Byron – The Poems

‘Mr Dallas has placed in your hands a manuscript poem which he tells me you do not object to publishing.’ Oh the insouciance, the sheer thrilling confidence of it! The hands were those of Mr John Murray, who with the astonishingly successful publication of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage embarked on one of the most turbulent literary and personal relationships between publisher and published. It would not end well. Few relationships with Byron did, and the tears were rarely his. Canto III however opens with a heartbroken lament for his daughter Ada, from whom he was parted for ever when he left England in disgrace in April 1816, ‘the wandering outlaw of his own dark mind’, and continues into a lament for Napoleon, ‘Conqueror and captive of the earth’, defeated at Waterloo on 18 June 1815. Verses thirty-six to forty-five present an unforgettable portrait of the ambition which spurs
on ‘the madmen who have made men mad’.

‘The Destruction of Sennacherib’ has a ferocious energy, the opening verse irresistible in its rhythmic power. ‘Darkness’, written earlier, is a surprise to those who like Byron-lite, of whom we shall drink deeply in Don Juan. ‘Darkness’ paints an almost Dantesque nightmare vision of the future. Night of course can sparkle, as did the mourning dress, decorated with spangles, of Lady Anne Wilmot. The dress and its wearer dazzled Byron when he saw her at a party. ‘She walks in beauty’ is a morning-after poem with a difference – it’s chaste. It’s also a lyrical masterpiece. ‘When we two parted’ is one of the great songs of lost love. It makes one weep. Alas, it’s too cruel to speak the last verse, long suppressed to protect the reputation of Lady Frances (Fanny) Webster. Here it is sotto voce. ‘Then fare thee well, Fanny / Now doubly undone / To prove false unto many / As faithless to one / Thou art past all re-calling / Even would I recall / For the woman once falling / Forever must fall.’ Byron, a feminist – in his fashion! He believed, and was loathed for it, that women were as sexually voracious as men. ‘I’d like to know who’s been ravished,’ he once cried when accused again of promiscuity. ‘I’ve been more ravished myself than anybody since the Trojan War.’ Eliot noted a certain passivity in Byron, whose letters imply that, in sexual matters, he often considered himself under obligation! He was aware however that the price for women was higher – as his lines in Julia’s letter make clear: ‘Man’s love is of his life a thing apart, / ’Tis woman’s whole existence’. Don Juan, his masterpiece, is full of emotion; ‘The emotion is hatred. Hatred of hypocrisy’, wrote Eliot. Since, however, Byron had discovered that in the ottava rima he could ‘without straining hard to versify rattle on exactly as I talk / With anybody in a ride or walk’, the delight we feel in listening to or reading Don Juan momentarily numbs us to its stinging truthfulness. In Canto I, a deliciously vicious marriage from hell – that of Don Juan’s parents Don Jóse and Donna Inez, who wished ‘each other, not divorced, but dead’ – is followed later, much later, by the initially slow efforts at seduction by the adolescent Don Juan of the very pretty Julia, twenty-three and married to Don Jóse, fifty. It’s so unfair that, as Byron notes, ‘At fifty love for love is rare’. Of the poem, translated by Goethe (a fact which gave Byron considerable satisfaction), the poet declared, ‘It may be profligate . . . but is it not life? Is it not the thing?’ It is indeed. ‘Sorrow is knowledge’ he wrote in Manfred, and few have written a gentler, sweeter poem about the inevitable than Byron’s ‘So, we’ll go no more a roving’.

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