Lord Byron
Tamarra Montgomery, Anna Hall, Alex Messick,
John Bennett
Background information
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Lord Byron was born with a clubfoot
Jack Byron, Lord Byron's father,
deserted him and his mother in
1790. When he died, he left all his
debts for his wife and son to pay.
Lord Byron was an avid reader as a
young man and later calculated that
he read 4,000 works of fiction.
As a young man Byron had several
love affairs, including one with his
half sister. His unrequested passion
for Mary Chaworth inspired him to
first start writing poetry.
Byron attended Trinity College at
Cambridge, where he was a
popular, handsome young man. He
graduated in 1808 with a M.A.
degree.
• Byron traveled through Europe and the Middle East,
retuning with sections of the book-length poem, Childe
Harold’s pilgrimage.
• In London, He was a ladies man was treated like a true
celebrity.
• Byron was driven from England when his marriage to
Annabella Milbanke ended, and he would never return to
England after that. Instead he traveled through Europe
with his friend Percy Bysshe Shelley, then settled in Italy
where he wrote Don Juan.
• While living in Italy Lord Byron's daughter died, and then
Shelley drowned in a boating accident.
• In 1823 Byron joined a revolutionary group in Greece
who sought to break free from Turkish rule. While
training troops, he dies of rheumatic fever. He is still
revered today as a national hero in Greece.
She Walks in Beauty
• The poem is about an unnamed woman.
• She's really quite amazing, and the speaker compares her to lots of
beautiful, but dark things, like "night" and "starry skies."
• The second stanza continues to use the contrast between light and
dark, day and night, to describe her beauty.
• Also that her face is really "pure" and "sweet."
• The third stanza wraps it all up – she's not just beautiful, she's
"good" and "innocent.”
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Major themes of “She Walks in Beauty” are Night and Death, because the
woman is wearing a black dress with spangles, and it reminds him of a
mourning gown and of the night sky while he wrote it.
Apostrophe to the Ocean
• The power of the
ocean and how it
relates to politics and
war.
• It deals cultural and
human relations.
• The poem is a
metaphoric montage
to he ocean.
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Major themes are the of “Apostrophe to the Ocean” are the Power of Nature
and its impact on human civilization.
Don Juan
• It’s a mock epic
about growing old
and life.
• The poem tells a
story of a reflection of
a mans life and self
examination
• The main character
represents Lord
Byron himself.
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Time is a major theme to “Don Juan”, as Lord Byron explores his own past
and reflects upon it.
Consensus
• We decided that Don Juan is Byron’s best
work from the selections we read. It
features a centralized and flowing plot.
The epic follows the life of a man who is
easily seduced by women. The title
character and protagonist goes through
different faces of life and faces the
challenges. Which spoke to us as we will
soon depart to face some of the
challenges the poem speaks of.