The epigraphs appeared in Italian. The general one, from Tasso, may be translated as ‘His thoughts cannot sleep within him.’ The Cantos’ epigraphs are all from the episode of Dante’s encounter with Francesca of Rimini, in
Inferno
, Canto V. For Byron’s own later translations of these lines, see ‘Francesca of Rimini’: his epigraph for Canto I (
Inferno
V.121-3) corresponds to 11. 25–7; for Canto II (
Inferno
V.120) to 1. 24; for Canto III (
Inferno
V.105) to 1. 9. The description of Conrad, the Corsair, in Canto I, stanzas VIII-XII (11. 171–308) emerged as a canonical portrait of the Byronic hero: a dark, mysterious, brooding outlaw, whose ‘one virtue’ midst his ‘thousand crimes’ is his devotion to his wife and, in general, an ethic of chivalry with regard to women. As in other Eastern tales, the projection of tyranny, especially sexual tyranny over enslaved women, as a feature of an ‘Eastern’ society and the corresponding narrative of liberation by an enemy of this system reflect early nineteenth-century ‘Orientalism’ (that is, the implied cultural superiority of West to East). Yet this ideological structure is complicated by the other sensational figure in the poem, the Pacha’s harem favourite, Gulnare, whose rebellion unsettles Western as well as Eastern orthodoxies of gender. She is first a damsel-in-distress rescued by Conrad; but when he is defeated and imprisoned for execution by the Pacha, she emerges as a determined murderer of this oppressor and liberator of the Corsair. Byron’s ambivalence about female violence (however this violence might be politically justified) is reflected in the tale’s structural pairing of Gulnare in antithesis to Conrad’s passive, patient, devoted wife, Medora.
The poem’s popular sales were matched by controversial reviews, the chief issue being the elevation of the Corsair, a criminal and outlaw, to heroic status; Gulnare also proved disturbing. Related to the redefinition of the hero, another point of discussion was Byron’s heroic couplet (a verse form advertised in the Dedication);
The Corsair
is his first use of the measure for an extended romance tale. Jeffrey’s praise in the
Edinburgh Review
(April 1814) included admiration for Byron’s verse technique, but
other reviewers protested both the impropriety of the heroic measure for this narrative and, more particularly, Byron’s indulgence of non-Augustan effects such as racy enjambment, unorthodox caesurae, and feminine and slant rhymes.
Criticism: Peter J. Manning, Byron and His Fictions, on psychological configurations, and ‘Hone-ing’ and ‘Tales and Politics’ (both in
Reading Romantics
) on political and social contexts; Jerome Christensen, Lord
Byron’s Strength
, on political power; Daniel P. Watkins,
Social Relations in Byron’s Eastern Tales
, on social structure; and Caroline Franklin,
Byron’s Heroines
, and Cheryl Fallon Giuliano, ‘Gulnare/ Kaled’s “Untold” Feminization’, on gender trouble; Susan Wolfson,
Formal Charges
, on the location of many of these issues in verse form.
Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte
Written, and published anonymously, in April 1814; Byron’s name appeared in the tenth edition (also 1814).
The allies entered Paris at the end of March 1814 and forced Napoleon’s abdication. The decision of the heroic figure, in whom he saw himself and with whom he was paired in the popular imagination, to capitulate rather than nobly to commit suicide left Byron ‘utterly bewildered and confounded’ (
BLJ
, Vol. 3, p. 256); he could not know that on 12 April, two days after he composed his first draft, Napoleon did attempt to poison himself. Byron’s disappointment issues in the flood of comparisons: the Greek athlete Milo (1.46); Sulla, who resigned in 79
BC
after a cruel dictatorship (1. 55); Charles V, who abdicated in 1556 (1. 64); Dionysius, who fell from tyrant of Syracuse to schoolteacher at Corinth (1. 125); Tamerlane, who confined the captive King Bajazet in a cage (1. 127); Nebuchadnezzar (1. 131); Prometheus (1. 136); Othello, echoed in 1. 142 (
Othello
IV.i.70); Cincinnatus, the Roman general who returned from triumph to his farm (1. 68). The first motto, from Juvenal’s Satire X, underscores the decay of glory: ‘Produce the urn that Hannibal contains,/And weigh the mighty dust which yet remains:/
AND IS THIS ALL!
’ (11. 147–8; translated by William Gifford). Stanza V first appeared in the third edition; stanzas XVII—XIX were written in response to Murray’s plea to lengthen the poem to avoid the tax on pamphlets of less than a sheet; Byron did not like these stanzas ‘
at all
— and they had better be left out’ (
BLJ
, Vol. 4, p. 107). They did not appear in any of the lifetime editions; despite the violation of Byron’s intentions, their inclusion in the 1832
Works
, our base text, governed all subsequent versions of the poem until
CPW
(see Vol. 3, p. 456).
Stanzas for Music
Written May(?) 1814; published in
Fugitive Pieces and Reminiscences of Lord Byron
, by Isaac Nathan, containing a new edition of
Hebrew Melodies
(1829).
‘Thou hast asked me for a song,’ Byron wrote to Thomas Moore on 4 May 1814, ‘and I enclose you an experiment, which has cost me something more than trouble’ (
BLJ
, Vol. 4, p. 114). Annabella reported in 1817 that Augusta acknowledged herself the subject; Byron gave Nathan permission to publish on the condition that the poem be dated ‘more than two years previously to his marriage’, which Nathan did, adding a protest against ‘calumniators’ who ‘distorted’ Byro’s ‘amatory’ pieces by applying them ‘to the lamented circumstances of his later life’ (
Fugitive Pieces
, p. 65).
She walks in beauty
Written June 1814; published in
Hebrew Melodies
(1815).
The subject is Anne Wilmot, the wife of Byron’s first cousin, whom he had seen at a party wearing ‘mourning, with dark spangles on her dress’.
Hebrew Melodies
was initiated by the Jewish composer Isaac Nathan, and brought out by him in April 1815, in a large folio, with music, priced at a guinea. The volume responded to the vogue for national songs, such as Thomas Moore’s
Irish Melodies
(1807; many successive editions), and sold 10,000 copies; Murray brought out an edition without music in June. As this poem, placed first, suggests, the collection does not consist solely of biblical lyrics.
Criticism: On the date of composition and Byron’s relations with his cousin, see Noel McLachlan,
‘She Walks in Beauty:
Some Byron Mysteries’; on the Hebrew Melodies generally, see T.L. Ashton’s monograph,
Byron s Hebrew Melodies,
and Frederick Burwick and Paul Douglass’s edition (with music),
A Selection of Hebrew Melodies, Ancient and Modern.
LARA: A Tale
Written quickly, May-June 1814; published anonymously August, with Samuel Rogers’s
Jacqueline.
The Advertisement prefixed to the first three editions invited a regard of this tale ‘as a sequel’ to
The Corsair,
proposing affinities in ‘the hero’s character, the turn of his adventures, and the general outline and colouring
of the story’ (
CPW,
Vol. 3, p. 453). The coyness notwithstanding, everyone took the poem to be Byron’s. Not only were there obvious parallels of verse form (heroic couplets) and character – Conrad seemed legible in Lara (returned after a long, mysterious absence) and Gulnare in his disguised page, Kaled – but the extensive set-piece description of Lara in Canto I (stanzas II—VIII; XVI-XIX) even more elaborately delineated the Byronic hero, a portrait that became one of the poem’s most popular passages. Though not matching The Corsair’s, sales were impressive: three editions in 1814 of about 7,000 copies, and a fourth, now under Byron’s name, of about 3,000. Even so, Byron and Murray were disappointed by the relative falling-off. In spring 1815, Byron told Leigh Hunt, ‘I fear you stand almost single in your liking of “Lara” – it is… my last & most unpopular effervescence’; he surmised that the tale had ‘too little narrative – and [was] too metaphysical to please the greater number of readers’ (
BLJ,
Vol. 4, p. 295).
Criticism: Peter J. Manning,
Byron and His Fictions,
on psychological configurations; Jerome Christensen,
Lord Byron’s Strength,
on political power; Daniel P. Watkins,
Social Relations in Byron’s Eastern Tales,
on social structure; and Caroline Franklin,
Byron’s Heroines,
and Cheryl Fallon Giuliano, ‘Gulnare/Kaled’s “Untold” Feminization’, on gender.
The Destruction of Sennacherib
Written February 1815; published in
Hebrew Melodies
(1815).
The biblical sources are 2 Kings 19 and Isaiah 37. Sennacherib may by analogy figure Napoleon, but without topical reference the poem’s captivating anapestic rhythms have secured its place in anthologies. For criticism see note to ‘She walks in beauty’.
Napoleon’s Farewell (From the French)
Written, and published anonymously in the
Examiner
, July 1815; reprinted in
Poems
(1816).
Not the translation that the subtitle feigns, the poem obtained wide circulation when William Hone included it in his pirated edition of Byron,
Poems on His Domestic Circumstances
(1816), for which see note to ‘Fare thee well!’.
From the French (‘Must thou go, my glorious Chief’)
Written 1815; first published in
Poems
(1816). Not a translation.
The two notes are taken from letters to Byron from John Cam Hobhouse, then in Paris.
THE SIEGE OF CORINTH
Composed, with difficulty, at various points between autumn 1813 and autumn 1815; published with
Parisina
13 February 1816. Lines 1–45, here separately numbered, were written in 1813 but first published in Moore’s
Life
(1830) and first included in the poem in the 1832
Works
.
The first edition of 6,000 was followed by two others in 1816, but the poem was severely reviewed for the nihilism of the last stanza and for some ghoulish passages, especially the canine ‘carnival’ (11. 409–33). Byron’s Advertisement sets out the historical co-ordinates: the end of a long competition between the Venetian and Ottoman Empires for the control of Peloponnesus. Byron alters the history to make the explosion of the magazine a sabotage by the Venetian Governor, Minotti, that destroys everyone. The oedipal contest at the centre of the tale – the love of Alp, a Venetian turned renegade to the Muslims, for Francesca, the daughter of Minotti, who had opposed the match – is also his invention. The nervous note about
Christabel
in reference to the last twelve lines of stanza XIX recognizes a debt to I.43–8 of Coleridge’s poem, which had been circulating in manuscript for over a decade. When Byron realized the influence, he wrote to Coleridge, attached a note of excuse to the 1816 edition, and subsequently helped Coleridge get
Christabel
published by Murray in 1816(
BLJ
, Vol.4, p.321).
Criticism: Peter J. Manning,
Byron and His Fictions
, on psychological configurations; and Caroline Franklin,
Byron s Heroines
, on Francesca and gender ideology.
When we two parted
Written and published as a song-sheet in 1815; republished in
Poems
(1816).
In
Poems
Byron dated the poem 1808, thus screening its subject, Lady Frances Wedderburn Webster, with whom he had a brief ‘platonic’ affair in 1813, and whose current affair with the Duke of Wellington raised London gossip in 1815. A cancelled stanza –
Then – fare thee well – Fanny –
Now doubly undone –
To prove false unto many –
As faithless to
One
–
Thou art past all recalling
Even
would
I recall
For the woman once
falling
Forever must
fall
.
— drew on lines Byron had written in 1812 about Lady Caroline Lamb, casting the two women together in his self-mythologizing erotic drama (
BLJ
Vol. 10, p. 198; see
CPW
, Vol. 3, pp. 475–6).
Criticism: Jerome J. McGann, ‘The Significance of Biographical Context’.
Fare thee well!
Written March 1816; printed in an edition of fifty copies for private circulation; published without authorization in the
Champion
, 14 April 1816, and widely pirated thereafter. The poem was included in
Poems
(1816), for which Byron added the epigraph from Coleridge’s
Christabel
(11. 408–13, 419–26).
The preliminary separation agreement between Byron and his wife was signed on 17 March; Byron drafted the poem the next day and sent a copy to her in the next few weeks with a mollifying letter (
BLJ
, Vol. 5, pp. 51-2). The reprinting of the poem in the
Champion
marked a reprisal against Byron, as a prominent Whig critic of the Regent’s morality now himself tainted with scandal. The coupling of Byron’s poems on Napoleon with those on his domestic circumstances in the pirated editions emphasizes the inseparability of the personal and the political, but the dissemination of the poems also served Byron’s attempts to shape public opinion in the scandal of the separation.