Selected Poems (149 page)

NOTES

A Fragment (‘When, to their airy hall, my fathers’ voice’)

Written 1803; printed in
Fugitive Pieces
(1806); retained in
Hours of Idleness
(1807).

In this Ossianic ‘fragment’, as Byron called it, he invokes his noble ancestors as ground for a heroic destiny.

Criticism: Jerome J. McGann,
Fiery Dust
(‘Feeling as He Writes: The Genesis of the Myth’).

To Woman

Written 1805(?); printed in
Fugitive Pieces
(1806); retained in
Hours of Idleness
(1807).

In 1820 Byron wrote Thomas Moore that he ‘knew by heart in 1803’ Moore’s
Poetical Works of the Late Thomas Little
(1801): ‘I believe all the mischief I have ever done, or sung, has been owing to that confounded book of yours’ (
BL
J, Vol. 7, p. 117). Moore’s erotic manner leaves traces throughout Byron’s early verse.

The Cornelian

Written 1805 or 1806; printed in
Fugitive Pieces
(1806); not republished in
Hours of Idleness.

The cornelian was a gift from John Edleston, a Cambridge chorister about whom Byron wrote: ‘he has been my
almost constant
associate since October 1805, when I entered Trinity College… I certainly
love
him more than any human being’ (
BLJ
, Vol. 1, p. 124). Edward Noel Long and others knew that Edleston was the subject, but by late February 1807 Byron was urging Long keep this reference ‘a
Secret
’, adding that although ‘
you
& all the Girls, I know not why think [it] my best’, he omitted the work and ‘most of the amatory poems’ from
Hours of Idleness
(
BLJ
, Vol. 1, pp. 110, 118).

Criticism: Louis Crompton,
Byron and Greek Love
.

To Caroline (‘You say you love, and yet your eye’)

Written 1806(?); printed in
Fugitive Pieces
(1806); not republished in
Hours of Idleness
.

Objections among his Southwell circle to his amorous verses led Byron to drop this and other instances from his first public volume. See note to ‘To Woman’.

ENGLISH BARDS AND SCOTCH
REVIEWERS: A Satire

Begun 1807; enlarged and recast 1808–9; published anonymously March 1809.

In 1807 Byron wrote a satire on ‘the poetry of the present Day’ titled
British Bards
; the condescending notice of
Hours of Idleness
in the
Edinburgh Review
(January 1808) goaded him to include the newly powerful critics, and deepened its tone from Horatian to Juvenalian, as the imitation announced in the note to the opening line indicates (‘What! while with one eternal mouthing hoarse, /Codrus persists on my vex’d ear to force/His
Theseid
, must I, to my fate resign’d/ Hear, ONLY hear, and never pay in kind?’; translated by William Gifford, 11. 1–4). A Whig and half-Scot himself, Byron had not expected scorn from the Whig
Edinburgh Review
; his title shows Byron positioning himself to draw on accumulated English prejudice against the Scots, a tactic also signalled by echoes of Charles Churchill, whose satire
The Prophecy of Famine
(1763) contributed to the campaign of his friend John Wilkes against the ministry of the Scots Lord Bute: for example, ‘Time was’ (1. 103), a recurrent marker in Churchil’s
The Times
(1764), and the echo of the repeated ‘
Health
to great Gloster’ of Churchill’s
Dedication to the Sermons
(1765) in Byron’s ‘Health to great Jeffrey!’ (1. 460; cf. 1. 438). Censure of the debased state of contemporary literature was conventional;
The Baeviad
(1794) and
The Maeviad
(1795), by William Gifford, attacking the English Della Cruscans, led by Robert Merry, were recent precursors (11. 94, 702–3, 741–64). Byron’s praise of Dryden, Pope and formally conservative contemporaries such as Thomas Campbell and Samuel Rogers (11. 799–818), and his reiterated disdain for ‘sons of song [who] descend to trade’ (1. 175) are attitudes that his later styles and commercial success complicated. Some targets remained lifelong: Byron savaged Robert Southey in the Dedication to
Don Juan
, which also mocks William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge,
and he parodied Southey’s
Vision of Judgement
(1821) in The Vision of Judgment (1822) (11. 202–34, 235–54, 255–64); William Lisle Bowles, whose sonnets of ‘sympathy’ (11. 327–62) and 1806 edition of Pope Byron excoriates (11. 363–84), further denigrated Pope in his
Invariable Principles of Poetry
(1819), sparking Byron to answer in two long essays (see CMP, pp. 120–83). The vigorous defence of traditional taste, carried in verse and notes, against ‘romantic’ tendencies ensured the poem’s popularity: the first edition of 1,000 copies sold out; a second edition, augmented, with a Preface and bearing Byron’s name, appeared in May 1809 and also sold out; by 1811 the poem had reached a fourth edition. Other dismissals were altered by experience: the satire, Byron later told Coleridge, ’was written when I was very young and very angry, and has been a thorn in my side ever since; more particularly as almost all the persons animadverted upon became subsequently my acquaintances, and some of them my friends’ (
BLJ
, Vol. 4, p. 286): Lord and Lady Holland and Holland House formed the centre of the Whig society Byron joined after his début in Parliament (11. 519, 540–59); M.G. Lewis, author of
The Monk
(1796) and
Tales of Terror
(1801) (11. 148, 265–82, 919) became a friend, as did Walter Scott (11. 153–84) and Thomas Moore (‘Thomas Little’; see note to ‘To Woman’) (11. 128, 283–94). Byron’s assault on the editor of the
Edinburgh Review
, Francis Jeffrey, whose 1806 duel with Moore he burlesques (11. 464 ff.) and whom he compares to the notorious judge of the ‘Bloody Assizes’ of 1685, George Jefferies (11. 438–59), was motivated by the belief that the notice of
Hours of Idleness
was his; it was rather written by Henry Brougham (1. 524), and Jeffrey later welcomed Byron’s Eastern Tales in the
Edinburgh Review
. Largely at Hollands request, Byron suppressed the printed but not published fifth edition in 1812; ‘it is not in print for sale – nor ever will be – (if I can help it) – again’ (
BLJ
, Vol. 4, p. 318), he declared in 1815, but pirated versions continued to appear.

Epigraphs:
I Henry IV,
III.1.128–9;
Essay on Criticism
(11. 610—11).

Criticism: on the provocation of the
Edinburgh Review
by Byron’s self-presentation in
Hours of Idleness
as ‘Lord Byron, A Minor’, see Kurt Heinzelman, ‘Byron’s Poetry of Politics’.

Lines to Mr Hodgson (Written on Board the Lisbon Packet)

Written 30 June 1809; published in Moore’s
Life
(1830).

Byron sailed for Lisbon on 2 July; this
jeu d’esprit
, sent to Francis Hodgson two days earlier, shows that Byron’s
Childle Harold
mood was not his only one.

Maid of Athens, ere we part

Written 9 February 1810; published with
Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage I-II
(1812).

Addressed to the twelve-year-old daughter of Byron’s landlady at Athens. Byron described himself as ‘dying for love’ of the three Macri sisters, ‘divinities all of them under 15’, but their mother viewed the attentions of the English lord more interestedly (
BLJ
, Vol. 1, p. 240). She was ‘mad enough to imagine I was going to marry the girl’, he reported; ‘I was near bringing away Theresa but the mother asked
30,000
piastres!’ (
BLJ
, Vol. 2, pp. 13, 46). Byron wrote of the Greek refrain (
Zoë mou, sas agapo
),

a Romaic expression of tenderness: if I translate it, I shall affront the gentlemen, as it may seem I supposed they could not; and if I do not I may affront the ladies. For fear of any misconstruction on the part of the latter I shall do so, begging pardon of the learned. It means, ‘My Life, I love you!’

Written after Swimming from Sestos to Abydos

Written 9 May 1810; published with
Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage I—II
(1812).

The poem records Byron’s re-enactment of the exploit, made famous by Ovid (Books XVIII and XIX of the
Heroides
); Musaeus, an Alexandrian poet of the fifth century AD, whose epyllion was translated by George Chapman in 1616; and the
Hero and Leander
of Christopher Marlowe and Chapman (1598). See Leslie A. Marchand,
Byron:
A Biography, Vol. 1, pp. 236–9).

To Thyrza (‘Without a stone to mark the spot’)

Dated 11 October 1811; published with
Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage
I-II (1812).

The first of a series of elegies for John Edleston, of whose death in May Byron had just heard. Moore maintained in his biography of Byron that Thyrza was ‘imaginary’; others assumed from the feminine name that the subject was a woman, an impression in which Byron colluded. Compare
Childe Harold
II.73–81, 891–9. See note to ‘The Cornelian’.

Criticism: Louis Crompton,
Byron and Greek Love.

CHILDE HAROLD’S PILGRIMAGE:

A Romaunt, Cantos I—II

Written from 31 October 1809 to 28 March 1810; published 10 March 1812.

Byron’s travels in 1809—11 provided the materials for this poem, one largely written, as the Preface declares, ‘amidst the scenes which it attempts to describe’. Byron left England for Portugal and Spain on 2 July 1809, accompanied by his friend from Cambridge, John Cam Hobhouse, his valet William Fletcher (I.158), the young son of one of his Newstead tenants, Robert Rushton (1.134) and an old servant, Joe Murray. The itinerary was partly determined by the wartime closing of the Continent, though the Iberian Peninsula too had been invaded by Napoleon in 1807, where local resistance was augmented by a British expeditionary force. On 4 July the party reached Gibraltar, whence Murray and Rushton returned to England; the others proceeded on 19 August to Malta, where Byron had a brief affair with Constance Spencer Smith (II.264–97). They arrived in Albania on 28 September, journeying to Janina and Tepelini, where they met Ali Pasha (II.554), the fierce local overlord, and Byron began the poem. From Christmas until March their centre was Athens. In spring 1810 they sailed to Smyrna, and visited Ephesus and the plains of Troy; on 13 May they arrived in Constantinople, returning to Greece on 17 July. Hobhouse then departed for England, and Byron settled in Athens until 21 April, when he returned to England by way of a month’s stay in Malta, landing at Portsmouth on 11 July 1811.

Childe Harold
derives from the eighteenth-century topographical poem, but so transformed that Scott could greet it as ‘certainly the most original poem which we have had this many a day’ (quoted in Samuel Smiles,
A Publisher and His Friends
, Vol. 1, p. 214). The Spenserian form, as the Preface observes, citing James Beattie, author of
The Minstrel
(1771–4), licensed flexibility of tone and a structure with ‘no pretension to regularity’. In praising Byron in the
Quarterly Review
(March 1812) for conveying ‘a good deal of curious information’ about Greece, George Ellis pointed to the topical appeal of the work. English interest in the unfamiliar eastern Mediterranean was high, fed by books of travels and the strategic importance of the region. The contrast Byron draws in the second canto between Greece’s heroic past and its condition under Turkish rule, including his attack on Thomas Bruce, seventh Earl of Elgin who, while serving as envoy to the Porte (the Ottoman Empire), removed from Athens the sculptures of the Parthenon (II.91–135), spurred the philhellenic
movement that led to the Greek War of Independence (1821–9) in which Byron died, becoming a Greek national hero.

The mock-Spenserianisms of the opening stanzas imply a distance between Byron and his ‘fictitious personage’, as the Preface describes Harold; but Harold was ‘Childe Burun’ in the manuscripts and to contemporaries the effect of the poem was daringly personal: Scott ascribed its success to ‘the novelty of an author speaking in his own person’ (
Quartely Review,
April 1818). In the context formed by Burke’s invocation of the language of chivalry to defend the
ancien régime
in his
Reflections on the Revolution in France
(1790), the satiric and melancholic reduction of the chivalric ‘romaunt’ in the first canto – reiterated in the Addition to the Preface (for the fourth edition) – shocked; the
Antijacobin Review
(1812) denounced as ‘the rant of democracy in its wildest form’ Byron’s treatment of the victories of Talavera (July 1809; I.405–58) and Albuera (May 1811; I.459-67), and his mockery of the Convention of Cintra (30 August 1808; I.288-314), by which the French defeated at Vimiero were convoyed home with their booty. Byron’s anti-war sentiments vividly expressed the Whig position and simultaneously outraged the Tories. The balance of tones in
Childe Harold
was altered as Byron revised the poem on his return to England: satirical passages were excised in response to the objections of friends and of his publisher, John Murray, and additions reflected the deaths enumerated in his note to I.927, those of his Harrow friend John Wingfield (14 May 1811), of his mother (31 July 1811), of his Cambridge friend Charles Skinner Matthews (3 August 1811) and (not named) of John Edleston (May 1811, although Byron did not learn of it until October): see II.73–81, 891-908, and the notes to ‘The Cornelian’ and ‘To Thyrza’. ‘To Ianthe’, addressed to Lady Charlotte Harley, the thirteen-year-old daughter of Lady Oxford (Byron enjoyed a liaison with the latter in 1812–14), was added to the seventh edition of the poem, in 1814. The counterpoint provided by the notes – worldly, scholarly, elegiac, indignant – forms an integral part of the work’s effect.
Childe Harold
was published 10 March 1812 in an expensive edition of 500 quarto copies and sold out in three days, making the author, as he later commented, famous overnight. It went through four editions by the end of the year, and reached a tenth in 1815.