The feeble ashes, and their feeble breath Blew for a little life, and made a flame Which was a mockery; then they lifted up 65 Their eyes as it grew lighter, and beheld Each other's aspects?saw, and shriek'd, and died? Even of their mutual hideousness they died, Unknowing who he was upon whose brow Famine had written Fiend. The world was void, 70 The populous and the powerful?was a lump, Seasonless, herbless,? treeless, manless, lifeless? without vegetation A lump of death?a chaos of hard clay. The rivers, lakes, and ocean all stood still, And nothing stirred within their silent depths; 75 Ships sailorless lay rotting on the sea,
And their masts fell down piecemeal; as they dropp'd They slept on the abyss without a surge? The waves were dead; the tides were in their grave, The moon their mistress had expired before;
so The winds were withered in the stagnant air, And the clouds perish'd; Darkness had no need Of aid from them?She was the universe.
1816 1816
So, we'll go no more a roving1
i
So, we'll go no more a roving So late into the night, Though the heart be still as loving, And the moon be still as bright.
2
5 For the sword outwears its sheath, And the soul wears out the breast, And the heart must pause to breathe, And love itself have rest.
3
Though the night was made for loving, 10 And the day returns too soon, Yet we'll go no more a roving By the light of the moon.
1817 1830
1. Composed in the Lenten aftermath of a period have but just turned the corner of twenty-nine.' of late-night carousing during the Carnival season The poem is based on the refrain of a bawdy Scot-
in Venice, and included in a letter to Thomas tish song, 'The Jolly Beggar': 'And we'll gang nae
Moore, February 28, 1817. Byron wrote, 'I find mair a roving / Sae late into the nicht.'
'the sword wearing out the scabbard,' though I
.
CHILDE HAROLD'S PILGRIMAGE, CANTO 1 / 61 7
Childe Harold's Pilgrimage Childe Harold is a travelogue narrated by a melancholy, passionate, well-read, and very eloquent tourist. Byron wrote most of the first two cantos while on the tour through Spain, Portugal, Albania, and Greece that these cantos describe. When he published them, in 1812, they made him at one stroke the best- known and most talked about poet in England. Byron took up Childe Harold again in 1816, during the European tour he made after the breakup of his marriage. Canto 3, published in 1816, moves through Belgium, up the Rhine, then to Switzerland and the Alps. Canto 4, published in 1818, describes Italy's great cities, in particular their ruins and museums and the stories these tell of the bygone glories of the Roman Empire.
Byron chose for his poem the Spenserian stanza, and like James Thomson (in The Castle of Indolence) and other eighteenth-century predecessors, he attempted in the first canto to imitate, in a seriocomic fashion, the archaic language of his Elizabethan model. (Childe is the ancient term for a young noble awaiting knighthood.) But he soon dropped the archaisms, and in the last two cantos he confidently adapts Spenser's mellifluous stanza to his own autobiographical and polemical purposes. The virtuoso range of moods and subjects in Childe Harold was a quality on which contemporaries commented admiringly. Equally fascinating is the tension between the body of the poem and the long notes (for the most part omitted here) that Byron appended to its sometimes dashing and sometimes sorrowing chronicle of his pilgrimage in the countries of chivalry and romance?notes that feature cosmopolitan reflections on the contrasts among cultures as well as sardonic, hard-hitting critiques of the evolving political order of Europe.
In the preface to his first two cantos, Byron had insisted that the narrator, Childe Harold, was 'a fictitious character,' merely 'the child of imagination.' In the manuscript version of these cantos, however, he had called his hero 'Childe Burun,' the early form of his own family name. The world insisted on identifying the character as well as the travels of the protagonist with those of the author, and in the fourth canto Byron, abandoning the third-person dramatis persona, spoke out frankly in the first person. In the preface to that canto, he declares that there will be 'less of the pilgrim' here than in any of the preceding cantos, 'and that little slightly, if at all, separated from the author speaking in his own person. The fact is, that I had become weary of drawing a line which every one seemed determined not to perceive.'
FROM CHILDE HAROLD'S PILGRIMAGE
A ROMAUNT1
From Canto 1
['SIN'S LONG LABYRINTH']
I
Oh, thou! in Hellas0 deem'd of heav'nly birth, Greece Muse! form'd or fabled at the minstrel's will! Since sham'd full oft by later lyres on earth, Mine dares not call thee from thy sacred hill:
5
Yet there I've wander'd by thy vaunted rill;
I. A romance or narrative of adventure.
.
61 8 / GEORGE GORDON, LORD BYRON . ?-?'
