On This Day I Complete My Thirty-Sixth Year
Written 22 January 1824; published in the
Morning Chronicle
29 October 1824, collected in the 1831
Works
.
On the day it was written Byron gave a copy of this poem, the last entry in his Missolonghi journal, to Pietro Gamba; widely published in the newspapers after Byron’s death on 19 April, it significantly influenced the image of his last days.
Criticism: Jerome J. McGann, ‘Shall These Bones Live?’; on the poem as Byron’s confession of love for his page, Loukas Chalandritsanos, see Louis Crompton,
Byron and Greek Love
, pp. 318–28.
WORKS CITED IN THE NOTES
Byron
BLJ. Byron ’s Letters and Journals,
ed. Leslie A. Marchand, 12 vols., Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press/London: John Murray, 1973–82.
CMP. Lord Byron: The Complete Miscellaneous Prose
, ed. Andrew Nicholson, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991.
CPW. Lord Byron: The Complete Poetical Works
, ed. Jerome J. McGann, 7 vols.; Vol. 6 coedited with Barry Weller, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980–93.
Works. The Works of Lord Byron: With His Letters and Journals, and His Life, by Thomas Moore, Esq.,
17 vols., London: John Murray, 1832–4.
Contemporary Reviews and Documents
Most of the reviews cited may be found in the collections listed Further Reading. Other works cited are:
BCH. Byron: The Critical Heritage
, ed. Andrew Rutherford, New York: Barnes and Noble/London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970.
Thomas Moore,
Letters and Journals of Lord Byron: With Notices of His Life
, London: John Murray, 1830.
Critical Works
Short titles are given for works already listed in Further Reading.
T.L. Ashton,
Byron ’s Hebrew Melodies,
Austin: University of Texas Press/London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972.
Frederick L. Beaty, ‘Byron and Francesca da Rimini’,
Publications of the Modern Language Association of America
75 (1960), pp. 395–401.
—
Byron the Satirist
, DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1985.
Bernard Blackstone,
Byron: A Survey
, London: Longman, 1975.
William A. Borst,
Lord Byron ’s First Pilgrimage
, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1948.
Frederick Burwick and Paul Douglass, eds.,
A Selection of Hebrew Melodies, Ancient and Modern, by Isaac Nathan and Lord Byron
, Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1988.
E.M. Butler,
Byron and Goethe
, London: Bowes & Bowes, 1956.
Marilyn Butler, ‘John Bull’s Other Kingdom: Byron’s Intellectual Comedy’,
Studies in Romanticism
31 (1992), pp. 281–95.
— ‘The Orientalism of Byron’s
Giaour’,
in
Byron and the Limits of Fiction,
ed. Bernard Beatty and Vincent Newey, Totowa, NJ: Barnes and Noble, 1988.
Samuel C. Chew, Jr.,
The Dramas of Lord Byron: A Critical Study
(1915), New York: Russell & Russell, 1964.
Jerome Christensen,
Lord Byron’s Strength
, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993.
John Clubbe, ‘ “The New Prometheus of New Men”: Byron’s 1816
Poems
and
Manfred
’, in
Nineteenth-Century Literary Perspectives
, ed. Clyde de L. Ryals et al., Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1974, pp. 17–47.
Michael G. Cooke,
The Blind Man Traces the Circle
, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969.
— ‘The Restoration Ethos of Byron’s Classical Plays’,
PMLA
79 (1964), pp. 569–78.
Martyn Corbett,
Byron and Tragedy
, New York: St Martin’s Press, 1988.
Louis Crompton,
Byron and Greek Love
, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985.
Stuart Curran,
Poetic Form and British Romanticism
, New York: Oxford University Press, 1986.
R.J. Dingley, ‘ “I had a dream…”: Byron’s “Darkness” ’,
Byron Journal
9(1981), pp. 20–33.
Wilfred S. Dowden, ed.,
The Journal of Thomas Moore
, 6 vols., Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1983.
Paul W. Elledge,
Byron and the Dynamics of Metaphor
, Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 1968.
— ‘Divorce Italian Style: Byron’s
Beppo’, Modern Language Quarterly
46 (1985), pp. 29–47.
— ‘Talented Equivocation: Byron’s “Fare thee well!” ’,
Keats–Shelley Journal
35 (1986), pp. 42–61.
Sheila Emerson, ‘Byron’s “one word”: The Language of Self-Expression in
Childe Harold III’, Studies in Romanticism
20 (1981), pp. 363–82.
David Erdman, ‘ “Fare thee well!” – Byron’s Last Days in England’, in
Shelley and His Circle, 1773–1822
, ed. Kenneth Neill Cameron, Vol. 4, pp. 638–53.
Caroline Franklin,
Byron’s Heroines,
Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992.
Cheryl Fallon Giuliano, ‘Gulnare/Kaled’s “Untold” Feminization of Byron’s Oriental Tales’,
Studies in English Literature 23
(1993), pp. 785–807.
— ‘Marginal Discourse: The Authority of Gossip in
Beppo
’, in
Rereading Byron
, ed. Alice Levine and Robert N. Keane, New York and London: Garland, 1993, pp. 151–63.
Robert F. Gleckner,
Byron and the Ruins of Paradise
, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1967.
Robert R. Harson, ‘Byron’s
Tintern Abbey’, Keats–Shelley Journal
20 (1971), pp. 113–21.
[Reginald Heber], ‘Lord Byron’s Dramas’,
Quarterly Review
27 (1822), pp. 476–524; attribution by Andrew Rutherford, BCH, 1970, p. 236.
Kurt Heinzelman, ‘Byron’s Poetry of Politics: The Economic Basis of the “Poetical Character” ’,
Texas Studies in Literature and Language
23 (1981), pp. 361–88.
John A. Hodgson, ‘The Structures of
Childe Harold III’, Studies in Romanticism
18 (1979), pp. 363–82.
Diane Long Hoeveler,
Romantic Androgyny: The Women Within
, University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1990.
Margaret J. Howell,
Byron Tonight: A Poet’s Plays on the Nineteenth-Century Stage
, Surrey: Springwood Books, 1982.
[ Francis Jeffrey], Review of
Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage and The Prisoner of Chillon, and Other Poems, Edinburgh Review
27 ( 12 December 1816), pp. 277–310; attribution by Donald H. Reiman,
Romantics Reviewed
, 1972, Part B, Vol. 2, p. 864.
—‘Lord Byron’s Tragedies’,
Edinburgh Review
36 (1822), pp. 413–52; attribution by Donald H. Reiman,
Romantics Reviewed,
1972, Part B, Vol. 2, p. 918.
Emrys Jones, ‘Byron’s Visions of Judgment’,
Modern Language Review
76 (1981), pp. 1–19.
M.K. Joseph,
Byron the Poet,
London: Gollancz, 1964.
William Keach, ‘Political Inflection in Byron’s
Ottava Rima’. Studies in Romanticism
27 (1988), pp. 551–62.
Malcolm Kelsall,
Byron’s Politics,
Sussex: Harvester Press, 1987.
G. Wilson Knight, ‘The Two Eternities: An Essay on Byron’, in
The Burning Oracle
, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1939, pp. 199–288.
Cecil Y. Lang, ‘Narcissus Jilted: Byron,
Don Juan
and the Biographical Imperative’, in
Historical Studies and Literary Criticism
, ed. Jerome J. McGann, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985, pp. 143–79.
Marjorie Levinson,
The Romantic Fragment Poem: A Critique of a Form,
Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986.
Ernest J. Lovell, Jr.,
Byron: The Record of a Quest,
(1949), Connecticut: Archon Books, 1966.
— ed, see Thomas Medwin.
D.L. Macdonald,
Poor Polidori
, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991.
Wolf Mankowitz,
Mazeppa: The Lives and Loves of Adah Isaacs Menken
, London: Blond & Briggs, 1982.
Peter J. Manning,
Byron and His Fictions
, Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1978.
— ‘Childe Harold in the Marketplace: From Romaunt to Handbook’,
Modern Language Quarterly
52 (1991), pp. 170–90.
—
Reading Romantics: Texts and Contexts
, New York and London: Oxford University Press, 1990.
Leslie A. Marchand,
Byron: A Biography
, 3 vols., New York: Knopf, 1957/London: John Murray, 1958.
—
Byron’s Poetry
, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968.
William H. Marshall,
Byron, Shelley, Hunt and
T
HE
L
IBERAL
, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1960.
Jerome J. McGann, ‘The Book of Byron and the Book of a World’, in
The Beauty of Inflections,
Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988, pp. 255–93.
—
Fiery Dust,
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968.
— ‘Hero with a Thousand Faces: The Rhetoric of Byronism’,
Studies in Romanticism
31 (1992), pp. 295–314.
— ‘ “Mixed Company”: Byron’s
Beppo
and the Italian Medley’, in
Shelley and His Circle, 1773–1822,
Vol. 7, ed. Donald H. Reiman, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986, pp. 234–97.
— ‘Shall These Bones Live?’ in
The Beauty of Inflections,
Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988, pp. 90–110.
— ‘The Significance of Biographical Context: Two Poems by Lord Byron’, in
The Author in His Work
, ed. Louis L. Martz and Aubrey Williams, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978, pp. 347–64.
Noel McLachlan, ‘ “She walks in beauty”: Some Byron Mysteries’,
London Magazine
30 (August–September 1990),
pp. 20
–33.
Thomas Medwin,
Medwin’s
C
ONVERSATIONS
OF LORD BYRON (1824), ed. Ernest J. Lovell, Jr., Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966.
Peter T. Murphy, ‘Visions of Success: Byron and Southey’,
Studies in Romanticism
24 (1985), pp. 355–73.
Isaac Nathan, ed.,
Fugitive Pieces and Reminiscences of Lord Byron,
London: Whittaker, Treacher, 1829.
Stuart Peterfreund, ‘The Politics of ‘Neutral Space’ in Byron’s
Vision of Judgment’, Modern Language Quarterly
40 (1979), pp. 275–91.
Marlon Ross, ‘Scott’s Chivalric Pose: The Function of Metrical Romance in the Romantic Period’,
Genre
18 (1986), pp. 267–97.
Andrew Rutherford,
Byron: A Critical Study,
Stanford: Stanford University Press/Edinburgh, Oliver & Boyd, 1961.
Sir Walter Scott, Reviews of
Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Canto III, Quar-terly Review
16 (October 1816/February 1817), pp. 172–208; and
Canto IV, Quarterly Review
19 (April/September 1816), pp. 215-32.
Samuel Smiles,
A Publisher and His Friends: Memoir and Correspondence of the Late John Murray with an Account of the Origin and Progress of the House, 1768–1843,
2 vols., London: John Murray, 1891.
Gordon Spence, ‘Moral and Sexual Ambivalence in
Sardanapalus’, Byron Journal
12 (1984), pp. 59–69.
Stuart Sperry, ‘Byron and the Meaning of
Manfred’, Criticism
16 (1974), pp. 189–202.
William St Clair, ‘The Impact of Byron’s Writings: An Evaluative Approach’, in
Byron: Augustan and Romantic,
ed. Andrew Rutherford, London: Macmillan, 1990, pp. 1–25.
—
Lord Elgin and the Marbles,
London: Oxford University Press, 1967.
—
That Greece Might Still be Free,
London: Oxford University Press, 1972.
T.G. Steffan, ‘The Devil a Bit of Our Beppo’,
Philological Quarterly
32 (1953), pp. 154–71.
Studies in Romanticism
31 no. 3 (Fall 1992); special issue on
Sardanapalus.
Gordon Kent Thomas,
Lord Byron’s Iberian Pilgrimage, Provo,
UT: Brigham Young University Press, 1983.
Peter L. Thorslev,
The Byronic Hero,
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1962.
Peter Vassallo,
Byron: The Italian Literary Influence,
New York: St Martin’s Press, 1984.
Daniel P. Watkins,
Social Relations in Byron’s Eastern Tales,
Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1987.
—‘Violence, Class Consciousness and Ideology in Byron’s History Plays’,
ELH
48 (1981), pp. 799–816.
Timothy Webb, ed.,
English Romantic Hellenism, 1700–1824,
Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1982.
Susan J. Wolfson, ‘Couplets, Self and
The Corsair’
, ‘Heroic Form: Couplets, “Self,” and Byron’s Corsair’;
Formal Charges: The Shaping of Poetry in British Romanticism
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997).
— ‘ “A Problem Few Dare Imitate”:
Sardanapalus
and “Effeminate Character” ’,
ELH
58 (1991), pp. 867–902.
INDEX OF TITLES
Beppo
,
573
Blues, The,
736
Bride of Abydos, The,
209
Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Cantos,
56
Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Canto III,
415
Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Canto IV,
508