

  Where the citron and olive are fairest of fruit,

  And the voice of the nightingale never is mute; 10

  Where the tints of the earth, and the hues of the sky,

  In colour though varied, in beauty may vie,

  And the purple of Ocean is deepest in dye;

  Where the virgins are soft as the roses they twine,

  And all, save the spirit of man, is divine —

  Tis the clime of the East — ‘tis the land of the Sun —

  Can he smile on such deeds as his children have done?

  Oh! wild as the accents of lovers’ farewell

  Are the hearts which they bear, and the tales which they tell.

  II.

  Begirt with many a gallant slave, 20

  Apparelled as becomes the brave,

  Awaiting each his Lord’s behest

  To guide his steps, or guard his rest,

  Old Giaffir sate in his Divan:

  Deep thought was in his agéd eye;

  And though the face of Mussulman

  Not oft betrays to standers by

  The mind within, well skilled to hide

  All but unconquerable pride,

  His pensive cheek and pondering brow 30

  Did more than he was wont avow.

  III.

&
nbsp; “Let the chamber be cleared.” — The train disappeared —

  “Now call me the chief of the Haram guard” —

  With Giaffir is none but his only son,

  And the Nubian awaiting the sire’s award.

  “Haroun — when all the crowd that wait

  Are passed beyond the outer gate,

  (Woe to the head whose eye beheld

  My child Zuleika’s face unveiled!)

  Hence, lead my daughter from her tower — 40

  Her fate is fixed this very hour;

  Yet not to her repeat my thought —

  By me alone be duty taught!”

  “Pacha! to hear is to obey.” —

  No more must slave to despot say —

  Then to the tower had ta’en his way:

  But here young Selim silence brake,

  First lowly rendering reverence meet;

  And downcast looked, and gently spake,

  Still standing at the Pacha’s feet: 50

  For son of Moslem must expire,

  Ere dare to sit before his sire!

  “Father! for fear that thou shouldst chide

  My sister, or her sable guide —

  Know — for the fault, if fault there be,

  Was mine — then fall thy frowns on me!

  So lovelily the morning shone,

  That — let the old and weary sleep —

  I could not; and to view alone

  The fairest scenes of land and deep, 60

  With none to listen and reply

  To thoughts with which my heart beat high

  Were irksome — for whate’er my mood,

  In sooth I love not solitude;

  I on Zuleika’s slumber broke,

  And, as thou knowest that for me

  Soon turns the Haram’s grating key,

  Before the guardian slaves awoke

  We to the cypress groves had flown,

  And made earth, main, and heaven our own! 70

  There lingered we, beguiled too long

  With Mejnoun’s tale, or Sadi’s song;

  Till I, who heard the deep tambour

  Beat thy Divan’s approaching hour,

  To thee, and to my duty true,

  Warned by the sound, to greet thee flew:

  But there Zuleika wanders yet —

  Nay, Father, rage not — nor forget

  That none can pierce that secret bower

  But those who watch the women’s tower.” 80

  IV.

  “Son of a slave” — the Pacha said —

  “From unbelieving mother bred,

  Vain were a father’s hope to see

  Aught that beseems a man in thee.

  Thou, when thine arm should bend the bow,

  And hurl the dart, and curb the steed,