Childe harold

G.G. BYRON AND THE ROMANTIC CHARACTER OF HIS “CHILDE HAROLD” (cANTOS 1-2) OR HIS OTHER EARLY POEMS.

The term "Romanticism" did not come into use in England until the mid 19th Century. At about this time readers began to see six English poets as forming a single movement: William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, and John Keats. The Romantic Movement spans roughly 1789 to 1824.

Fundamental to romanticism is a new atitude towards the role of man in nature. Nature ceases to be an objective intellectual concept for the Romantics, as it was for the writers of the Enlightment period, and becomes instead an elusive metaphor. This period was marked by a rejection of the ideals and rules of classicism and neoclassicism and by an affirmation of the need for a freer, more subjective expression of passion, pathos and personal feelings.

Some aspects of romanticism in the 18th c. are: (a) an increasing interest in Nature, and in the natural, primitive and uncivilized way of life; (b) a growing interest in scenery, especially its more untamed and disorderly manifestations; (c) an association of human moods with the 'moods' of Nature - and thus a subjective feeling for it and interpretation of it; (d) a considerable emphasis on natural religion; (e) emphasis on the need for spontaneity in thought and action and in the expression of thought; (f) increasing importance attached to natural genius and the power of the imagination; (g) a tendency to exalt the individual and his needs and emphasis on the need for a freer and more personal expression; (h) the cult of the Noble Savage.

in 1814 Lord Byron's "The Corsair" was published, selling out its entire first run of 10,000 copies. The poem was one of a handful of melodramatic verse-tales written by Byron between 1812-16, a period in which he was at the height of poetic fame in England. Pirate captain Conrad is the Byronic homme fatale, one who will risk all, including his beloved Medora, in order to rescue Gulnare, chief slave in the Turkish Pacha's harem, although he will not stoop to kill the sleeping Pacha in order to rescue himself. By this specific chivalry, and a life of dash and passion, "He left a Corsair's name to other times, / Linked with one virtue and a thousand crimes Giaour is the story, when entire, contained the adventures of a female slave, who was thrown, in the Mussulman manner, into the sea for infidelity, and avenged by a young Venetian, her lover, at the time the Seven Islands were possessed by the Republic of Venice, and soon after the Arnauts were beaten back from the Morea, which they had ravaged for some time subsequent to the Russian invasion. The desertion of the Mainotes, on being refused the plunder of Misitra, led to the abandonment of that enterprise, and to the desolation of the Morea; during which the cruelty exercised on all sides was unparalleled even in the annals of the faithful.

The Giaour proved to be very popular with several editions published in the first year. By 1815, 14 editions had been published when it was included in his first collected edition. Its runaway success led Byron to publish three more "Turkish stories" in the next couple of years: The Bride of Abydos in 1813, The Corsair in 1814 and Lara. Each of these poems proved to be very popular with The Corsair selling 10,000 copies in its first day of publication. These tales led to the public perception of the Byronic hero.

Byron commented ironically on the success of these works in his 1818 poem Beppo:

Oh! that I had the art of easy writing, What should be easy reading (...) How quickly would I print (the world delighting) A Grecian, Syrian or Assyrian tale And sell you, mixed with Western sentimentalism Some samples of the finest Orientalism.

In the years which elapsed between Byron’s return from foreign travel and his final departure from England in 1816, the form of poetry which chiefly occupied his mind was the romantic verse-tale. The Giaour, The Bride of Abydos, The Corsair, Lara, The Siege of Corinth and Parisina all fall within this period; they were written in hot haste, partly to satisfy the public taste for work of this character, and partly to wring the poet’s thoughts from reality to imagination. After taking up his residence on the continent, other forms of poetry claimed his first attention; but the appearance of The Prisoner of Chillon in 1816, Mazeppa in 1819 and The Island in 1823 shows that Byron never wholly relinquished his delight in the verse-tale. Moreover, though it was the early stories of oriental life which most impressed his contemporaries, it is probable that the later tales will live longest. In essaying the verse-tale, Byron entered into direct rivalry with Scott, imitating his metric art and making the same bold appeal to the instincts of the age for stirring adventure and romantic colour. But, whereas Scott sought his themes chiefly in the pages of history, Byron was content to draw largely upon personal experience; instead of the clash of passion between lowlander and highlander, or cavalier and roundhead, we witness the antagonism of Christian and Mussulman, of Greek and Turk. The spirit of medieval chivalry in which the wizard of the north delighted, is, in Byron, replaced by the fanaticism of the Moslem, and by that love of melodrama which we invariably associate with the Byronic hero. Byron lacks Scott’s gift of lucid narrative, nor has he that sense of the large issues at stake which gives to the Scottish lays something of epic massiveness; but he has greater passion, and, within certain strictly defined limits, offers a more searching disclosure of the human heart. In these early oriental tales, we meet with the true Byronic hero, first faintly outlined in Childe Harold and culminating, a little later, in Manfred and Cain. He figures under many names, is sometimes Mussulman and sometimes Christian, but, amid all his disguises, retains the same essentials of personality and speaks the same language. He is a projection of a certain habit of mind on the part of Byron himself into surroundings which are partly imaginary, and partly based on personal experience. In The Corsair and Lara, Byron seems to have outgrown the influence of Scott and to have fallen under that of Dryden. With the change from the octosyllabic to the decasyllabic couplet, the style grows more rhetorical: the speeches of Conrad-Lara and Gulnare-Kaled acquire something of that declamatory character which we meet with in the heroes and heroines of Dryden’s Fables, and, though Byron preserves the romanticist’s delight in high-pitched adventure and glowing colours, he also displays the neo-classic fondness for conventional epithets and the personification of abstractions. In Parisina, and, still more, in The Prisoner of Chillon, there is a welcome return to a simpler style: the gorgeous east no longer holds him in fee, and he breaks away both from rhetorical speech and melodramatic situations. In Parisina, he invests a repellent, but deeply tragic, theme with dignity and restrained beauty; no artifice of rhetoric mars the sincerity of the passion, and nowhere else does Byron come so near towards capturing the subtle cadence of the Christabel verse. In The Prisoner of Chillon, he advances still farther in the direction of sincerity of emotion and simplicity of utterance. Love of political freedom, which was always the noblest passion in Byron’s soul, inspired the poem, and, here, as in the third canto of Childe Harold, written about the same time, we are conscious of the influence of Wordsworth. The Sonnet on Chillon is as generous in emotion and as sonorous in its harmony as Wordsworth’s sonnet On the extinction of the Venetian Republic; and, in his introduction into the poem itself of the bird with azure wings that seemed to be the soul of Bonnivard’s dead brother, there is something of that delicate symbolism in which both Wordsworth and Coleridge found peculiar delight.

A new note is struck in Mazeppa. The mood of The Prisoner of Chillon is one of elegiac tenderness, whereas, here, we are conscious of the glory of swift motion, as we follow the Cossack soldier in his life-in-death ride across

similar theme in his picture of Deloraine’s ride to Melrose abbey, and, in either case, we feel ourselves spell-bound by the animation of poets to whom a life of action was a thing more to be desired than the sedentary ease of a man of letters. The Island is the last of Byron’s verse-tales and the last of his finished works. Written in 1823, just before he set sail for Greece, it shows that neither the classic spirit which he displays in many of his dramas, nor the cynical realism of much of Don Juan, could stifle in him the glow of high romance. In the love-story of Torquil and Neuha, we have a variation from the Juan-Haidée episode, set against a background of tropical magnificence, and told with a zest which shows that advancing years availed nothing to diminish the youthful ardour of Byron.