CHAPTER 31
George Gordon Byron
Byron took the Bible seriously. The thoroughness of his acquaintance with Scripture has long been known (Stevens, 1964, pp. 460–3), most of his numerous biblical references have been detailed (Looper, 1978), and his obsession with the theme of the fall is now generally recognized (Ridenour, 1960; McGann, 1976; Hirst, 1991). Yet the pervasiveness and import of the biblical atmosphere in his work – even where there are no explicit biblical allusions – is not always appreciated. We are so often struck by Byron’s iconoclastic, comic, and generally pioneering usage of scriptural material that we sometimes fail to notice the traditional aspects and the underlying seriousness of his treatment. In particular critics tend to overlook the fact that in the rare instances when he copies or dramatizes a biblical narrative (as he does in his two “Mysteries,” Cain and Heaven and Earth, and also in “The Vision of Belshazzar” in the Hebrew Melodies), despite his ingenious innovations he remains basically faithful to the plot and the spirit of his model. In these instances he also largely subordinates his own concerns to those of his source. This is not the case, however, with regard to the poet’s many scriptural references when he merely quotes or paraphrases an expression, takes up an image or an idea, or alludes to an episode (without retelling it) or to a character (without recounting the story associated with him or her). Such references, whether radically revised or introduced in a more conventional manner, nearly always become secondary to Byronic themes. This chapter considers the range of biblical allusions in Byron’s poetry and the complexity and variety of his treatment of biblical sources. It begins with some general examples from Childe Harold, Beppo, and Don Juan, then considers the collection of short poems, Hebrew Melodies, with special attention to “The Destruction of Semnacherib” and “She Walks in Beauty.” It concludes with an extended discussion of Byron’s reworking of scriptural materials in Cain: A Mystery. Apart from these, the works for which most biblical quotations and allusions have been listed are Marino Faliero, and The Prophecy of Dante, most from the Old Testament (especially Genesis), but also many from Matthew, John, Luke, Revelation, Corinthians and Acts (Looper, 1978).
Childe Harold
In Byron’s earliest poems scriptural allusions may serve as mere ornaments (as do Adam, Eden, and the “wings of the dove” in the last two stanzas of “The First Kiss of Love”),1 but in the mature work they are carefully integrated. When, for example, in Childe Harold Byron adapts the dust and clay metaphors (each of which appears well over a hundred times in his poetry), he develops the biblical sense of human transience: for example, he writes that the great Italian poets, though “distinguish’d from our common clay,” are yet “resolv’d to dust” (4:56). The description of the fetters of our physical existence as “clay-cold bonds which round our being cling” (3:73) shows Byron successfully applying Holy Writ to his own use, and so does the dust image introduced at the point where these fetters are rent: “And when, at length, the mind shall be all free … / And dust is as it should be” (3:74). Again, reading about those who “perish with the reed on which they leant” (4:22), we may remember a verse from the Second Book of Kings: “Now, behold, thou trustest upon the staff of this bruised reed, even upon Egypt, on which if a man lean, it will go into his hand, and pierce it” (18:21). This expression of human deceit (political unreliability in this instance) is unobtrusively assimilated to Byron’s argument for bearing the suffering of existence – it fits in as neatly as does the figure of the wolf dying in silence in the previous stanza, or the scorpion’s sting in the following stanza – but the metaphor of the treacherous reed retains its biblical connotation and purpose. In the second canto, however, Byron appropriates this image of the reed in a more original manner. Beholding the magnificent remnants of the Acropolis, the poet declares:
… religions take their turn:
’Twas Jove’s – ’tis Mahomet’s – and other creeds
Will rise with other years, till man shall learn
Vainly his incense soars, his victim bleeds;
Poor child of Doubt and Death, whose hope is built on reeds. (2:3)
The scriptural figure of the reed is here forced to bear an antiscriptural message, because instead of evoking the idea of perfidious humanity it is made to stand for all “creeds,” not excepting the Bible’s. Childe Harold contains other instances of the same strategy: in an allusion to Psalm 90:10, Byron writes: “The Psalmist numbered out the years of man” (3:35), but in contrast to the latter’s lament over the brevity of life, Byron goes on to assert: “They are enough.” While undermining the source, the sentiment voiced here reflects “the fulness of satiety” experienced by Childe Harold from the outset (1:4) and, furthermore, is in keeping with – and may indeed have been influenced by – passages from the Book of Job (10:1) and Ecclesiastes (1:2, 1:9, 4:3, 5:6).
Beppo
The poet’s revision of scriptural material is most obvious when he transposes it to highly extraneous contexts to achieve comic incongruity. In a digression in Beppo he explicitly draws on the Bible (1 Timothy 4:8) to describe his projected memoirs as “my life (to come) in prose” and concludes that “laughter / Leaves us so doubly serious shortly after” (stanza 79). This is especially true when the laughter is at the expense of the Bible. In the next stanza the biblical background and the seriousness of its implication are not immediately apparent:
Oh, Mirth and Innocence! Oh, Milk and Water!
Ye happy mixture of more happy days
In these sad centuries of sin and slaughter,
Abominable Man no more allays
His thirst with such pure beverage. No matter,
I love you both, and both shall have my praise:
Oh, for old Saturn’s reign of sugar-candy! –
Meantime I drink to your return in brandy.
Whereas few readers will identify the two expressions in the opening apostrophe as a repetition from Byron’s letter to Thomas Moore of December 24, 18162 or the rhyming of “brandy” with “sugar-candy” as taken from a nursery rhyme beginning “As I was going down Cranbourne Lane,” most will recognize the allusion to the golden age in classical mythology. But the mention of Saturn, a pagan deity, hides a deeper concern. The double irony of characterizing “happy mixtures” as “pure beverage” because the concoction symbolizes the purity of the bygone era of “old Saturn’s reign” may divert our attention from the biblical undertone contrasting primordial “Innocence” with post-lapserian “sin.” Those for whom “Milk and Water” calls to mind the biblical “milk and honey” will in the present context think not so much of the promised “land flowing with milk and honey” (Exodus 3:8) as of the “more happy days” before the expulsion from Eden. The narrator, however, confesses that he “love[s] … both” the “Innocence” prior to original “sin” and the corrupt world of “these sad centuries” in which we live.
Don Juan
Eden has often been represented as pure love and the fall as a loss of such love, but in Don Juan Byron goes beyond this. Juan’s first love, his relationship with Julia, is “Like Adam’s recollection of his fall; / The tree of knowledge has been pluck’d – all’s known –” (1:127). Expulsion from Paradise and a satiated life (and thus a satiated love) seem inappropriate to the occasion, because Juan is still in the throes of his first passion, but we should not miss Byron’s radical innovation: Eden is lost even while love is yet alive. Love still is Eden, but, paradoxically, it also constitutes a forfeiture of Eden. Byron’s new conception of Eden displaces the fall’s traditional temporal sequence by encompassing the notion that consciousness foredooms love to disillusion at its very inception. Since “The Tree of Knowledge is not that of Life” (Manfred 1.1:12), we must know that everything dies, even the purest of loves. As often in Byron, the weary satiety and sense of futility, so well known to readers of Childe Harold, Manfred, and Cain, and sometimes associated with Ecclesiastes, here derive directly from Adam and Eve’s forbidden fruit.
Some of the references to Adam, Eve, Eden, and the fall in Don Juan may be pure burlesque, as in the observation “That happiness for Man – the hungry sinner! – / Since Eve ate apples, much depends on dinner” (13:99), yet there is a serious thematic intent behind most of the apparently flippant biblical allusions in Byron’s great epic satire. For example, Juan is caught by Alfonso in Julia’s bedroom, and his “only garment quite gave way; / He fled, like Joseph, leaving it;” to which the poet adds the editorial comment: “but there, / I doubt, all likeness ends between the pair” (1:186). This seemingly superfluous clarification heightens the farcical effect by drawing attention to the obvious difference between a hero who resists temptation and one who succumbs. It will, however, also remind us that the similarity between Juan and Joseph does not end with the abandonment of a garment, because in both cases an inexperienced young man is tempted, manipulated, and ensnared by an older married woman. The reference to Joseph in Byron’s masterpiece thus hints at the author’s unconventional treatment of the Don Juan legend, in which the ruthless seducer is transformed into a victim of seduction.
Hebrew Melodies
Feeling no need to follow convention when dealing with biblical and Christian subjects, Byron often provoked the establishment by expressing unorthodox views, as in his attacks on the doctrine of eternal damnation in The Vision of Judgment (stanzas 13–14) and in Heaven and Earth (1.3:193–203). As Richard Cronin (2006, p. 152) points out in connection with Don Juan, “Byron does not repudiate any of the faiths that he encounters … but neither does he espouse any.” Generally his work reflects what Robert Ryan (1990, p. 42) calls an “oscillation” and an “equipoise” between “two impulses, to doubt and to believe.” Only in Hebrew Melodies does he unswervingly conform to biblical or traditionally religious sentiments (perhaps – as most were written not long before and shortly after their wedding – because he wished to please Annabella Milbanke, or perhaps out of loyalty to childhood memories). Either way, these sentiments are shored up by an unusually pronounced biblical style and atmosphere, though the design and execution of the individual poems remain distinctively Byron’s own. A few of them are about the exile following the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem, but this theme, together with the pervasive theme of the loss of Eden, forms the background of all the pieces published as Hebrew Melodies.
Byron must have considered the poems that he gave to the composer Isaac Nathan to be suitable for inclusion in their anthology, even those he had already written before his association with Nathan. Although most of the Hebrew melodies are based on some Old Testament figure or incident, perhaps it can only be said of one – “The Vision of Belshazzar” – that the poet is reworking an entire biblical story (or at least one that consists of more than a single verse). In this poem he imaginatively yet faithfully retells the fifth chapter of the Book of Daniel, with four of his six stanzas focusing on the writing on the wall, to which he twice alludes satirically in Don Juan (3:65 and 8:134). The idea of being “weighed in the balances, and … found wanting” (Daniel 5:27), as is Belshazzar in line forty-three of the poem, is echoed repeatedly in Byron’s verse (Childe Harold 4:93; Manfred 2.3:70; Marino Faliero 1.2:122, 4.2:223; Cain 2.2:438; The Two Foscari 2.1:133; Werner 3.1:36, 4.1:250).
The poet modifies biblical material more freely and puts more of himself into the poems about the final days of Saul – Israel’s first sovereign – in “Saul” and “Song of Saul Before His Last Battle” (cf. 1 Samuel 28–31), whereas “My Soul is Dark” does not at all retell the story of David’s relieving Saul of his despondency (cf. 1 Samuel 16:14–23) but merely alludes to a “minstrel” (11) and his “harp” (2), so that conceivably the poet may above all be writing about his own “heavy heart” (12) (see Blackstone, 1975, p. 131). “Jephtha’s Daughter” originates from the two verses in Judges comprising the victim’s speech (11:36–7) out of a story of forty verses. “On Jordan’s Banks” does not retell a specific biblical incident in any sense, but the scriptural theme of yearning for an end to exile is reproduced by means of a series of scriptural references: to the Jordan, Sion (Zion), Baal, Sinai, the tablets with the Ten Commandments, the warning that one cannot see God and survive, the destruction of the temple and more generally to an “oppressor’s spear” (10). The poem has been seen as “a painfull registering of the terrible silence of God in the face of injustice” (Mole, 2002, p. 24), but to most readers it will probably convey a balance between lament and prayer for redemption in keeping with the prophetic tradition. Biblical parallelism in the first two lines of the poem (“On Jordan’s banks … On Sion’s hill”) is more pronounced in the repetition in stanza 2 (“There – where … There – where”), and prepares for a climactic ending with the reiteration of “How long” in the last stanza (echoing, for example, Psalms 6:3 and 13:1), which culminates in a direct appeal to the Almighty.
“The Destruction of Semnacherib [Sennacherib],” frequently anthologized (it is often found suitable for school-children and it illustrates anapaestic meter, which may be seen as capturing the rhythm of biblical parallelism: Roston, 1965, p. 190), gives us the traditional scriptural theme of human frailty and insignificance in the face of divine omnipotence:
The Destruction of Semnacherib
1
The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold,
And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold;
And the sheen of their spears was like stars on the sea,
When the blue wave rolls nightly on deep Galilee.
2
Like the leaves of the forest when Summer is green,
That host with their banners at sunset were seen:
Like the leaves of the forest when Autumn hath blown,
That host on the morrow lay withered and strown.
3
For the Angel of Death spread his wings on the blast,
And breathed in the face of the foe as he pass’d;
And the eyes of the sleepers wax’d deadly and chill,
And their hearts but once heaved, and for ever grew still!
4
And there lay the steed with his nostril all wide,
But through it there roll’d not the breath of his pride:
And the foam of his gasping lay white on the turf,
And cold as the spray of the rock-beating surf.
5
And there lay the rider distorted and pale,
With the dew on his brow, and the rust on his mail;
And the tents were all silent, the banners alone,
The lances unlifted, the trumpet unblown.
6
And the widows of Ashur are loud in their wail,
And the idols are broke in the temple of Baal;
And the might of the Gentile, unsmote by the sword,
Hath melted like snow in the glance of the Lord!
Basing his poem on a single verse from the Old Testament (2 Kings 19:35, repeated almost verbatim in Isaiah 37:36), Byron summarizes this verse in the poem’s title and expands it into twenty-four lines, with the first stanza describing the might of the Assyrian army, the second establishing the contrast between these martial forces “at sunset” (6) and “on the morrow” (8), and the last four elaborating upon the desolation and explaining its cause. Few poems are so profoundly steeped in the atmosphere of the Bible and, while creatively revising its imagery, so successfully replicate its style: anaphora (the word “And,” beginning thirteen lines); the memorable redundancies; the parallelism and incremental repetition revolving around one catastrophe; the unforgettable simile of the poem’s first line reminding us of the faithful shepherd. The importation of a nocturnal sea of Galilee (far from the present scene outside Jerusalem) creates a dark radiance that is reflected in the music produced, among other things, by the assonance of the “e” and alliteration of the “l” sounds in the admirable simile of lines 3–4. The eventually withering leaf, one of the central biblical symbols of human ephemerality, links the two similes of the second stanza, each comprising a full couplet, a connection reinforced by the repetition of “Like the leaves of the forest” and “That host.”
The word “For” in line 9 introduces the explanation for Sennacherib’s overthrow: the intervention of “the Angel of Death.” Even without the repetitions in the next three verses, the mere mention of the angel tells us that the Assyrians’ fate is sealed. Such explicit repetitiveness of the death scene recurs in the fourth stanza, which is focused on the “steed” introduced in line 13. The significance of “his nostril all wide” is explained in the following verse with the “But” announcing a negation and at the same time displacing the repeated “And,” thus indicating that we are taking a quick look back at the opening stanza now summed up in the word “pride.” Line 15 expands upon the steed and its nostrils. How superfluous to call attention to the last “gasping” of the steed, but how evocative of death-throes and the frustrations of defeated might! Biblical parallelism is imitated in the fifth stanza’s first line with the two cogent adjectives “distorted and pale” (in contrast with the splendor of “purple and gold” in the poem’s second line). The following three verses are each divided by caesuras into two parallel phrases, the last parallelism emphasized by the repetition of a peculiar use of a common prefix: “unlifted … unblown.”
The final stanza gives a wider perspective on the Assyrian home front. Byron first wrote “Babel” instead of “Ashur” (21), an error that shows how engrossed he was with the theme of exile and with Babylon, the place of Judah’s banishment. (“Babel” or “Babylon” occurs thirty times in Byron’s poetry.) The final couplet conveys the biblical message: human powerlessness before the Lord (and not the Angel of Death, who is merely the Lord’s agent). Whereas “unlifted” and “unblown” reflect helplessness, the coinage “unsmote” refers to the manner of defeat of the Assyrian invader, who, in the Hebraic spirit, is now referred to as “the Gentile.” “Melt” in the sense of the destruction of power is frequent in the Bible, but although “melted like snow” does not appear (snow is uncommon in the Holy Land), the expression is a stroke of genius, because it takes up the seasonal imagery of the second stanza with its withered leaves. The word “glance” also appears nowhere in the Authorized Version, but accomplishing the defeat of an army by a sheer glance suggests the omnipotence and spirituality associated with monotheism.
The essential unity of Hebrew Melodies is seldom appreciated. Some of the poems neither recreate a biblical episode nor make any overt biblical allusion, but their relevance becomes apparent in relation to the biblical background of the whole collection. This is true also of “She Walks in Beauty,” though it has often been said that this lyric does not belong to Hebrew Melodies (Marchand, 1965, p. 134). At one level the poem demonstrates how the balance of light and shade in a human face conjures up a nocturnal landscape, and the subdued contrast between winning “smiles” and glowing “tints” suggests the kindness of “days in goodness spent” (15–16), a peaceful mind, a pure heart, and innocent love (17–18). Within the framework of the Hebrew Melodies, however, the “days in goodness spent,” with their leap into the past to evoke a by-gone era, remind us of the Israelites’ yearning for their happy former days, the pre-exilic period. Although “She Walks in Beauty” already existed before the question of writing the Hebrew Melodies arose, Murray Roston (1965, p. 187) feels that the poem “consciously aims at capturing from the Song of Songs [the Song of Solomon] the oriental luxuriance, the languorous yet rich passion for the dark beauty of the Shulamite.” Among other things, Roston probably has the “raven tress” (9) in mind, reminiscent of the “raven” locks of Songs 5:11. In any event the “cloudless climes” (2) might suggest the Mediterranean, but in the context of the Hebrew Melodies these climes are certainly made to refer to the lands of the Bible, and “dwelling place” (12) may remind us of Balaam’s prophecy (Numbers 24:21).
Before we interpret “A mind at peace with all below” (17) ironically as “a mind that is without sensitivity to the promptings of the nether parts, a mind dead to passion,” and “innocent” (18) as “immune to carnal desire” (Miller, 1985, p. 66), we have to consider the pervasive contrast in Scripture and in the Christian tradition between human frailty and divine omnipotence, earthly clay and celestial essence, body and soul. In this context “below” stands in opposition to “heaven” (6). The position of “innocent” at the end of the poem and the unusual secondary stress on its last syllable resulting from the rhyme with “spent” (16) give the word double emphasis. For Byron “innocent” love is Edenic love, which fallen humanity has forfeited, so that the person described in this lyric, who retains such primordial innocence, is placed, as it were, into some transcendental realm from which she can look down on “all below” and be “at peace” with it (17). But no matter how “biblical” we may sense this lyric to be, Byron leaves his signature plainly visible, not only in the exceptional emphasis on an “innocent” love, but also in such original turns as the idiosyncratic opposition between a conventional “heaven” and the striking expression “gaudy day” (6). Like all of the Hebrew Melodies, even those not based on a biblical subject and more personal – such as “Oh! Snatch’d Away in Beauty’s Bloom” (Ashton, 1972, p. 149) with its lament over human transience, its weeping by a river bank, even if not Jordan’s or one of Babylon’s, and the parallelism of its last line – “She Walks in Beauty” partakes of the biblical atmosphere of the collection while remaining unmistakably Byronic.
Cain: A Mystery
Not less distinctively Byronic is the poet’s one substantial and completed rewriting of a whole biblical episode, which he calls Cain: A Mystery (Heaven and Earth is a fragment). The play has frequently been seen as an attack on the Bible and religion, yet despite Byron’s development of a story about fratricide into an intriguing tragedy of human revolt against the divine order and his self-projection into the rebellious protagonist, Cain most impressively illustrates his essential fidelity to his particular source and to the scriptural spirit in general. As in the original story, Cain, a tiller of the soil, and Abel, his younger brother, a shepherd, make offerings to God. When Abel’s sheep is accepted and Cain’s fruit rejected, Cain slays his brother and is cursed from the earth, condemned to wander east of Eden as a fugitive and vagabond with a mark set on him. Readers have too often disregarded various themes Byron imports into the play from other portions of the Scriptures, his skillful development of the biblical lesson of human brotherhood, and in particular his close adherence to the account given in chapter 4 of Genesis. Perhaps this disregard is because the events of acts I and II, the dialogue preceding Abel’s entry in act III, and the play’s last eighty lines are largely fabrications.
Unlike the variety of circumstances in Byron’s play that reveal the several attributes of his hero, in Genesis the act of fratricide is the only event that clearly establishes the character of Cain. We may assume that the murder is connected with the rejection of Cain’s offering and surmise that the murderer may have acted out of spite, frustration, rebellion, hatred, or revenge, but most frequently, in Byron’s age as in ours, readers have thought of “the jealous murder of Abel” (Schock, 1995, p. 204). Presumably we may take Cain’s reply to the Lord’s question “Where is Abel thy brother?” as a callous rejection of responsibility and as evasive and deceitful, or insolent and defiant, yet we cannot be quite sure: “I know not” just might indicate not indifference, evasion, or deceit but a sincere expression of confusion or despair, and “Am I my brother’s keeper?” might express shocked acknowledgment of responsibility. As we cannot be absolutely certain about anything in the character of the biblical figure apart from his guilt of fratricide, when Byron creates an idealist thirsting for justice and enlightenment, a metaphysical rebel who is also a loving father, husband, and brother, it must be the Cain of the popular tradition that Byron ennobles rather than the Cain of Genesis. He does not so much change the biblical story as focus on its ambiguities, fill its gaps, and develop what is merely implied.
Chapter 4 of Genesis several times refers to Abel as Cain’s “brother” (even after this fact has been established), and Byron builds on the idea of mutual responsibility suggested in being the “keeper” of one’s “brother” by means of judicious usage of the latter term, which appears forty-two times in the play (with “brethren” occurring three and “sister” eight times). When Adah, Cain’s sister and wife, announces Abel’s arrival with the words “Our brother comes,” Cain prepares us for his murderous repudiation of blood ties with the odd remark “Thy brother Abel” (III.1.161–2). As Abel falls dying and is about to forgive his murderer, he registers the bond between them: “What hast thou done, my brother?” (III.1.317); and at this point Cain, who, after a cosmic flight with Lucifer, has not even once addressed Abel as “brother,” gives evidence of a sudden inner change by responding with the one-word exclamation “Brother!” (III.1.318). Henceforth he does repeatedly call the slain Abel “My brother” (III.1.323, 353, 375). It is the poignant reminder that Zillah (who has lost her brother and husband) “has but one brother / Now” that jolts Cain into the recognition that he himself is henceforth left “brotherless” (III.1.335–6).
A significant contribution to the moral superiority of Byron’s protagonist over the long-established Cain figure is made by the poet’s omission of the speech containing the Lord’s admonition to Cain (Genesis 4:6–7):
And the LORD said unto Cain, Why art thou wroth? and why is thy countenance fallen? If thou doest well, shalt thou not be accepted? and if thou doest not well, sin lieth at the door. And unto thee shall be his desire, and thou shalt rule over him.
In the Bible, it seems that an envious Cain rejects God’s warning and goes on to commit premeditated homicide, but since the Bible does not explicitly mention either the envy or the premeditation (and gives no details about what happens between the warning in verse 7 and the murder in verse 8), Byron’s source leaves him free to provide his own version of what “leads to the Catastrophe … not premeditation or envy … but … rage and fury against the inadequacy of his state to his Conceptions” (BLJ 9:53–4). Clearly Byron’s protagonist acts impetuously in a moment of mental imbalance and is shocked when “awake at last” (III.1:378), but the poet’s contention that Cain’s murderous blow is caused by something other than envy has been challenged. Lucifer’s suggestion that Cain harbors thoughts of envy (the traditional view) puts into words what Cain feels but does not admit to himself (II.2:339, 353–6). Such sentiments may never entirely leave Cain, but in the murder scene Byron indisputably stages an act motivated not by envy but by rebellion. Cain’s frustration after his journey with Lucifer produces in the usually affectionate father and brother such “rage and fury” that he envisages the possibility of killing his baby son (III.1.124–6) and in the scene of fratricide is led from protesting innocent suffering to causing it.
Deviating from Genesis, Byron combines the scene of murder with that of the sacrifice in which Abel’s offering precedes Cain’s, and a “whirlwind … throw[s] down the altar of CAIN.” This brings to mind God’s answer “out of the whirlwind” at the end of the Book of Job (38:1) whereby the Lord breaks His long silence by asserting divine providence without answering the question of Job’s innocent suffering. The ending of Cain also leaves unanswered the question of unmerited pain, which, like Job, the hero has repeatedly confronted with militant passion. Also like Job, Cain rejects life while grieving over death’s inevitability. Job, however, lamenting the ephemerality of life (10:20 or 14:1–2), thinks of human fate in general and in his wish that he “had never been born” (3:3) refers to himself alone, whereas Cain speaks of himself in both instances: “Must I not die?” (I.1.29) and “Would I ne’er had been / Aught else but dust!” (I.1.291–2). Cain longs for death because of the senselessness of a life that ends in death (I.1.109–10), so that in Hades he declares: “Since / I must one day return here from the earth / I rather would remain; I am sick of all / That dust has shown me –” (II.2.106–9). Though, not unlike the Book of Job in tone, this expression of taedium vitae is more reminiscent of Ecclesiastes, with whom Cain also shares the consciousness of his limitations and of life’s vanity.
The drama’s most important biblical topic not based on the Cain episode itself is, as so often in Byron, the Eden story of the previous two chapters of Genesis. More than the plot of Cain’s seduction by Lucifer is derived from Eve’s temptation by the snake; the fall motif, rather than the Cain figure of popular tradition, also provides the essential feature of the hero’s character: his mental unrest. The older curse, the burden resulting from the primal fall, something that is impersonal and remote for other haunted romantic heroes, becomes dramatically immediate when a son complains of suffering for the sins of his parents. In rebellion against God, Cain attacks the fatal tree’s “bitter” fruits (I.1.78), the expulsion from Eden and man’s toil (he takes no notice of woman’s pain in childbirth) and focuses on the death sentence, the penalty prescribed for his transgression (Genesis 3:16–19, 23–4; 2:17). Among his first words are “Must I not die?” (I.1.29). He then taunts his parents asking “wherefore pluck’d ye not the tree of life?” (I.1.33), and upon his encounter with Lucifer he immediately laments that “the tree of life / Was withheld … and all the fruit is death!” (I.1.105–8). In the biblical account of the death of Abel we hear nothing of Cain’s preoccupation with death or any curse before the scenes of sacrifice and murder. Thus the dirge of Byron’s hero over the transience of his existence, “being dust, and groveling in the dust, / Till I return to dust” (III.1.114–15), echoes words from the previous chapter of Genesis: “for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return” (3:19). Cain has inherited this consciousness from his father, whom Byron makes bear a mark “upon his forehead” (II.1.75) before Cain is stained with his.
Although Byron once more rehearses the fall theme and draws on many other biblical passages in Cain, it is unmistakably chapter 4 of Genesis that he is rewriting. Fifteen lines of Byron’s dialogue (III.1.468–82) copy almost verbatim six (verses 9–14) of the sixteen verses comprising the biblical story of the first murder. Yet a careful comparison of these two seemingly identical passages reveals the remarkable revisionary effort on the poet’s part. Substituting an angel for the Lord (thus avoiding biblical anthropomorphism), Byron’s version begins “Where is thy brother Abel?” which preserves the Bible’s emphasis on brotherhood. But in the light of Zillah’s charge that Cain, “the stronger” of the two brothers, failed to defend the weaker Abel (III.1.365–9), the rejoinder “Am I then / My brother’s keeper?” (III.1.468–9) attains a new dimension. Perhaps Byron’s Cain is merely repeating what we may see as his prototype’s attempt to exculpate himself (possibly even to arraign the Creator), but we have not ruled out the possibility that the biblical Cain might be speaking in confusion or with a shocked recognition of responsibility. The Cain of Genesis, however, apparently also conveys lack of concern, whereas such an attitude could only be pretence in the case of Byron’s sensitive hero, who earlier expressed acute remorse. The poet makes two changes at this point: his honest Cain does not reiterate the outright lie “I know not” when asked where his brother is, and he adds the word “then” to “Am I my brother’s keeper?” (Genesis 4:9). Following Zillah’s accusation and Cain’s repeated expressions of regret and sorrow, these two revisions may prompt us to consider the possibility that an intuition about being answerable for his fellows is here in the process of ripening in the hero’s consciousness. Rather than trying to evade responsibility, he may, having internalized his sister’s indictment, now be asking the Angel (or really asking himself) whether he should not have acted literally as his brother’s “keeper,” that is, his guard and protector. The possibility that Cain’s question does not constitute rebelliousness or rejection of guilt is less remote in Byron than in Genesis.
With the repetition of the rebuke “what hast thou done?” (III.1.469) Byron retains the Bible’s implicit ascription of responsibility for human acts, which he will later reinforce with an expression of irrevocability: “what is done is done” (III.1.516). In the play the voice of “[Abel’s] blood cries out, / Even from the ground” (III.1.470–1), with Byron’s addition of “Even” emphasizing that the earth cannot hide bloodshed. This poignant image acquires further resonance from the tradition of spilt innocent blood culminating in the crucifixion, which has just been brought to mind by Abel’s Christ-like words “Forgive [Cain], for he knew not what / He did” (III.1.319–20; cf. Luke 23:34), and which the drama’s repeated references to blood sacrifice richly exploit (see Steffan, 1968, pp. 88–9). In his rephrasing of verse 11, however, the poet inserts a word that jars: Abel’s blood was shed by Cain’s “rash” hand (III.1.473). Not only does the adjective not appear in the original, there is no hint whatsoever that the biblical Cain (who has been given a warning) might have acted as impetuously as Byron’s hero. In modifying verse 12 Byron has the Angel separate the two components of “a fugitive and a vagabond,” perhaps in order to let the force of each word sink in before Adah uses the compact biblical form four lines later in her plea on Cain’s behalf, which replaces the biblical Cain’s own words in verses 13–14.
At this point the poet breaks off his seeming transcription of verses from the Old Testament. He begins with a reversal of the source pattern: his hero courts death (III.1.482), whereas the biblical Cain has just pleaded for his life. Next he invents speeches about the yet unpeopled earth (III.1.483–4), sibling ties (III.1.490–1), and potential parricide (III.1.485–8, 492). Byron probably remembered the story of Lamech’s accidental killing of his ancestor Cain from Bayle’s Dictionary. At line 494 the poet resumes the scriptural account as given in verse 15: “And the Lord set a mark upon Cain,” which he spins into a miniature drama. When the Angel calls “Come hither!” Cain asks “What / Would’st thou with me?” (III.1.497–8), a question that may reflect confusion, affect incomprehension, or perhaps once more breathe defiance (She-Rue, 2004, p. 132). After the Angel’s reply again brings home to Cain the gravity of “such deeds as [he has] done” (III.1.499), making further evasion impossible, the murderer exclaims “No, let me die!” (III.1.500), where the death wish also serves as a last futile attempt to escape accountability. The mark, which he receives despite refusing its protection, produces the immediate effect of externalizing his remorse by “burn[ing]” his “brow” (III.1.500–1). After this point there is no further reference to the mark. The play’s new, relatively more tranquil tone following the scenes of murder, Eve’s curse, and Cain’s confrontation with the Angel leaves little room for the frenzy usually associated with the traditional mark as the symbol of pariahdom and the curse of homelessness. The feeling of being perpetually hounded is but briefly conjured up in Cain’s words “Now for the wilderness” (III.1.544) and in his description of the road “Eastward from Eden” as “the most desolate” (III.1.552–3), which replaces the biblical Cain’s actual departure and settling “east of Eden” (4:16). Thus the effect becomes all the more powerful when in the play’s last line, which gives Adah’s farewell to the dead Abel and Cain’s response, the eternal wanderer’s inner turbulence suddenly finds its outlet:
ADAH. Peace be with him!
CAIN. But with me!
It is as if the mark were now being set on Cain’s brow a second time. Even if such a reverberating ending truncates the tragedy’s catharsis, it undoubtedly epitomizes the traditional Cain curse and is especially ironic because, as the result of his parents’ fall, Byron’s hero gives expression to such feverish restlessness before the murder as if already bearing the mark of the outcast: “Nothing can calm me more. Calm! say I? Never / Knew I what calm was in the soul” (III.1.204–5).
Despite such revisions, we should accept Byron’s repeated claim that in Cain he is faithful to the Bible. Granted, few readers think of the Cain of Genesis as Byron does: an iconoclast questioning divine justice who possibly holds God responsible for the murder because He created Cain and failed as Keeper of Abel. In all probability none before Byron ever exercised their imagination so energetically in filling the gaps in the character of the Old Testament figure by suggesting his complex sensitivity: his love, his innate sense of isolation, his obsession with human transience (paradoxically coupled with a death wish), and his relentless pursuit of righteousness. In Byron’s Cain these traits become so poignantly ironic in the light of the act of fratricide as to make it into a perfect tragic peripeteia. The fact that Cain kills his brother in Byron’s drama as well as in Genesis is so obvious that it is hardly ever mentioned, but we should remember that with Cain’s murder of Abel the play retains the essence of the Cain story. One might assume that the poet could easily have changed the fratricidal ending (as easily as showing us a hero named “Don Juan” being seduced) if he wished to maintain to the end the noble innocence of his romanticized seeker of justice. It is not that Byron feared he would fail to reach an audience that might be hostile to such drastic rewriting of the Bible, since he does not shrink from putting the most offensive blasphemies into the mouth of his hero, nor, in general (as we have seen), does he hesitate to break with standard practice in his treatment of Holy Writ. But to spare Cain the murder of his brother may have seemed impossible to the poet. In 1821 Lord Byron wrote to his publisher, “I am a great reader and admirer of those books [of the Bible] – and had read them through & through before I was eight years old – that is to say the old Testament – for the New struck me as a task – but the other as a pleasure” (BLJ 8:238). The poet’s loyalty to his source in Cain, which reproduces a full story from one of those pleasurable books he had so voraciously read in his childhood, testifies to the spell the Bible cast over him.
Notes
1 Lord Byron, The Complete Poetical Works, ed. Jerome J. McGann, 7 volumes (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1980–93), 1:157. All quotations from Byron’s poetry are from this edition, subsequently cited as Works.
2 See Leslie A. Marchand, ed., Byron’s Letters and Journals, 12 volumes (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1973–82), 5:149. Further references to this edition are abbreviated as BLJ.
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