Criticism: David Erdman, ‘ “Fare thee well!” – Byron’s Last Days in England’, on the political context; and Paul W. Elledge, ‘Talented Equivocation’, on Byron’s treatment of separation.
Prometheus
Written in Switzerland July or August 1816; published with
The Prisoner of Chillon
(1816).
‘Of the Prometheus of Æschylus I was passionately fond as a boy,’
Byron wrote; ‘[it] has always been so much in my head – that I can easily conceive its influence over all or anything that I have written’ (
BLJ,
Vol. 5, p. 268); he included in
Hours of Idleness
a translation of some lines done at Harrow.
Criticism: John Clubbe, ‘The New Prometheus of New Men’, on the biographical background of the Swiss poems and the evolution of Byron’s treatment of this cardinal Romantic figure.
THE PRISONER OF CHILLON:
A Fable and Sonnet on Chillon
Written 1816 and published 5 December by Murray in a slender volume,
The Prisoner of Chillon and Other Poems,
which Murray advertised in advance to capitalize on the success of
Childe Harold
III, published 18 November. He sold out the first edition of 6,000 at a booksellers’ dinner at which he also marketed
Childe Harold
III. Scott reviewed both volumes favourably in the February 1817 issue of the
Quarterly Review
(also published by Murray).
In June 1816, Byron and Shelley visited the Castle of Chillon on Lake Geneva, in whose dungeons had been chained political prisoners for years on end, often for life sentences. ‘These prisons are excavated below the lake… Close to the very walls, the lake is 800 feet deep,’ Shelley wrote to Peacock (12 July 1816). The verse tale, composed within the week, is cast as the dramatic monologue of François Bonnivard, who was imprisoned for six years (1530–36). The sonnet was written later and prefixed, so Byron’s last note indicates, to ‘dignify’ the account of wretched suffering with a celebration of the ‘courage and virtues’ of the political prisoner. With this signal, the pair of poems became widely admired for their expression of defiant spiritual resistance to the tyranny described by Shelley’s letter:
At the commencement of the Reformation, and indeed long after that period, this dungeon was the receptacle of those who shook, or who denied the system of idolatry, from the effects of which mankind is even now slowly emerging… I never saw a monument more terrible of that cold and inhuman tyranny, which it has been the delight of man to exercise over man.
Even so, the sonnet’s stirring anthem remains at odds with the tale’s concentration on the prisoner’s suffering and despair: his last sentence, ‘I/ Regain’d my freedom with a sigh’ is in an entirely different key from the sonnet’s famous first line, ‘Eternal Spirit of the chainless Mind!’
Criticism: Jerome J. McGann,
Fiery Dust
, on the thematic relations to
Childe Harold III
; and Andrew Rutherford,
Byron
:
A Critical Study
, on dramatic power.
Darkness
Written in Switzerland in July or August 1816; published with
The Prisoner of Chillon
(1816).
Criticism: Scott, reviewing
The Prisoner of Chillon
volume in the
Quarterly Review
, complained that in ‘Darkness’ Byron ‘contented himself with presenting a mass of powerful ideas unarranged, and the meaning of which it is not easy to attain’ (October 1816). On the despair of the poem see Robert F. Gleckner,
Byron and the Ruins of Paradise
; on the popularity in Byron’s day of such apocalyptic visions and on Byron’s sources, see R.J. Dingley, ‘ “I had a dream…”: Byron’s “Darkness” ’.
CHILDE HAROLD’S PILGRIMAGE:
A Romaunt, Canto III
Written 25 April-4 July 1816; published 18 November 1816.
Byron departed from England on 25 April 1816, and the opening stanzas were written while he was still ‘at Sea’, on the crossing from Dover to Ostend. The melancholy that Harold, the ‘wandering outlaw of his own dark mind’ (1. 20), had embodied in 1809 was repeated in the scandal of the separation. Byron’s daughter Augusta Ada had been born 10 December 1815; Annabella took the unweaned infant with her when she left Byron on 15 January 1816, and he never saw her again (11. 1–4; 1067–102). For the biographical details of the period of composition see note to
Manfred
; the sublime mode of the poem excluded the range of Byron’s actual moods. His physician, John Polidori, reported that at Ostend ‘Byron fell like a thunderbolt upon the chambermaid’ (Leslie A. Marchand,
Byron: A Biography
, Vol. 2, p. 610), and he replied to Thomas Moore’s praise of the ‘magnificence’ of the canto by commenting:
I am glad you like it; it is a fine indistinct piece of poetical desolation, and my favourite. I was half mad during the time of its composition, between metaphysics, mountains, lakes, love unextinguishable, thoughts unutterable, and the nightmare of my own delinquencies. I should, many a good day, have blown my brains out, but for the recollection that it would have given pleasure to my mother-in-law; and, even
then
, if I could have been certain to haunt her – but I won’t dwell upon these trifling family matters. (
BLJ
, Vol. 5, p. 165)
In
Stanzas from the Grand Chartreuse
(1855) Matthew Arnold asked,
What helps it now, that Byron bore,
With haughty scorn which mock’d the smart,
Through Europe to the Aetolian shore
The pageant of his bleeding heart?
That thousands quoted every groan,
And Europe made his woe their own? (ll. 133–8)
but in
Childe Harold
personal experience becomes the register of an era. Byron folded self-reflection into the meditation on Napoleon (ll. 316–78); he was travelling in a replica of Napoleon’s carriage and, having taken the additional surname ‘Noe’ on his marriage, was ‘delighted’, as Leigh Hunt observed, ‘to sign himself N.B.; “because,” said he, “Bonaparte and I are the only public persons whose initials are the same” ’ (quoted in
BLJ
, Vol. 9, note to p. 171). Byron visited Waterloo, the site of Napoleon’s final defeat (18 June 1815) on 4 May 1816, and his stanzas on the battle and the ball given by the Duchess of Richmond the night before, from the dramatic command – ‘Stop! - for thy tread is on an Empire’s dust!’ - to the elegy for the slain ‘thousands’ represented by ‘young, gallant Howard’ (Byron’s cousin Frederick Howard, son of the Earl of Carlisle, his guardian, satirized in
English Bards and Scotch Reviewers
(ll. 681–96)) memorialized the events for a generation (ll. 145–405).
Self-analysis and social commentary merge also in the figures of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who appears as the author of the
Confessions
(posthumously published 1782—9) and of the novel
Julie, ou la Nouvelle Héloise
(1761) (ll. 725–69), set at Clarens on Lake Geneva (ll. 923–76), as well as a critical thinker whose work, like that of Voltaire, paired with Gibbon, author of
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
(1776—88), hastened the French Revolution (ll. 977–1003). Against the costs of ambition and conquest Byron sets the examples of François Marceau, who died defending the French Republic against the Austrians (ll. 536—53), of Morat, where in 1476 the Swiss repulsed the invading Burgundian army (ll. 601-16), and of Julia Alpinula, who, according to a first-century
AD
legend, died after a futile effort to save her father from execution by the Romans (ll. 626—34). Her role parallels that of Ada, and epitomizes the idealized function of the feminine in the canto.
Byron recurrently opposes to masculine will and warfare (‘rotting from sire to son’) the world of nature; he told Medwin that ‘Shelley, when I was in Switzerland, used to dose me with Wordsworth physic even to nausea’ (Thomas Medwin,
Conversations of Lord Byron
, p. 194), and
Childe Harold III
may be seen as testing both Shelleyan ideal love and Wordsworthian nature. Wordsworth enviously insisted that ‘the whole third canto of Childe Harold founded on his style and sentiments - the feeling of
natural objects, which is there expressed not caught by B. from Nature herself but from him, Wordsworth, and spoiled in the transmission —
Tintern Abbey
the source of it all’ (Thomas Moore,
Letters and Journals of Lord Byron
, Vol. 1, p. 355). Byron’s Titanism, as in the echoes of Coriolanus at 11. 1049–55 (
Coriolanus
III.i. 66–7), plays against the prescribed cure. Jeffrey noted that the poem displayed ‘the same stern and lofty disdain of mankind’ as Byron’s previous works, ‘but mixed… with deeper and more matured reflections, and a more intense sensibility to all that is grand and lovely in the external world’ (
Edinburgh Review
, December 1816). Murray paid £2,000 for
Childe Harold III
and
The Prisoner of Chillon
; he published the former on 18 November 1817, and on 13 December told Byron that he had sold 7,000 copies of each to the booksellers (Samuel Smiles,
A Publisher and His Friends
, Vol. 1, p. 369).
Epigraph: Frederick the Great to Jean D’Alembert: ‘So that this application force you to think of something else. In truth there is no remedy other than that and time.’
Criticism: Ernest J. Lovell, Jr.,
Byron
:
The Record of a Quest
, on the treatment of nature; Jerome Christensen,
Lord Byron’s Strength
, particularly on the significance of ‘NB’; John A. Hodgson on ‘The Structures of
Childe Harold III
’; Peter J. Manning,
Byron and His Fictions
, on the psychological patterns; Sheila Emerson, ‘Byron’s “One Word’“, on Byron’s reflexive language; and the works of general criticism listed in note to
Childe Harold I—II
.
Epistle to Augusta (‘My sister! my sweet sister!’ &c. )
In forwarding a manuscript of this poem to Murray from Switzerland on 28 August 1816 Byron indicated that it was not to be published without the consent of his sister. Augusta objected, and the poem was not published until Thomas Moore’s
Life
(1830) and then collected in the 1831
Works
.
The ‘grandsire’ of 1. 15 is Admiral John Byron (1723–86). Byron draws echoes of
Hamlet
(III.i.67) in 1. 30, of
Macbeth
(V.v.ff.) in 1. 107, of
Paradise Lost
(XII.646) in 1. 81, of his own contemporaneous
Manfred
(I.i.3–7) in ll. 109–11 and of
Childe Harold III
, throughout, into an account of his life so rhetorically crafty that he must have wished it published. The poem is Byron’s first extended employment of
ottava rima
.
Criticism: on the Wordsworthian parallels, see Robert Harson, ‘Byron’s
Tintern Abbey
’.
Lines (On Hearing that Lady Byron was III)
Written September 1816; published in Lady Blessington’s
Conversations of Lord Byron
(serial form 1832–3; 1834), and collected in the 1832
Works
.
MANFRED: A Dramatic Poem
Written August 1816—May 1817; published 16 June 1817.
Byron quit England on 25 April 1816, arriving a month later in Geneva, where he re-met Claire Clairmont, who was bearing his child (Allegra, born 1817); Claire, travelling with Percy and Mary Shelley (her stepsister), introduced the two poets. By early June they had taken neighbouring houses, Byron Villa Diodati and the Shelley party Montalègre. English tourists gazed at and gossiped about the group; rumours circulated that they were living in ‘a League of Incest’ (
BLJ
, Vol. 6, p. 76). In mid August M.G. Lewis, author of
The Monk
(1796) and other Gothic works, visited and ‘translated most of Goethe’s
Faust
(Part I, 1808) ‘
viva voce
’ to Byron, who in 1813 had read a ‘sorry French translation’ of excerpts in de Staël’s
De l’Allemagne
(Thomas Medwin,
Conversations of Lord Byron
, p. 141). ‘I was naturally much struck with it,’ Byron told Murray, ‘but it was the
Staubach
& the
Jungfrau
– and something else – much more than Faustus that made me write Manfred,’ though he acknowledged that the ‘first Scene… & that of Faustus are very similar’ (
BLJ
Vol. 7, p. 113). Of the incantation that concludes I.i Byron noted that it ‘was a Chorus in an unfinished Witch drama, which was begun some years ago’, a period coinciding with his first exposure to
Faust
(see
CPW
, Vol. 4, pp. 463–4). The concurrent success of Coleridge’s
Remorse
(1813) showed what could be done with the popular form of Gothic melodrama; while serving on the Drury Lane Theatre Management Committee in 1815 Byron encouraged Coleridge to write more plays, and though he disavowed all wishes for representation, the experience may have strengthened his desire to try himself. Behind
Manfred
stand the Gothic dramas he encountered at Drury Lane and the Gothic tradition generally: William Beckford’s Oriental tale
Vathek
(1786) furnished the details of Manfred’s underworld visit in II.iv, and Horace Walpole’s
The Castle of Otranto
(1764) is the probable source of the protagonist’s name. The many verbal similarities between the play and the journal that Byron kept for Augusta of his Alpine tour with Hobhouse in September (17–29) underscore the impact of the spectacular scenery on the drama (
BLJ
, Vol. 5, pp. 96–105).