Lecture 12 Lord Byron (1st
hour), Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage
Don Juan (2nd hour)
• George Gordon Byron was born in an
impoverished noble family in London in 1788,
a year before the French Revolution. His father
was a captain nicknamed " Mad Jack', who had
squandered away the money of the poet's
mother and then deserted her. For some years
mother and son lived in loneliness and poverty
in Scotland. His mother, a passionate woman,
petted and abused him alternately. Byron was
born with a clubfoot, and in the frequent family
scenes his mother called him "you lame brat.”
So the poet's early years had been far from
happy.
• In 1815, Byron married Miss Milbank, a solemnly
religious young woman who made up her mind to
"reform" Byron by marrying him. It proved a most
unhappy marriage. A year later, shortly after the birth of
their daughter Ada, she left him and refused to come
back, saying that" he was insane'. Now the freedomloving character of Byron's poetry and his "seditious
speeches" in Parliament had long evoked hatred for him
on the part of the English ruling classes. They grasped
Byron's misfortune in family life as a pretext to launch a
wholesale attack against him. "I felt" he wrote." that, if
what was whispered, and mattered, and murmured, was
true, I was unfit for England; if false, England was unfit
for me." On April 25, 1816, he set sail for Europe, never
to return.
• Byron first went to Switzerland, where he
made acquaintance with Shelley. The two
poets visited the castle of Chillon, in which
the Swiss revolutionary Bonnivard (14961570) had been imprisoned for several
years. Shortly afterwards Byron wrote the
famous "Sonnet on Chillon" and the
narrative poem .The “Prisoner of
Chillon'(1816). In Switzerland he also
wrote Manfred a poetical drama, and other
poems.
• “Childe Harold's Pilgrimage":
•
This long poem contains four cantos. It is
written in the Spenserian stanza, i.e. a 9-line
stanza rhymed ababbcbcc, in which the first
eight lines are in iambic pentameter while the
ninth in iambic hexameter. The poem tells of
Childe ( =a youth of noble birth) Harold's travels
in Europe. Harold is a young aristocrat whose'
world-weariness' bespeaks his loathing for
English high society. He leaves his country to
escape from the society he fears and hates.
Being solitary and melancholy, he seeks the
companionship of mountains and seas.
• The first canto deals with Portugal and Spain.
The poet praises Portugal as the "delicious land'
where "fruits of fragrance blush on every tree,'
but he feels acutely the poverty of the oppressed
people. Then he depicts the Spaniards in their
Struggle against foreign aggression.
• The second canto describes Albania and Greece.
The author paints pictures of the "dark blue sea",
moonlit nights and places famous in ancient
history. He laments over the fallen state of fair
Greece", reminds the Greeks of their heroic past,
and encourages them to strive for liberty with
their own arms.
• The third canto was written 6 or 7 years later
than the first two cantos. During the long interval,
the poet suffered so much from the venom and
spite of the high society.
• The fourth canto sings of Italy and the Italian
people who have given the world great writers
and thinkers like Petrarch, Dante, Boccaccio,
Tasso and Galileo. Byron exposes the
reactionary rulers of Europe, and especially the
Holy Alliance. His ardent love of liberty and his
firm belief in the people's final triumph find
expression in lyrical outbursts.
• "Don Juan':
•
"Don Juan" was written in Italy during the
years 1818-1823. It is 16,000 lines long, in 16
cantos, and written in ottava rima, each stanza
containing 8 iambic pentameter lines rhymed
abababcc.
•
The story of the poem takes place in the
latter part of the l8th century. Don Juan, its hero,
is a Spanish youth of noble birth. The
vicissitudes of his life and his adventures in
many countries are described against varied
social backgrounds, and he is seen to take part
in different historical events, thus giving a broad
panorama of contemporary life.
• Don Juan, a handsome and happy-go-lucky
young man, falls in love with Donna Julia, the
wife of Don Alfonso. But the affair is soon
discovered; Julia is Shut up and the young
culprit is sent abroad. After a shipwreck in a
storm, Juan escapes in a boat with thirty other
Passengers. They are tossed about on the sea
and, one by one die Of hunger and thirst. Juan
alone comes out alive and swims to a Greek
island, where he is saved by Haidee, "a child of
nature" and the only daughter of Lambro, a
pirate. The young people become attached to
each other and the love scenes beneath the
moonlit sky are described with great lyric beauty.
• "Don Juan" is Byron’s masterpiece, written in the
prime of his creative power. His aim in writing it
was "to remove the cloke (=cloak) which the
manners and maxims of [high] society throw
over their secret sins. and shew t =show) them
to the world as they really are." He called this
poem an "epic satire". "a satire on abuses of the
present state of society." "Almost all Don Juan,'
he wrote, "is real life, either my own, or from
people I know." In "Don Juan" Byron displayed
his genius as a romanticist and a realist
simultaneously.
• Points of view
• (1) Politically Byron has a strong passion for liberty and
an intense hatred for all tyrants. He appeals for the
liberty of the oppressed nations, while exalting the great
fighters for freedom in history. He glorifies the French
Revolution and condemns the despotic Napoleon period.
He gives his strong support to the Spanish, Portuguese
and Italian people fighting for their national
independence. He laments over the fallen Greece,
expressing his ardent wish that the suppressed Greek
people should win their freedom. At the news of the
Greek revolt against the Turks, Byron not only gave the
insurgent Greeks financial help but also plunged himself
into the struggle for the national independence of that
country.
• (2) Artistically, Byron continued in the
tradition of classicism that had been
advocated by the writers of the
Enlightenment in the l8th century. He
eulogized the 18th-century Enlighteners
and attacked the conservative schools of
contemporary poetry, showing his
contempt for what he considered the
commonplace and vulgarity of the "Lake
Poets".
• Childe Harold's Pilgrimage
• This is a poem about the hero Harold, who was
disillusioned in modern civilization and who
decided to leave his native land for foreign
countries in order to be among simpler people.
The poem presents a panoramic view of all sorts
of things, from colorful descriptions of national
manners and customs and impressive pictures
of nature to the author's philosophical reflections
and his courageous political opinions.
• Don Juan
• Don Juan is a great comic epic, a poem based on a
traditional Spanish legend of a great lover. Byron invests
in Juan the moral Positives like courage, generosity and
frankness, which, according to Byron, mm virtues
neglected by the modern society. In addition, by making
use of Juan's adventures, Byron presents a panoramic
view of different types of society, painting brilliant
pictures of life in its various stages of love, joy, suffering,
hatred and fear. The unifying principle in Don Juan is the
basic ironic theme of appearance and reality, i.e. what
things seem, to be and what they actually are. The
diverse materials and the clash of emotions gathered in
the poem are harmonized by Byron's insight into the
difference between life's appearance and its actuality.
• Special features
• (1) Owing to his persistent attacks on "cant political,
religious, and moral", to the novelty of his oriental
scenery, to the romantic character of the Byronic hero,
and to the easy, fluent, and natural beauty of his verse,
Byron's poetry exerted great influence on the Romantic
Movement.
• (2) Byron's diction, though unequal and frequently faulty,
has on the whole a freedoms, copiousness and vigor.
• (3) His descriptions are simple and fresh, and often bring
vivid objects before the reader. Byron's poetry is like the
oratory which hurries the hearers without applause.
• (4) The glowing imagination of the poet rises and sinks
with the tones of his enthusiasm, roughing into argument,
or softening into the melody feeling and sentiments.
• (5) Byron employed the Ottva Rima (Octave Stanza)
from Italian mock-heroic poetry.
• "The Isles of Greece" (from Don Juan, III)
• Main idea
• "The Isles of Greece", taken from Canto III of
Don Juan, is among Byron's most effective
poetical utterances on national freedom. All the
16 stanzas that constitute the song are
supposed to have been sung by a Greek singer
at the wedding feast of Don Juan and Haidee on
an isle of Greece. In the song, by contrasting the
freedom enjoyed by the ancient Greeks with the
enslavement of the early 19th-century Greeks
under Turkish rule, the poet calls on the Greeks
to struggle for their national liberation.