11.3. George Gordon, Lord Byron and Persy b. Shelley.

Although Byron was a descendant of an ancient aristocratic family, he sided with the progressive bourgeois democratic movements. His abhorrence of the gloomy realities of his time made him a romanticism.

His early poems, published in a volume entitled Hours of idleness were severely criticized by the Edinburgh Review, the leading literary magazine of that time. Byron answered his critics with English bards and Scotch Reviewers, a satire in verse in which he fiercely attacked the literary exponents of the political reaction, the conservative romanticists as Wordsworth, Coleridge and Sothey.

After graduating from Cambridge University, in 1809, when 21, Byron started a tour during which he visited Portugal, Spain, Albania, Greece and Turkey. He opposed the reactionary policy of the British government and the brutal measures taken by it to suppress the movement of the Luddites; in a brilliant speech delivered in the House of Lords, he vindicated these rebellious workers and condemned the ruling classes for their oppression of the people. A few days after this, the first two cantos of Childe Harold’s pilgrimage came off the press and the success of the poem gave Byron every right to write in his diary: “I awoke one morning to find myself famous”.

Childe Harold is a sort of travel journal in verse which tells us about the disappointment and disillusions of a youth with society. For: “loathed he in his native land to dwell, which seemed to him more lone than Eremite’s sad cell”.

He is “sore sick at heart”. And is beloved by none. Nothing cheers him in his home and country, and he decides to travel.

His house, his home, his heritage, his lands,

The laughing dames in whom he did delight

Whose large blue eyes, fair locks, and snowy hands,

Might shake the saint ship of an anchorire

And long had fed his youthful appetite;

His goblets brimmed with every costly wine,

And all that mote to luxury invite

Without a sign he left to cross the brine

And traverte Paynim shores and pass Earth’s central line.

Then follows the beautiful and famous song, full of emotion:

Adieu, adieu! My native shore

Fades o’er the waters blue

The night –winds sigh, the breakers roar,

And shricks the wild sea-mew.

You sun that sets upon the sea

We follow in his flight

Farewell awhile to him and thee,

My native Land-God night.

He is perfectly pleased to be alone on the sea, voyaging to other countries:

“And now I’m in the world alone,

Upon the wide wide sea:

But why should I for others groan

When none will sign for me?”

The first two cantos take us to Portugal, Spain, Albania and end with a lament on the bondage of Greece:

“Fair Greece! Sad relic of departed worth!

Immortal, though no more; though fallen, great!

Who now shall lead thy scattered children forth

And long accustem’d bondage uncreate?”

This is a description of his first voyage, Canto III tells of the pilgrim’s travels through Belgium, up Rhine, to the Alps and the Sura. The historical association of each place are made the poet’s themes; the Spanish War, Waterloo and Napoleon, and especially Rousseau. He admires Rousseau and the other ideologists of the Enlightenment because they caused “the wreck of old opinions”.

In Canto IV the poet abandons his hero Childe Harold, and he speaks in the first person singular, of Venice where he stayed for a long time, Argua and Petrarch, Ferrara and Tasso, Florence and Boccaccio, Rome and its great men, from scipio to Rienzi. Here he presents views and events of greatness in a past of lost happiness and everywhere he shows his preference for the simple, natural things to the current civilization.

He also laments Italian enslavement by Austria:

“Italia! Oh Italia! Thou who hast

The fatal gift of beauty, which became,

A funeral dower of present woes and past

On thy sweet brow is sorrow plough’d by shame,

And graved in characters of flame”.

Very strongly Byron expresses his love for nature and loneliness when he signs

“There is a pleasure in the pathless words,

There is a rapture on the lonely shore

There is society, where none intrudes

By the deep Sea, and music in the roar:

I love not man the less, but Nature more

From these our interviews, in which I steal

From all I may be, or have been before

To mingle with the Universe, and feel

What I can ne’er express, yet cannot all conceal”

His inclination and admiration for the Orient and exotic lands, full of peculiar charm and his aspiration for the simplicity of nature expressed in Childe Harold spread into all European literature, in France, Germany, and Russia. This is what is called Byronism in literature.

Although “Childe Harold” is full of sorrow, the hero is not a pessimist. He admires people who fight for freedom and independence, and is realistic in his description of the various lands he travels.

In the centre of all his nature works stands a rebel, in most cases a rogue, a demoniacal personage who disregards all conventionalities and laws. Byron sings of rebellion. His heroes are against tyranny, they are fighters for liberty.