Lord Byron - Delphi Poets Series

by Lord Byron

  Not less because I suffer it unbent.

  That thou wert beautiful, and I not blind,

  Hath been the sin which shuts me from mankind;

  But let them go, or torture as they will,

  My heart can multiply thine image still;

  Successful Love may sate itself away;

  The wretched are the faithful; ‘t is their fate 60

  To have all feeling, save the one, decay,

  And every passion into one dilate,

  As rapid rivers into Ocean pour;

  But ours is fathomless, and hath no shore.

  III.

  Above me, hark! the long and maniac cry

  Of minds and bodies in captivity.

  And hark! the lash and the increasing howl,

  And the half-inarticulate blasphemy!

  There be some here with worse than frenzy foul,

  Some who do still goad on the o’er-laboured mind, 70

  And dim the little light that’s left behind

  With needless torture, as their tyrant Will

  Is wound up to the lust of doing ill:

  With these and with their victims am I classed,

  ‘Mid sounds and sights like these long years have passed;

  ‘Mid sights and sounds like these my life may close:

  So let it be — for then I shall repose.

  IV.

  I have been patient, let me be so yet;

  I had forgotten half I would forget,

  But it revives — Oh! would it were my lot 80

  To be forgetful as I am forgot! —

  Feel I not wroth with those who bade me dwell

  In this vast Lazar-house of many woes?

  Where laughter is not mirth, nor thought the mind,

  Nor words a language, nor ev’n men mankind;

  Where cries reply to curses, shrieks to blows,

  And each is tortured in his separate hell —

  For we are crowded in our solitudes —

  Many, but each divided by the wall,

  Which echoes Madness in her babbling moods; 90

  While all can hear, none heed his neighbour’s call —

  None! save that One, the veriest wretch of all,

  Who was not made to be the mate of these,

  Nor bound between Distraction and Disease.

  Feel I not wroth with those who placed me here?

  Who have debased me in the minds of men,

  Debarring me the usage of my own,

  Blighting my life in best of its career,

  Branding my thoughts as things to shun and fear?

  Would I not pay them back these pangs again, 100

  And teach them inward Sorrow’s stifled groan?

  The struggle to be calm, and cold distress,

  Which undermines our Stoical success?

  No! — still too proud to be vindictive — I

  Have pardoned Princes’ insults, and would die.

  Yes, Sister of my Sovereign! for thy sake

  I weed all bitterness from out my breast,

  It hath no business where thou art a guest:

  Thy brother hates — but I can not detest;

  Thou pitiest not — but I can not forsake. 110

  V.

  Look on a love which knows not to despair,

  But all unquenched is still my better part,

  Dwelling deep in my shut and silent heart,

  As dwells the gathered lightning in its cloud,

  Encompassed with its dark and rolling shroud,

  Till struck, — forth flies the all-ethereal dart!

  And thus at the collision of thy name

  The vivid thought still flashes through my frame,

  And for a moment all things as they were

  Flit by me; — they are gone — I am the same. 120

  And yet my love without ambition grew;

  I knew thy state — my station — and I knew

  A Princess was no love-mate for a bard;

  I told it not — I breathed it not — it was

  Sufficient to itself, its own reward;

  And if my eyes revealed it, they, alas!

  Were punished by the silentness of thine,

  And yet I did not venture to repine.

  Thou wert to me a crystal-girded shrine,

  Worshipped at holy distance, and around 130

  Hallowed and meekly kissed the saintly ground;

  Not for thou wert a Princess, but that Love

  Had robed thee with a glory, and arrayed

  Thy lineaments in beauty that dismayed —

  Oh! not dismayed — but awed, like One above!

  And in that sweet severity there was

  A something which all softness did surpass —

  I know not how — thy Genius mastered mine —

  My Star stood still before thee: — if it were

  Presumptuous thus to love without design, 140

  That sad fatality hath cost me dear;

  But thou art dearest still, and I should be

  Fit for this cell, which wrongs me — but for thee.

  The very love which locked me to my chain

  Hath lightened half its weight; and for the rest,

  Though heavy, lent me vigour to sustain,

  And look to thee with undivided breast,

  And foil the ingenuity of Pain.

  VI.

  It is no marvel — from my very birth

  My soul was drunk with Love, — which did pervade 150

  And mingle with whate’er I saw on earth:

  Of objects all inanimate I made

  Idols, and out of wild and lonely flowers,

  And rocks, whereby they grew, a Paradise,

  Where I did lay me down within the shade

  Of waving trees, and dreamed uncounted hours,

  Though I was chid for wandering; and the Wise

  Shook their white agéd heads o’er me, and said

  Of such materials wretched men were made,

  And such a truant boy would end in woe, 160

  And that the only lesson was a blow; —

  And then they smote me, and I did not weep,

  But cursed them in my heart, and to my haunt

  Returned and wept alone, and dreamed again

  The visions which arise without a sleep.

  And with my years my soul began to pant

  With feelings of strange tumult and soft pain;

  And the whole heart exhaled into One Want,

  But undefined and wandering, till the day

  I found the thing I sought — and that was thee; 170

  And then I lost my being, all to be

  Absorbed in thine; — the world was past away; —

  Thou didst annihilate the earth to me!

  VII.

  I loved all Solitude — but little thought

  To spend I know not what of life, remote

  From all communion with existence, save

  The maniac and his tyrant; — had I been

  Their fellow, many years ere this had seen

  My mind like theirs corrupted to its grave.

  But who hath seen me writhe, or heard me rave? 180

  Perchance in such a cell we suffer more

  Than the wrecked sailor on his desert shore;

  The world is all before him — mine is here,

  Scarce twice the space they must accord my bier.

  What though he perish, he may lift his eye,

  And with a dying glance upbraid the sky;

  I will not raise my own in such reproof,

  Although ‘tis clouded by my dungeon roof.

  VIII.

  Yet do I feel at times my mind decline,

  But with a sense of its decay: I see 190

  Unwonted lights along my prison shine,

  And a strange Demon, who is vexing me

>   With pilfering pranks and petty pains, below

  The feeling of the healthful and the free;

  But much to One, who long hath suffered so,

  Sickness of heart, and narrowness of place,

  And all that may be borne, or can debase.

  I thought mine enemies had been but Man,

  But Spirits may be leagued with them — all Earth

  Abandons — Heaven forgets me; — in the dearth 200

  Of such defence the Powers of Evil can —

  It may be — tempt me further, — and prevail

  Against the outworn creature they assail.

  Why in this furnace is my spirit proved,

  Like steel in tempering fire? because I loved?

  Because I loved what not to love, and see,

  Was more or less than mortal, and than me.

  IX.

  I once was quick in feeling — that is o’er; —

  My scars are callous, or I should have dashed

  My brain against these bars, as the sun flashed 210

  In mockery through them; — – If I bear and bore

  The much I have recounted, and the more

  Which hath no words, — ‘t is that I would not die

  And sanction with self-slaughter the dull lie

  Which snared me here, and with the brand of shame

  Stamp Madness deep into my memory,

  And woo Compassion to a blighted name,

  Sealing the sentence which my foes proclaim.

  No — it shall be immortal! — and I make

  A future temple of my present cell, 220

  Which nations yet shall visit for my sake.

  While thou, Ferrara! when no longer dwell

  The ducal chiefs within thee, shall fall down,

  And crumbling piecemeal view thy hearthless halls,

  A Poet’s wreath shall be thine only crown, —

  A Poet’s dungeon thy most far renown,

  While strangers wonder o’er thy unpeopled walls!

  And thou, Leonora! — thou — who wert ashamed

  That such as I could love — who blushed to hear

  To less than monarchs that thou couldst be dear, 230

  Go! tell thy brother, that my heart, untamed

  By grief — years — weariness — and it may be

  A taint of that he would impute to me —

  From long infection of a den like this,

  Where the mind rots congenial with the abyss, —

  Adores thee still; — and add — that when the towers

  And battlements which guard his joyous hours

  Of banquet, dance, and revel, are forgot,

  Or left untended in a dull repose,

  This — this — shall be a consecrated spot! 240

  But Thou — when all that Birth and Beauty throws

  Of magic round thee is extinct — shalt have

  One half the laurel which o’ershades my grave.

  No power in death can tear our names apart,

  As none in life could rend thee from my heart.

  Yes, Leonora! it shall be our fate

  To be entwined for ever — but too late!

  THE PROPHECY OF DANTE

  “‘Tis the sunset of life gives me mystical lore,

  And coming events cast their shadows before.”

  Campbell, [Lochiel’s Warning].

  INTRODUCTION

  The Prophecy of Dante was written at Ravenna, during the month of June, 1819, “to gratify” the Countess Guiccioli. Before she left Venice in April she had received a promise from Byron to visit her at Ravenna. “Dante’s tomb, the classical pinewood,” and so forth, had afforded a pretext for the invitation to be given and accepted, and, at length, when she was, as she imagined, “at the point of death,” he arrived, better late than never, “on the Festival of the Corpus Domini” which fell that year on the tenth of June (see her communication to Moore, Life, p. 399). Horses and books were left behind at Venice, but he could occupy his enforced leisure by “writing something on the subject of Dante” (ibid., p. 402). A heightened interest born of fuller knowledge, in Italian literature and Italian politics, lent zest to this labour of love, and, time and place conspiring, he composed “the best thing he ever wrote” (Letter to Murray, March 23, 1820, Letters, 1900, iv. 422), his Vision (or Prophecy) of Dante.

  It would have been strange if Byron, who had sounded his Lament over the sufferings of Tasso, and who had become de facto if not de jure a naturalized Italian, had forborne to associate his name and fame with the sacred memory of the “Gran padre Alighier.” If there had been any truth in Friedrich Schlegel’s pronouncement, in a lecture delivered at Vienna in 1814, “that at no time has the greatest and most national of all Italian poets ever been much the favourite of his countrymen,” the reproach had become meaningless. As the sumptuous folio edition (4 vols.) of the Divina Commedia, published at Florence, 1817-19; a quarto edition (4 vols.) published at Rome, 1815-17; a folio edition (3 vols.) published at Bologna 1819-21, to which the Conte Giovanni Marchetti contributed his famous excursus on the allegory in the First Canto of the Inferno, and numerous other issues remain to testify, Dante’s own countrymen were eager “to pay honours almost divine” to his memory. “The last age,” writes Hobhouse, in 1817 (note 18 to Canto IV. of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Poetical Works, 1899, ii. 496), “seemed inclined to undervalue him…. The present generation … has returned to the ancient worship, and the Danteggiare of the northern Italians is thought even indiscreet by the more moderate Tuscans.” Dante was in the air. As Byron wrote in his Diary (January 29, 1821), “Read Schlegel [probably in a translation published at Edinburgh, 1818]. Not a favourite! Why, they talk Dante, write Dante, and think and dream Dante at this moment (1821), to an excess which would be ridiculous, but that he deserves it.”

  There was, too, another reason why he was minded to write a poem “on the subject of Dante.” There was, at this time, a hope, if not a clear prospect, of political change — of throwing off the yoke of the Bourbon, of liberating Italy from the tyrant and the stranger. “Dante was the poet of liberty. Persecution, exile, the dread of a foreign grave, could not shake his principles” (Medwin, Conversations, 1824, p. 242). The Prophecy was “intended for the Italians,” intended to foreshadow as in a vision “liberty and the resurrection of Italy” (ibid., p. 241). As he rode at twilight through the pine forest, or along “the silent shore Which bounds Ravenna’s immemorial wood,” the undying past inspired him with a vision of the future, delayed, indeed, for a time, “the flame ending in smoke,” but fulfilled after many days, a vision of a redeemed and united Italy.

  “The poem,” he says, in the Preface, “may be considered as a metrical experiment.” In Beppo, and the two first cantos of Don Juan, he had proved that the ottava rima of the Italians, which Frere had been one of the first to transplant, might grow and flourish in an alien soil, and now, by way of a second venture, he proposed to acclimatize the terza rima. He was under the impression that Hayley, whom he had held up to ridicule as “for ever feeble, and for ever tame,” had been the first and last to try the measure in English; but of Hayley’s excellent translation of the three first cantos of the Inferno, praised but somewhat grudgingly praised by Southey, he had only seen an extract, and of earlier experiments he was altogether ignorant. As a matter of fact, many poets had already essayed, but timidly and without perseverance, to “come to the test in the metrification” of the Divine Comedy. Some twenty-seven lines, “the sole example in English literature of that period, of the use of terza rima, obviously copied from Dante” (Complete Works of Chaucer, by the Rev. W. Skeat, 1894, i. 76, 261), are imbedded in Chaucer’s Compleint to his Lady. In the sixteenth century Sir Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (“Description of the restless state of a lover”), “as novises newly sprung out of the schools of Dante, Ariosto, and Petrarch” (Puttenham’s Art of Poesie, 1589, pp. 48-50);
and later again, Daniel (“To the Lady Lucy, Countess of Bedford”), Ben Jonson, and Milton (Psalms ii., vi.) afford specimens of terza rima. There was, too, one among Byron’s contemporaries who had already made trial of the metre in his Prince Athanase (1817) and The Woodman and the Nightingale (1818), and who, shortly, in his Ode to the West Wind (October, 1819, published 1820) was to prove that it was not impossible to write English poetry, if not in genuine terza rima, with its interchange of double rhymes, at least in what has been happily styled the “Byronic terza rima.” It may, however, be taken for granted that, at any rate in June, 1819, these fragments of Shelley’s were unknown to Byron. Long after Byron’s day, but long years before his dream was realized, Mrs. Browning, in her Casa Guidi Windows (1851), in the same metre, re-echoed the same aspiration (see her Preface), “that the future of Italy shall not be disinherited.” (See for some of these instances of terza rima, Englische Metrik, von Dr. J. Schipper, 1888, ii. 896. See, too, The Metre of Dante’s Comedy discussed and exemplified, by Alfred Forman and Harry Buxton Forman, 1878, p. 7.)

  The MS. of the Prophecy of Dante, together with the Preface, was forwarded to Murray, March 14, 1820; but in spite of some impatience on the part of the author (Letter to Murray, May 8, 1820, Letters, 1901, v. 20), and, after the lapse of some months, a pretty broad hint (Letter, August 17, 1820, ibid., p. 165) that “the time for the Dante would be good now … as Italy is on the eve of great things,” publication was deferred till the following year. Marino Faliero, Doge of Venice, and the Prophecy of Dante were published in the same volume, April 21, 1821.

  The Prophecy of Dante was briefly but favourably noticed by Jeffrey in his review of Marino Faliero (Edinb. Rev., July, 1821, vol. 35, p. 285). “It is a very grand, fervid, turbulent, and somewhat mystical composition, full of the highest sentiment and the highest poetry; ... but disfigured by many faults of precipitation, and overclouded with many obscurities. Its great fault with common readers will be that it is not sufficiently intelligible…. It is, however, beyond all question, a work of a man of great genius.”

  Other notices of Marino Faliero and the Prophecy of Dante appeared in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, April, 1821, vol. 9, pp. 93-103; in the Monthly Review, May, 1821, Enlarged Series, vol. 95, pp. 41-50; and in the Eclectic Review, June 21, New Series, vol. xv. pp. 518-527.

  DEDICATION.

  Lady! if for the cold and cloudy clime

  Where I was born, but where I would not die,

  Of the great Poet-Sire of Italy

  I dare to build the imitative rhyme,