?3 I have not loved the world, nor the world me;
1050 I have not flattered its rank breath, nor bow'd To its idolatries a patient knee,? Nor coin'd my cheek to smiles,?nor cried aloud In worship of an echo; in the crowd They could not deem me one of such; I stood
1055 Among them, but not of them; in a shroud Of thoughts which were not their thoughts, and still could, Had I not filed1 my mind, which thus itself subdued.
114
I have not loved the world, nor the world me,? But let us part fair foes; I do believe,
1060 Though I have found them not, that there may be Words which are things,?hopes which will not deceive, And virtues which are merciful, nor weave Snares for the failing: I would also deem O'er others' griefs that some sincerely grieve;
1065 That two, or one, are almost what they seem,? That goodness is no name, and happiness no dream.
'5 My daughter! with thy name this song begun? My daughter! with thy name thus much shall end? I see thee not,?I hear thee not,?but none
1070 Can be so wrapt in thee; thou art the friend To whom the shadows of far years extend: Albeit my brow thou never should'st behold, My voice shall with thy future visions blend, And reach into thy heart,?when mine is cold,?
1075 A token and a tone, even from thy father's mould.
116
To aid thy mind's development,?to watch Thy dawn of little joys,?to sit and see
1. Defiled. In a note Byron refers to Macbeth 3.1.66 ('For Banquo's issue have I filed my mind').
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MANFRED / 635
Almost thy very growth,?to view thee catch Knowledge of objects,?wonders yet to thee!
1080 To hold thee lightly on a gentle knee, And print on thy soft cheek a parent's kiss,? This, it should seem, was not reserv'd for me; Yet this was in my nature:?as it is,
I know not what is there, yet something like to this.
117 1085 Yet, though dull Hate as duty should be taught, I know that thou wilt love me; though my name Should be shut from thee, as a spell still fraught With desolation,?and a broken claim: Though the grave closed between us,?'twere the same, 1090 I know that thou wilt love me; though to drain My blood from out thy being, were an aim, And an attainment,?all would be in vain,? Still thou would'st love me, still that more than life retain.
118 The child of love,?though born in bitterness, 1095 And nurtured in convulsion,?of thy sire These were the elements,?and thine no less. As yet such are around thee,?but thy fire Shall be more tempered, and thy hope far higher. Sweet be thy cradled slumbers! O'er the sea, 1100 And from the mountains where I now respire, Fain would I waft such blessing upon thee, As, with a sigh, I deem thou might'st have been to me!
1812,1816
Manfred Manfred is Byron's first dramatic work. As its subtitle, 'A Dramatic Poem,' indicates, it was not intended to be produced on the stage; Byron also referred to it as a 'metaphysical' drama?that is, a drama of ideas. He began writing it in the autumn of 1816 while living in the Swiss Alps, whose grandeur stimulated his imagination; he finished the drama the following year in Italy.
Manfred's literary forebears include the villains of Gothic fiction (another Manfred can be found in Horace Walpole's Castle of Otranto; see p. 579) and of the Gothic dramas Byron had encountered during his time on the board of managers of London's Drury Lane Theatre. Manfred also shares traits with the Greek Titan Prometheus, rebel against Zeus, ruler of the gods; Milton's Satan; Ahasuerus, the legendary Wandering Jew who, having ridiculed Christ as he bore the Cross to Calvary, is doomed to live until Christ's Second Coming; and Faust, who yielded his soul to the devil in exchange for superhuman powers. Byron denied that he had ever heard of Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, and because he knew no German he had not read Goethe's Faust, of which part 1 had been published in 1808. But during an August 1816 visit to Byron and the Shelley household, Matthew Lewis (author of the Gothic novel The Monk; see pp. 595 and 602) had read parts of Faust to him aloud, translating as he went, and Byron worked memories of this oral translation into his own drama in a way that evoked Goethe's admiration.
Like Byron's earlier heroes, Childe Harold and the protagonists of some of his
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63 6 / GEORGE GORDON, LORD BYRON . ?-?'
Eastern tales, Manfred is hounded by remorse?in this instance, for a transgression that (it is hinted but never quite specified) is incest with his sister Astarte; it is also hinted that Astarte has taken her own life. While this element in the drama is often regarded as Byron's veiled confession of his incestuous relations with his half- sister, Augusta, and while Byron, ever the attention-seeker, in some ways courted this interpretation, the theme of incest was a common one in Gothic and Bomantic writings. It features in The Monk and Walpole's closet drama The Mysterious Mother (1768), and, at about the time Byron was composing his drama, it was also being explored by Mary and Percy Shelley.
The character of Manfred is its author's most impressive representation of the Byronic Hero. Byron's invention is to have Manfred, unlike Faust, disdainfully reject the offer of a pact with the powers of darkness. He thereby sets himself up as the totally autonomous man, independent of any external authority or power, whose own mind, as he says in the concluding scene (3.4.127?40), generates the values by which he lives 'in sufferance or in joy,' and by reference to which he judges, requites, and finally destroys himself. In his work Ecce Homo, the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, recognizing Byron's anticipation of his own Uhermensch (the 'superman' who posits for himself a moral code beyond all traditional standards of good and evil), asserted that the character of Manfred was greater than that of Goethe's Faust.
For more information on the context of Manfred, see 'The Satanic and Byronic Hero' at Norton Literature Online.
