This section looks at four poems – one tale, two lyrics, and a ‘dramatic poem’ – to illustrate the range of Byron’s generic experimentation between 1814 and 1816. Lara, written in May and June 1814 and published in the same year, belongs to Byron’s so‐called ‘Turkish Tales’, in which he created the ‘masterful, moody outlaws’ that became known as Byronic heroes.1 Byron sardonically claimed the action was meant to take place on the moon.2 His advertisement to the 1814 edition implied that Lara could be read as a sequel to The Corsair, but Leslie Brisman points out that this does not shed much light on the poem.3 Rather, Byron’s Tales represent his interest in the psychological aftershocks of trauma, as Bernard Beatty summarizes: ‘[Byron] is interested in pain as consequential in some sense and, above all, in its recognitions and acknowledgement by those who endure it’.4 This interest spurs his work into the explorations of repression, looming secrets, and the damaging effects of love. The hero is a vehicle for Byron to explore these ideas as the poet shrouds his hero with mystery, with every detail of his Tale suggesting that there is another ‘tale untold’ (Lara 2.25.627).5
In Lara Byron creates a profoundly ambiguous moral universe that makes the reader aware that what we know is always subject to what the speaker tells us; any pretence at the objective is continually thwarted and deferred, with the Tale acting both to ‘invite moral judgement and make that judgement impossible’.6 Paraphrase suggests the narrative intricacy of the work. The poem opens with Lara returning to his ancestral lands with his foreign page, Kaled, to take possession of his estates. It soon becomes apparent that Lara fails to share ‘The common pleasure or the general care; / He did not follow what they all pursued’ (1.4.102–3) and his isolation from his peer group renders him the topic of general discussion as ‘Lara’s vassals prattled of their lord’ (1.9.154). After an unexplained confrontation with Ezzelin, Lara arranges to fight a duel with his adversary, only to fight Otho successfully in the stead of the absent Ezzelin, who disappears to rumours of Lara’s involvement. Such rumours and dissatisfaction with the rule in the region lead to Lara entering into open warfare with his fellow feudal chiefs. Lara becomes the aristocrat who would fight for the rights of his serfs, as ‘that long absence from his native clime / Had left him stainless of Oppression’s crime’ (2.8.170–1). After initial success, soon Lara’s forces are decimated by the superior strength of the armies of the other chiefs. Wounded by an arrow, Lara lies dying, cared for by Kaled, his foreign page, to whom he addresses his dying words in a foreign language despite Otho’s presence. Kaled then reveals that he is a woman, and chooses to die by Lara’s grave.
Despite the apparently comprehensible plot, the story is far from simple owing to its style of narration. The reader pivots from tacit support of Lara, to anger and condemnation of his seeming lack of care for his men and his needlessly antagonistic attitude to Otho. Nor does it seem that we learn anything about the inner life of Lara, or Kaled, or Ezzelin, or Otho. Nigel Leask points to Byron’s poetic skill in this narrative poem where the poet’s aesthetic power and control become part of the poem’s action: ‘Lara shows Byron as a master of suspense, and there is considerable power in his handling of narrative deferral and chilling denouement.’7 Byron, from the beginning, makes the reader aware of the many fissures, and the power of the unexpressed and the unsaid, in the work:
The Serfs are glad through Lara’s wide domain,
And Slavery half forgets her fuedal chain;
He, their unhop’d, but unforgotten lord,
The long self‐exiled chieftain, is restored: (1.1.4)
With ‘half forgets’, Byron suggests the joy of forgetting the painful ties that bind the people to their masters while remembering how impossible such forgetfulness would be. He holds open a hope only to half‐undercut it with a darker understanding of the dehumanizing effect of slavery. Equally, the negative prefixes attached to ‘hoped’ and ‘forgotten’ cancel even as they suggest the states he conjures. Lara ripples with a tension between the tale told and what could be said as Byron makes emotional, physical, and mental states difficult to define. This uneasiness means that the tale told becomes something scrutinized rather than accepted.
Lara forces the reader to enter into the poem’s maze of interpretation as Byron underscores the impossibility of assigning moral judgements, doing so by the perspective shifts he makes in the poem. This is a vital component of Lara’s challenging two‐part design, which, as Jerome McGann argues, was part of his insistence on how his reader must engage closely with his poetry: ‘Byron taught his public how to read his poetry, led them to see (for example) that more was meant in The Giaour and the other tales than met the eye of one who simply read them as exotic tales of adventure.’8 Lara’s themes become dangerously relevant to Britain, and more universally, as class, dangerous rumours, guilt, and uncertainty pervade the text. The French Revolution, with its initial optimistic removal of the aristocrats from power by the people, degenerated into a bloody killing spree, and Byron’s poetry retains this tortured ambiguity. Rather than Lara becoming a symbol of liberation, Byron explicitly complicates Lara’s freeing of his slaves: ‘And cared he for the freedom of the crowd? / He raised the humble but to bend the proud’ (2.9.252–3). The careful, polished couplets, the twists and turns, and digressive sections of the plot, all ensure that the reader must concentrate on the tale told through ‘textual digressions within a tightly controlled formal patterning’.9 The couplet form, though less challenging than Byron’s later ottava rima, is deceptively simple. The text ripples with discontinuities and evasions created, at least in part, through Byron’s judicious use of form. Lara exerts a hold on the reader through such disruptive tactics as we move through the couplets, trying to catch a glimpse of his hero.
Lara, though possessing a mysterious past, is intriguing because of the teller’s skill, not by virtue of being the subject of the tale. The narrative is broken by our incomplete understanding of what has actually happened. Lacking the precise content of Lara’s past, or Kaled’s identity, or of the grounds of Ezzelin’s complaint, or if we should support Lara’s fight, the reader is left to follow the meandering tale. The narrator creates Lara’s intrigue, guessing at rather than observing his character:
There was in him a vital scorn of all:
As if the worst had fall’n which could befall,
He stood a stranger in this breathing world,
An erring spirit from another hurled;
A thing of dark imaginings, that shaped
By choice the perils he by chance escaped;
But ’scaped in vain, for in their memory yet
His mind would half exult and half regret: (1.3.313–20)
Though apparently offering information, the lines heighten rather than dispel mystery. The ‘As if’ of line 314 undoes the sense that this speculation is based on fact and the narrator introduces the idea that Lara is both more than and separate from the greater mass of humanity. Aesthetic beauty sings through the lines; ‘breathing world’ shocks with both its obvious yet original strength and ‘erring spirit’ carefully reminds us of Milton’s Satan while refusing to commit to the identification. Lara’s ‘inexplicably mixed’ (1.289) character defies categorization as his silence becomes the vacuum that must be filled by all observers: ‘His silence formed a theme for others’ prate— / They guess’d—they gazed—they fain would know his fate’ (1.17.293–4). If, for Nigel Leask, ‘the poem’s subject is repression’,10 here Byron suggests that for Lara’s observers, the common theme is obsession. The dashes scored across the page suggest the tantalizing longing to classify Lara comfortably within the bounds of their understanding as Byron almost pathologizes their speculative mania for answers. Lara, a highly accomplished narrative poem, becomes almost a psychological exploration of its eponymous hero and its narrator as it leaves its reader with more questions than answers.
‘When We Two Parted’, composed between August and September 1815, feigns a confessional simplicity even as it misdirects the reader. Showcasing Byron’s superb ability with metre and rhyme, the poem is divided into four sections of eight alternate rhymed lines in tightly compressed trimeter with varying stresses. Roughly speaking, each of the eight lines is broken into an iamb, followed by an anapaest, with the odd‐numbered lines containing a final unstressed beat:
Thy vows are all broken,
And light is thy fame;
I hear thy name spoken,
And share in its shame. (‘When We Two Parted’, 13–16)
Trailing his bleeding heart across its stanzas, Byron cleverly positions himself as standing brooding and apart from the group as he deals with his secret love and secret betrayal. Though ‘When We Two Parted’ belonged to a collection published in 1816, Byron labels it 1808, and Jerome McGann rightly points out that the dating of the poem is a deliberate attempt to mislead his readers: ‘But the lines were not written in 1808 – that was a ruse of Byron’s – they were written in 1815; and their immediate subject was Lady Frances Wedderburn Webster. Byron manipulated his 1816 text in order to hide that fact. But he was also manipulating another, altogether invisible text – a poem which he wrote in 1812 to Lady Caroline Lamb.’11 Though Byron might claim that he wrote these lines earlier, many in Byron’s London social milieu would be aware of the poem’s true context, and the 1812 poem to Lady Caroline Lamb that had formed part of ‘When We Two Parted’.12 Byron creates groups of the ‘knowing’ and uses his poetry to signal indirectly to their members in a deliberate manipulation of the concept of lyric. Lyric poetry fashions a relationship with its reader based on sincerity. Byron undermines this fragile trust and, with great care and skill, transforms the lyric.
‘Stanzas to [Augusta]’ was written July 1816 and published that year. It complements the ‘Epistle to Augusta’ (written August 1816 and published 1831) in being addressed to Augusta Leigh (Byron’s half‐sister). The lines move between using three anapaestic feet and an unstressed final syllable, and combining iambs and anapaests, and exhibit subtle metrical flexibility. The eight‐line stanzas consist of alternate rhymes, mixing feminine and masculine rhymes to shape and disrupt the sense of set patterning. Byron allows his voice freedom to fall into rhymes without the rhymes seeming over‐determined. Sharing its themes with the ‘Epistle to Augusta’, ‘Stanzas’ repeatedly isolates the poet and his addressee. It asserts that its addressee, ostensibly Augusta, shares his grief with a loyalty and love that his heart ‘never hath found but in thee’ (‘Stanzas to [Augusta]’, 8). Here it echoes the language of Byron’s letter to Augusta in 1816, where he writes tenderly to her: ‘What a fool I was to marry—and you not very wise—my dear— […] I shall never find any one like you—nor you (vain as it may seem) like me. We are just formed to pass our lives together, and therefore—we—at least—I—am by a crowd of circumstances removed from the only being who could ever have loved me, or whom I can unmixedly feel attached to.’13 The poem mingles both the confessional and the artificial as Byron makes poetry out of pain rather than simply transcribing it.
Though human, thou didst not deceive me,
Though woman, thou didst not forsake,
Though loved, thou forborest to grieve me,
Though slander’d, thou never could’st shake,—
Though trusted, thou didst not betray me,
Though parted, it was not to fly,
Though watchful, ’twas not to defame me,
Nor, mute, that the world might belie. (‘Stanzas to [Augusta]’, 25–32)
The patterning of stanza 4 is relentless in its anaphora as it dramatizes Augusta’s uniqueness. Dividing each line into two, Byron embodies the separation between himself and Augusta and the negatives serve to emphasize his treatment at the hands of ‘the world’ (33) from which he attempts to separate Augusta and himself. Isolation from the world and his beloved became a recurrent theme in Byron’s poetry and drama, and though Byron suffered from this alienation, it proved the spark that set his poetry alight.
Manfred, written in 1816 and 1817, represents an early foray into what Byron calls his ‘mental theatre’,14 and Byron wrote it as a dramatic poem not intended for performance. The play centres on Manfred, the play’s ambiguous aristocratic hero, a late version of the Cain type, mingled with Prometheus. Byron explored various versions of these types throughout his career.15 It opens with Manfred invoking ‘Ye spirits of the unbounded Universe!’ (1.1.29) as he demands of the seven assembled spirits that he should be granted forgetfulness, but will not name that which he wishes to forget, telling the spirit ‘Ye know it, and I cannot utter it’ (1.1.138). The spirits cannot grant him this, nor death, but appear to him in the shape of Astarte, the beautiful dead woman who seems strongly connected to Manfred’s unnamed guilt. Bemoaning the conflict of the flesh and the spirit, Manfred laments later that we are ‘Half dust, half deity, alike unfit / To sink or soar’ (1.2.40–1). A chamois hunter saves Manfred from a suicide attempt, and in their subsequent conversation, Manfred sheds some light on Astarte, implying an incestuous relationship between the pair before the chamois hunter counsels Manfred to be stoical in the face of existence. When Manfred encounters the Witch of the Alps, he reveals the depths of his torment as he claims of Astarte that ‘I loved her, and destroy’d her!’ (2.2.117). The Witch demands his submission, but Manfred refuses to grant it, keeping his autonomy despite the temptation to surrender to her will. Likewise, when he meets Arimanes, ‘Sovereign of Sovereigns!’ (2.4.23), he will not kneel before him, and his refusal leads them to grant him the boon of seeing her. But the vision of her, and her words, which do not grant him the forgiveness he begs, convulse him. Having been promised by Astarte that his woes would end the next day, Manfred becomes calm ahead of his encounter with the Abbot of St Maurice. The Abbot attempts to convert Manfred to Christianity, asking him to show penitence and beg pardon. Manfred reads his overtures as requiring him to submit to a higher power, and refuses, telling him, ‘The lion is alone, and so am I’ (3.1.123), as the Abbot laments that ‘This should have been a noble creature’ (3.1.160) and decides to follow him in secret. Following Manfred into the tower, the Abbot makes a final attempt to save Manfred, and the spirits appear to bid him to follow them. Defying both the Abbot and the spirits, Manfred insists on his own will, and his final words, ‘Old man! ’tis not so difficult to die’ (3.4.151), underscore a sense of self‐mastery that endures from the beginning to the end of the play.
For Jerome McGann, ‘Manfred is a nakedly autobiographical piece in which Byron tries to represent what sort of life can remain for a man once he knows not only that his soul is a sepulchre, but that he himself has made it so’.16 Yet Manfred seems another attempt at dealing with ‘the inadequacy of [man’s] state to his Conceptions’,17 a task that preoccupied Byron throughout his poetic and dramatic career. Manfred openly challenges everything, attempting to command spirits, explore the limitations and freedom of the self, and remain imperiously in charge of his own destiny. While it might be a form of self‐mastery, it is a bitterly broken form of heroism where the self comes up against its own destruction, leading Frederick Garber to argue: ‘At the dead end there is only himself, those closed‐in walls and that bitter kingdom of the mind in which he is lord and subject and, he argues, his own destroyer.’18 This emphasis on human, fragile power based on the will rather than divine strength means that Byron keeps human vulnerability in play. Despite the commanding tone of Manfred’s speeches to the spirits, there is a desperation beneath the lines as Manfred struggles with his guilt for the unnamed crime. As noted above, the crime itself revolves around Astarte, where Byron hints at an incestuous relationship with this now dead figure. But the crime is only in the eyes of the world; Manfred adopts a pose of splendid isolation from the opinions of society. His rejection of the social order should create a new relationship of self and world, new boundaries, and new standards of value. Yet this new relationship never truly emerges. Manfred might be an isolated hero but he never adopts a tantalizing potential freedom. Although he seemingly could choose to be otherwise, Manfred still appears to feel sinful as he remains tormented by guilt. He may insist that he creates his own rules, and appears powerful in commanding the spirits, but he punishes himself through his adherence to the rules of a society he struggles to reject. While asserting the power of the individual’s mind to create its own heaven and its own hell in the manner of Milton’s Satan, his own mind punishes him for a crime defined by society.
In the conclusion of the final Act, Manfred banishes the Spirits with great authority:
Thou didst not tempt me, and thou couldst not tempt me;
I have not been thy dupe, nor am thy prey—
But was my own destroyer, and will be
My own hereafter.—Back, ye baffled fiends!
The hand of death is on me—but not yours!
[The Demons disappear. (Manfred 3.4.137–41)
Manfred describes himself as a ‘destroyer’ and asserts his potency through his choice of wording in ‘I have not been thy dupe’, assuming that he holds the power to choose not to be a pawn in their game. Yet there is an implicit fear on his part that he was never in control. Instead, society, the spirits, and religion continue to exert power no matter how hard Manfred tries to disavow their importance. But Byron also points up Manfred’s defiant self‐control. The stage direction, ‘The Demons disappear’, shows Byron subtly changing Manfred’s interlocutors from the earlier description as a singular ‘spirit’ into multiple ‘Demons’. The change and distortion confirms Manfred’s power, and the commanding nature of the speech reaffirms the power of his mind to choose his own fate, even if that fate is death. Yet the play’s tragedy is to show that such a display of titanic defiance and self‐determination only leads Manfred to his death. Heroism, self‐determination, and overweening strength end up destroyed. Here, ‘There woos no home, nor hope, nor life, save what is here’ (Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage 4.105.945). The problem becomes something so deep as to be unalterable, and as Peter Manning writes: ‘Society does not need redemption; Manfred alone, like Milton’s Satan, is cut off from joy.’19 In Manfred Byron created the epitome of his own blasted and wasted hero type whose triumph must be his destruction.