Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, A Romaunt was written and published in stages across the poet’s career. The first two cantos, with their imitation or mockery of Spenserian ‘romance’ and their use of a travelogue format, were published in 1812. Canto 3, written in the aftermath of Byron’s departure from England that year, and dealing, among other things, with his visit to the battlefield of Waterloo, and response to the Swiss Alps, was published in 1816. Much of it was composed after meeting Shelley in Geneva in May the same year. Canto 4, set in Italy, appeared from the press in 1818. Inevitably the work’s focus and tones shift, but it still seems appropriate to refer to it as a single poem while bearing in mind the fact of its complicated publishing history; there are purposeful continuities and developments throughout, nowhere more so than in the room each canto gives itself to wander and digress, often dramatizing and enacting an interplay of feelings or attitudes.
Mainly written in 1809 and 1810, the original manuscript of the first two cantos underwent pre‐publication revisions. Byron responded to criticism on political and religious grounds from his friend, R. C. Dallas, and his publisher, John Murray, and included additional stanzas prompted by events in his life, such as the stanzas (96–7) at the end of canto 2 about the deaths of various figures in his life, including his mother and John Edleston, a fellow Cambridge student with whom Byron was in love. The poem was an immediate sensation. His upper‐middle‐class readership delighted in accounts of travel to Spain, Greece, and Turkey, all areas of topical interest: Spain was a theatre of war, the Peninsular War being fought there against Napoleon’s invading forces. Moreover, readers were intrigued by the way in which Byron depicted a version of his experiences through the figure of Childe Harold. The Byronic hero was launched, a brooding, self‐divided figure, shifting between gloom and ardour, cloaked in impenetrable mystery, apart from the society which prompted his every antithetical move. This projected self is not quite identifiable with nor is it entirely separable from Byron the poet; at the same time, Harold and Byron share in one another’s life, progressively so, until by the fourth canto Byron, in his Preface, concedes that ‘there will be found less of the pilgrim than in any of the preceding [cantos], and that slightly, if at all, separated from the author speaking in his own person. The fact is,’ Byron continues, ‘that I had become weary of drawing a line which every one seemed determined not to perceive.’1 But the provocative blurring of that line is among Byron’s most arresting indeterminacies in the poem.
The poem handles with shrewd artistry the interplay between Harold and the poet‐narrator; running on parallel lines, each figure embodies a process of what in canto 1 Byron calls ‘Consciousness awaking to her woes’ (1.92.941); each does so in the context of historical and geopolitical realities that are rendered with gusto. Harold may seem world‐weary. Byron’s narrative presence and extensive prose notes, at the foot of the page in the original edition, show a mind absorbed, even as he is often appalled, by what is happening in the world. An example is his assault on the Scottish Earl of Elgin’s theft and selling of sculptures from Athens in canto 2. Here Byron is every inch the admiring disciple of Pope, depicting Elgin with swift contempt: ‘Cold as the crags upon his native coast, / His mind as barren and his heart as hard’ (2.12.102–3). A long Appendix reinforces the attack.
The poem is, thus, generically and tonally inclusive. It does not provide a smoothly comfortable reading experience, often dispatching a topic as vehemently as it addressed it; the Elgin Marbles stanzas, for instance, pass into the abrupt transition, ‘But where is Harold? shall I then forget / To urge the gloomy wanderer o’er the wave?’ (2.16.136–7). Yet these abruptnesses are inseparable from qualities that make the poem compelling: above all, a restless intensity of engagement with experience, a controlled narratorial impatience, and, as Jerome McGann notes, an implicit conviction that what seems disparate connects vitally. Thus, the longing for individual freedom (embodied in Harold) mirrors the desire for political liberation (the narrator’s wish for Greece).2 The first canto, setting up a rhythm that is pervasive, moves between discovery and disillusion, voyaging and finding that there is nothing new under the sun, responsiveness to contemporary history and an air of near‐sardonic detachment. The ‘Pilgrimage’ of the title, as Alice Levine observes, is ‘ironic, secular, Romantic’, and yet the questing is real, finding its best image in the third canto’s self‐reflexive discovery of ‘wanderers o’er Eternity / Whose bark drives on and on, and anchor’d ne’er shall be’ (3.70.669–70), an image Shelley replies to in the final stanza of Adonais, hearing an anticipatory echo of his own aspiring impulses in the enjambment and driving on that makes even ‘Eternity’ a realm of process.3
Sometimes the narrator’s mood is that of Hamlet in the Gravedigger’s scene, as when, at the Parthenon in Athens, he comments on a skull:
Look on its broken arch, its ruin’d wall,
Its chambers desolate, and portals foul:
Yes, this was once Ambition’s airy hall,
The dome of Thought, the palace of the Soul … (2.6.46–9)
If life seems futile here, the thought only adds a spur to the narrator’s subsequent re‐embracing of experiential possibilities. Within a few stanzas he writes, with seemingly extempore immediacy, of a calm night at sea, ‘when Meditation bids us feel / We once have lov’d, though love is at an end’, when ‘The heart, lone mourner of its baffled zeal, / Though friendless now, will dream it had a friend’ (2.23.199–202). This writing unexpectedly and powerfully connects the reader to Byron. If it involves our acceptance of an achieved rhetoric, with its theatrical self‐presentation, the rhetoric seems to well up from depths of feeling. Byron’s syntax, bending back on itself, with its ‘Though’ clauses, is in touch with the way feelings move to and fro in time, and the pronoun ‘We’, rather seductively, includes the reader in Byron’s depiction of what it is to have a ‘heart’ that is the ‘lone mourner of its baffled zeal’.
Byron’s public voice is among his most spectacular if not always comfortable successes. One of the novel guises he adopts in canto 1, as in later cantos, is that of the all‐noticing, disenchanted eye‐witness, or near‐eye‐witness. So, Albuera, which staged one of the bloodiest battles of the Peninsular War, earns the sardonic tag ‘glorious field of grief’ (1.43.459), before the idea of military glory is exploded as a meaningless ‘game of lives’ and the dead elicit a lip‐curling lack of compassion, ‘hirelings’ (1.44.473) who fight ‘for their country’s good, / And die, that living might have prov’d her shame’ (1.44.473–4). Yet within a few stanzas the poet commends the Maid of Saragossa as a fearsome warrior against the French invaders; she ‘Stalks with Minerva’s step where Mars might quake to tread’ (1.54.566), wise in her forcefulness, or so the allusion to ‘Minerva’s step’ suggests, yet ultimately a monstrous wonder rather than an admirable heroine.
Or, perhaps, she is both at the same time. The mobility of the poetry makes the Spenserian stanza a means of change and redirection, within and between stanzaic units. When Byron describes a bullfight at Cadiz, he finishes with a stanza in which the slain bull is, at first, brute animal and distant relation to tragic hero:
Where his vast neck just mingles with the spine,
Sheath’d in his form the deadly weapon lies.
He stops – he starts – disdaining to decline:
Slowly he falls, amidst triumphant cries,
Without a groan, without a struggle dies. (1.79.783–7)
The poet puts himself and the reader in the bloody arena, fascinated, sickened spectators who move beyond mere spectatorship as Byron ratchets up his intensity of perception. The ordering of the first two lines makes us see the fatal anatomical area first, the vulnerable place ‘Where his vast neck just mingles with the spine’, then the ‘deadly weapon’ securely located within it, ‘Sheath’d’, as Byron puts it with characteristically bitter wit. The third line captures, in little, a drama of defiance through its strong verbs and caesurae. Resistance to the inevitable is futile, and therefore in its own way, affecting. It is not that Byron says this; more that he implies it through the rendering of the animal’s dignified descent, before the b rhymes find their focus in the pivotal verb, ‘dies’. Capturing the crowd’s satisfied sense of vicarious triumph, the mood of the stanza’s last four lines changes; the bull becomes a corpse, a ‘dark bulk’ (1.79.790) both honoured – it is ‘pil’d’ (1.79.789) within ‘The decorated car’ (1.79.788) – and hurried off‐stage. Few poets can match Byron’s capacity to give us what feels like ‘the thing itself’, as he does in this celebrated passage and elsewhere.
Canto 2 addresses the plight of modern Greece, apostrophized as ‘Fair Greece! sad relic of departed worth!’ (2.73.693), a phrase that shows Byron’s capacity for suggestive, epigrammatic speech. The ‘worth’ may have ‘departed’, but it lingers in the reader’s mind, having as well as being the last word, and Byron looks into the future as he imagines the role he himself, in his own way, will undertake when he asks, invoking the memory of the Spartan hero Lysander, ‘who that gallant spirit shall resume, / Leap from Eurotas’ banks, and call thee from the tomb?’ (2.73.700–1). The stanzas on Greece bookend an account of Albania and its ruler Ali Pacha, again demonstrating Byron’s political savvy; Ali’s ‘dread command’ in this outpost of the crumbling Ottoman Empire ‘Is lawless law; for with a bloody hand / He sways a nation, turbulent and bold’ (2.47.418–20). Byron senses that brutal autocracy is necessary if some kind of feudal stability is to hold, even as he admires the spirit of those who ‘Disdain his power’ (2.48.422).
Byron is looking into the crucible out of which our modern Europe, with its continued national conflicts, was being born. What is born coexists with what is dying, and, as noted above, he addresses the fact of mortality in two of the entire poem’s finest stanzas (96 and 97); as always in Byron’s best work, there is a strong sense of rising rhetorically yet passionately to the occasion, as in these lines:
Oh! ever loving, lovely, and belov’d!
How selfish Sorrow ponders on the past,
And clings to thoughts now better far remov’d!
But Time shall tear thy shadow from me last. (2.96.900–3)
The quatrain deploys its rhymes to capture the movements of feeling, a glimmer of self‐rebuke (‘selfish Sorrow’) eddying in the verse until the magnificent flourish of the final line makes ‘Sorrow’ the medium of unforgettable statement.
Canto 3 of the poem deploys this growing ability to move fluidly within the Spenserian stanza. The canto alludes to the previous cantos, as though Byron were at once in control of the possibilities offered by, and the sorrowful reader of, his past self:
Again I seize the theme then but begun,
And bear it with me, as the rushing wind
Bears the cloud onwards: in that Tale I find
The furrows of long thought, and dried‐up tears … (3.3.21–4)
He is ready to ‘seize the theme’, but he looks back at his poem as though it bequeathed unalterable traces. The question of why he is writing the poem, and what he is doing in the process, finds expression in the remarkable stanzas, 6 and 7, in which he asserts that ‘’Tis to create, and in creating live / A being more intense, that we endow / With form our fancy, gaining as we give / The life we image, even as I do now’ (3.6.46–9). Byron approaches ‘creating’ from the perspective of the poet as his own first reader, able to ‘live / A being more intense’, an intensifying caught in the wording, with its air of catching new fire with each phrase and rhyme, and coming to an electrifying close in ‘even as I do now’. The short supplementary clause brings with it a revitalized sense of the poem in process as means of living by other means for poet and reader. And yet the next stanza reminds us of the slumps as well as soarings of which this poem is capable. If stanza 6 prizes the ‘Soul of my thought! with whom I traverse earth’ (51), stanza 7 recoils from thought, now depicted not as benignly self‐delighting, but as self‐ravening, self‐destructive: ‘Yet must I think less wildly: —’, Byron writes; ‘I have thought / Too long and darkly’ (3.7.55–6).4
Creativity is gift and curse, it transpires, and that double condition pervades the poem. Harold’s own flights of idealistic star‐gazing grant temporary relief from ‘earth, and earth‐born jars, / And human frailties’ (3.14.120–1), but the ‘jars’ get the better of the ‘stars’ with which they collide in an expressively dissonant rhyme; ‘this clay will sink / Its spark immortal’, says Byron of the force that opposes the spirit’s yearning, ‘envying it the light / To which it mounts as if to break the link / That keeps us from yon heaven which woos us to its brink’ (3.14.123–6). Remembered by Shelley in Adonais, that passage exemplifies Byron’s control of overlapping tones: the sardonically disenchanted (‘as if to break the link’) dwells together or alongside the renewal of hope in ‘yon heaven’ (emphasis added) and the suggestion of the almost agonizingly distant nearness of hope’s realization in ‘woos us to its brink’.
Harold, Byron’s surrogate, still serves a purpose in this canto, less puppet than visitor who prompts a secondary commentary that quickly turns primary. He stands upon ‘this place of skull, / The grave of France, the deadly Waterloo!’ (3.18.154–5), which leads, after a powerful evocation of the ball before the battle and the subsequent destruction, to an inward poetry marked by external horror. ‘And thus the heart will break, yet brokenly live on’ (3.32.288), Byron concludes one stanza about those grieving for the dead, before he passes, in an enjambed stanza that was the last addition to the canto, into an extended comparison between the broken heart and a ‘broken mirror’ (3.33.289).5 The comparison turns out to be an image for the poem itself, which ‘makes / A thousand images of one that was’ (3.33.290–1). Everywhere, as Byron reads modern history and the Swiss scenery, he sees a train of distorting mirrors of his own drives and energies: Napoleon and Rousseau are two such figures (both of whom are picked up by Shelley in The Triumph of Life, with Adonais his most impassioned and thoughtful responses to the canto). Napoleon induces in the verse an attempt to arrive at antithetically balanced judgement that reminds one, momentarily, of Dryden and Pope, but Byron’s response to the figure he styles ‘Conqueror and captive of the earth’ (3.37.325) is never content with satirical detachment. One seems to watch a trembling beam that is now kicked one way, now another – but at the end of the tortuous labyrinth run through by diction and syntax Byron’s identification with the fallen emperor is evident: ‘But quiet to quick bosoms is a hell, / And there hath been thy bane’ (3.42.370–1). And yet distance quickly reclaims the ascendancy: ‘This makes the madmen who have made men mad / By their contagion’ (3.43.379–80).
For Shelley, in Prometheus Unbound, ‘The voice which is contagion to the world’ (2.3.10) is transgressively inspiring. And, for Byron, the ‘contagion’ spread by ‘Sophists, Bards, Statesmen, all unquiet things / Which stir too strongly the soul’s secret springs’ (3.43.382–3) is not wholly bad, even if it prompts him, ‘dosed’ by Shelley ‘with Wordsworth physic even to nausea’,6 as he was that fateful Genevan summer, to turn to the apparent offer of quiet made by nature: ‘to me’, he asserts, ‘High mountains are a feeling, but the hum / Of human cities torture’ (3.72.682–3). But the feeling of ‘torture’ seems more plausible than the claimed‐for ‘feeling’ in the presence of nature, and there is a strong sense in the verse of trying out a Wordsworthian recourse to nature, but not finding it completely convincing. Like Shelley, he finally sides with ‘the human mind’s imaginings’ (‘Mont Blanc’, 143) rather than with the intuition of ‘something far more deeply interfused’ (Wordsworth, ‘Tintern Abbey’, 97). Yet whereas Shelley pursues a poetic‐philosophical quest, when he uses the phrase ‘secret springs’ (4) in ‘Mont Blanc’, Byron is always and primarily, if not only, ‘blood, bone, marrow, passion, feeling’ (Don Juan, cancelled stanza, 2), his ‘secrets springs’ are always likely to give to tidal overflow, oceanic engulfments.
And yet, emotion in Byron is never so controlled as when at its most seemingly unbridled. A stanza resonant with apparently rhetorical questions – ‘Are not the mountains, waves, and skies, a part / Of me and of my soul, as I of them?’ (3.75.707–8) – is at once compelling in its urgency and knowingly aware of itself as Wordsworthian ventriloquism. The mood passes, ‘But this is not my theme’ (3.76.716); Byron is alone again, his poetic consciousness beginning its search for images of itself in a related but different direction, this time through reflections on ‘the self‐torturing sophist, wild Rousseau, / The apostle of affliction’ (3.77.725–6). In his revolutionary ardour, eroticized yearning, Rousseau seems a double of Shelley, Byron’s travelling companion round Lake Geneva, but he is also a version of an aspect of Byron himself, who, in canto 3 at any rate, is tempted by, even as he resists, a Shelleyan‐Rousseauistic yearning after ‘ideal beauty’ (740). The stanza moves through various transitions, including further description of nature, back to where it started, thoughts of the poet’s daughter, the last in a series of figures pulling at the poet’s desire for relationship, confirming him in his isolation, or in the virtual companionship made possible by poetry. Movingly, chillingly, Ada becomes a chosen heir, responsive to her father’s ‘voice’: ‘My voice shall with thy future visions blend, / And reach into thy heart, — when mine is cold, — / A token and a tone, even from thy father’s mould’ (3.115.1073–5). There, the vision of futurity is comparable to Keats’s warm and capable hand icily extended towards us; much has to do, in Byron’s case, by the way in which ‘reach’ turns, across the line‐ending, into a transitive verb, ‘reaching’ into the daughter’s heart, ‘A token and a tone’.
The final canto looks at art as a trophy, sometimes a hollow trophy, wrested from the ravages of history. History’s ‘one page’ (4.108.969) always involves ‘the same rehearsal of the past’ (4.108.965), Byron asserts on the Palatine Hill, surrounded by Roman ruins. This is a grimly pessimistic vision, one familiar from Edward Gibbon’s monumental Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–88); the annals of Rome depict a cycle that runs its course from ‘Freedom’ through ‘Glory’ (4.108.966) to end up in ‘barbarism at last’ (4.108.967). Modern Venice tells a comparable story, even as Byron does not idealize the nature of her former power: ‘Though making many slaves,’ he says of the city when an independent republic, ‘herself still free’ (4.14.122). Venice lives on, for all its ‘infamous repose’ (4.13.117) under Austrian rule, as an idea, immortalized in literature, prompting Byron’s reformulation of creativity as a form of compensation: ‘The beings of the mind are not of clay; / Essentially immortal, they create / And multiply in us a brighter ray / And more beloved existence’ (4.5.37–40); these beings are capable of ‘replenishing the void’ (4.5.45) which ordinary living creates.
Exemplifying the precarious status of its own ideal through its shifting, nervy caesurae and subliminally ironic diction (‘more beloved’ speaks volumes of the poet’s disenchantment with love), such writing offers an exalted yet disquieting view of art. Later in the canto, art is not exempt from Byron’s astonishingly eloquent assault on human values; a form of false projection like love, artistic creativity is, on this account, a form of illness: ‘Of its own beauty is the mind diseased, / And fevers into false creation’ (4.122.1090–1). That such ‘false creation’ has its own feverish beauty as it evokes the impossible origin and goal of art, ‘The unreach’d Paradise of our despair’ (4.122.1096), typifies the intensity, drive, and drama of canto 4, simultaneously bleak and unmelodramatically exhilarating, an instance of Romantic poetry driving to extremes, and finding in the end consolation in the sublimities of St Peter’s and the ocean, and in the knowledge that, in the act of poetry, there is always the possibility of escape from mere hopelessness, of impressing on history and the world an answering imprint of poetic self. In Byron’s words, which might be an epigraph for the canto and the whole poem, and, as suggested at the end of the previous section, his poetry more generally, ‘There woos no home, nor hope, nor life, save what is here’ (4.945).