My Roommate Lord Byron
In my youth’s summer I did sing of One,
The wandering outlaw of his own dark mind. . . .
—Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Canto the Third
It would have pleased Lord Byron to know that, having been the most renowned, imitated, and execrated of the Major Romantic Poets, he is now, almost two centuries later, the least honored, the most ignored and deplored of that select few. For he thrived on giving offense. He was a sexy, swaggering contrarian whose wisecrack answer to the earnest inquiry of Concerned Virtue, “What are you rebelling against?,” would have been the same as Marlon Brando’s: “What have ya got?”
As with Brando, behind the mask of the rebel shaking his fist at prim respectability was the furrowed brow of a sensitive guy not afraid to cry, a misunderstood teenage werewolf or, better yet, a vampire—a possibility he darkly hinted at in his letters.1 Byron pictured himself (under the alias of Childe Harold) wandering about the Alps at midnight alternately exulting in thunderstorms and crying tears of secret melancholy. Generations of readers have thrilled with a sympathetic vibration to that particular passage (Childe Harold, Canto 3, stanzas xcii–xcvii). But the storm passes and the poet moves to other scenes, other feelings, other roles. He roars at the ocean—a splendid roar (Canto 4, stanza clxxix); he luxuriates among the odalisques of his harem or runs off with someone else’s begum, then addresses songs to her, such songs! lyrics of irresistible seductiveness; following which he joins his gentlemen friends for brandy and cigars and brags to them of his exploits on the tilting grounds of love, a perfect cad.
Those who prize sincerity in poets and would hold them to their word, as to a marriage vow, cannot but take exception to such will-o’-the-wisp fickleness of purpose. That was the Prosecution’s chief charge against Lord Byron back when; that is its charge now. And now it is a graver charge, for the one sin a poet cannot be forgiven in our age is lying in the confessional of his poetry. Read any of his poems titled “Stanzas for Music”; for instance, the one that begins:
I speak not, I trace not, I breathe not thy name,
There is grief in the sound, there is guilt in the fame:
But the tear which now burns on my cheek may impart
The deep thoughts that dwell in that silence of heart.
The sound is so smooth that the comma-spliced phrases glide by almost without making sense. Indeed, some of his best-loved lyrics don’t bear thinking about at all. “She walks in Beauty, like the Night / Of cloudless climes and starry skies.” What or who is being likened to the Night, She or Beauty?
To ask such a question is to be deaf to the poem. As well ask the meaning of the viola’s recurring theme in Berlioz’s Harold in Italy, or of a kiss. Byron’s love lyrics are pure blarney, part of the apparatus of seduction of the nineteenth century’s most accomplished make-out artist. One doesn’t ask for good sense from such entertainers but rather intoxication, which together with love is one of the favorite themes of their songs. “Oh, Believe Me If All Those Endearing Young Charms,” an internationally popular song of Byron’s time, was written by Thomas Moore, his best friend, professional rival, biographer, and literary executor, and it was the beau ideal and bull’s-eye of poetic aspiration: a “parlor song” of lilting melody, elegant diction, sweet sentimentality, and unexceptionable good taste. Moore, who was also an accomplished performer, was the most successful purveyor of such goods in the early Romantic era, but Byron wrote a couple of dozen almost as endearing and enduring, including one addressed to Moore himself, which he wrote, drunk, on a Carnival night in Venice:
So we’ll go no more a-roving
So late into the night,
Though the heart be still as loving,
And the moon be still as bright.
For the sword outwears its sheath,
And the soul wears out the breast,
And the heart must pause to breathe,
And Love itself have rest.
Though the night was made for loving,
And the day returns too soon,
Yet we’ll go no more a-roving
By the light of the moon.
“Ode to a Nightingale” it’s not. Indeed, it comes close to the doggerel of greeting card verse, and an academic critic isn’t given much of substance to “interrogate,” but the three stanzas approach the platonic condition of lyric utterance and engrave themselves on memory at a first reading.
It was Byron’s knack to speak in marble, as it was for only a few other poets—Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Pope, Keats, Tennyson, Yeats. Auden was the last, since when; though there have been a few poets who’ve earned two or three citations in Bartlett’s, there are none who have been so unfailing a source of plums and one-liners as Byron.
If Byron’s poetry were limited to his various “Stanzas for Music” and poems of love, loss, and ineffable self-pity, it would need no more by way of an introduction than Enjoy! But that would leave the main continent unexplored. For Byron was much more than another crooner of old sweet songs. He had ambitions that could only be satisfied on the scale of the big players—Shakespeare, Dante, Tasso, Goethe; accordingly he wrote a goodly number of long narrative poems, sustained meditations, and verse dramas. However, in none of these ventures—excepting the picaresque verse-novel Don Juan—has Byron won friends among today’s critics. Indeed, a major vein of his work, the many Oriental Tales, such as “The Bride of Abydos” or “The Giaour,” have become the bêtes noires of an entire school of criticism, Post-Colonial Theory, as exemplified in the work of Edward Said, author of Orientalism. These critics are concerned to show that the machinery of such romances—the harems and their doe-eyed odalisques, the sighs, the pirates, the derring-do—are all not simply beneath the notice of mature readers, but bad for us, because they trivialize foreign cultures and fail to do justice to their diversity. In short, Byron is politically incorrect, and not only with respect to his Orientalism, but in the way his art embodies the Male Gaze. Breathes there a sophomore who would not bring a charge of harassment against the professor who required her to read such verses as these?
Her eye’s dark charm ’twere vain to tell,
But gaze on that of the Gazelle,
It will assist thy fancy well;
As large, as languishingly dark,
But Soul beam’d forth in every spark
That darted from beneath the lid,
Bright as the jewel of Giamschid.
Yea, Soul, and should our prophet say
That form was nought but breathing clay,
By Alla! I would answer nay. . . .
“The Giaour,” 11. 473–82
This is the territory not of Apollo and his Muses but Xena: Warrior Princess. Indeed, if poets have left off catering to such needs, it is only because movies and television do the job so much better. Byron’s Oriental Tales must be read in the same spirit as one watches Valentino as The Sheik or Hedy Lamarr as DeMille’s Delilah—a spirit not of camp in the snickering, Sontagean sense but rather of a happy surrender to one’s own inner twelve-year-old and sheer bad taste.
Byron can be thought of as one of the inventors of Hollywood, but so too can Sir Walter Scott—and such composers as Verdi and Berlioz, such painters as Delacroix and J. M. W. Turner. I mention these four in particular because each found inspiration for major work in Byron’s verse tales and dramas. As have myriad others. There have been six operas based on “The Bride of Abydos,” another six taken from “The Corsair,” and eight from “Sardanapalus” (not to mention the songs set to his lyrics: seventy-three just for “She Walks in Beauty”). Such posthumous creativity is a surer testimony to the merit of a poet’s work than any amount of critical “interrogation.” The poet who inflamed the imaginations of Verdi, Mascagni, Schoenberg, Gounod, Hindemith, and Busoni certainly had to have been doing something right.
And still we have not touched on Byron’s greatest works, the four cantos of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, and the unending epic impromptu, Don Juan. The latter is a book-length work and would need an introduction all its own. The Byron who wrote it was another poet than the one who wrote the other narrative poems, with the exception of “Beppo,” a short story told in ninety-nine stanzas of ottava rima, the same verse form employed in Don Juan, in which Byron found, for perhaps the first time in all poetry, the cadences of his own voice. Not the voice of The Poet, in its bardic or lyric vein, but the voice of the funny, flirty, snobbish, bawdy, brawling celebrity, rock superstar and aristocrat that was George Gordon, aka Lord Byron.
Of course, it may simply be a mask, a persona, but the illusion that one is meeting a real person who has been transformed into ottava rima is still compelling two centuries later, and once your ear is tuned to that voice the entire oeuvre begins to resonate.
For that reason Byron may be the most living of all the Dead White Males who wrote poetry. Keats will shiver your soul to a deeper depth, and Wordsworth elevate it to a higher altitude, but if you simply want to spend the night with your best friend, Byron’s the man.
Begin with Childe Harold. That’s how his own world got to know him first, and it’s still the best entrée. Here is the Byron who became the first matinee idol poet. He sets his wit aside and fixes his gaze on you and pours his heart out in a nonstop monologue about Napoleon and all the brave soldiers who died at Waterloo; about the most spine-tingling of Alpine thunderstorms, and the sheer genius of Jean Jacques Rousseau; and oh yes, his half-sister Augusta, whom he too dearly loved, and the daughter separated from him by an ocean; he will open the door to his soul, and to yours, too—though with Byron it is sometimes hard to get a word in edgewise, but that’s the problem of having a genius for a friend. Childe Harold is the ultimate all-night bull session, and to read it is to be twenty-four again and know you’ll live forever.
1. Recently that hint has been taken up by the novelist Tom Holland, who has portrayed Byron as a vampire in three of his novels, Lord of the Dead, Slave of My Thirst, and Deliver Us from Evil.