Selected Poems (153 page)

The most significant impulse underlying the play – the ‘something else’
to which he alluded to Murray – was Byron’s bitterness over the separation from Annabella; he added stanzas IV and V to the incantation, and, as a note from Moore in the 1832 edition observed: ‘it is needless to say who was in the poet’s thoughts’. (Byron also published the incantation separately with
The Prisoner of Chillon
(1816).) Inseparable from this complex of feelings was Augusta; by naming Manfred’s beloved Astarte after an incestuous pagan goddess, as M. J. Quinlan points out, Byron revived the scandal surrounding his departure from England. In breaking off the colloquy between Manuel and Herman as the former is about to declare ‘The lady Astarte, his —’ Byron seems to tease his audience to find the line between biographical revelation and dramatic fiction (III.iii.47).

If
Manfred
exhibits the obsession with remorse of Byron’s earlier Eastern tales – he admitted to Murray that it was ‘too much in my old style’ (
BLJ
, Vol. 5, p. 185) – it also transforms confession into myth (see Manfred’s invocation of Prometheus at I.i.154 and the note to ‘Prometheus’ above), speculation (see the parallel to
Hamlet
suggested by the epigraph (I.v. 166–7)), and the romantic, particularly Shelleyan, concern with the epipsyche. Byron sent Murray a fair copy of the ‘very wild – metaphysical – and inexplicable’ play (
BLJ
, Vol. 5, p. 170) from Venice in March 1817; when Gifford criticized the third act, he conceded that it was ‘certainly d—d bad’ and agreed to ‘reform it – or re-write it altogether’ (BLJ, Vol. 5, p. 211). In the original third act (printed in
CPW
, Vol. 4, pp. 467–71), a demon carries off the Abbot, who has crudely threatened Manfred; in the revised text, sent from Rome on 5 May, the ‘Abbot is become a good man’ (
BLJ
, Vol. 5, p. 219). The new calm Byron strove for, countering the Titanism of the earlier acts, was weakened when Murray omitted Manfred’s final speech: ‘Old man! ’tis not so difficult to die’ (III.iv.151). ‘You have destroyed the whole effect & moral of the poem by omitting the last line of Manfred’s speaking,’ Byron protested (
BLJ
, Vol. 5, p. 257), and the line was restored in 1818. Goethe declared the play a ‘wonderful phenomenon’ in which Byron had taken the principles of
Faust
‘in his own way for his own purposes, so that none of them remains the same’, and fashioned them into ‘the quintessence of the most astonishing talent born to be its own tormentor’. Jeffrey, in the
Edinburgh Review
, disapproved of the ‘painful and offensive’ theme of incest, but saw the drama’s ‘obscurity’ as ‘part of its grandeur’: ‘the darkness that rests upon it, and the smoky distance in which it is lost, are all devices to increase its majesty, to stimulate our curiosity, and to impress us with deeper awe’ (August 1817). Despite Byron’s insistence that he had rendered his ‘dramatic poem’ ‘
quite impossible
for the stage’ (
BLJ
, Vol. 5, p. 170), Manfred was produced at Covent Garden in 1834 with a travesty ending in which Astarte saves
Manfred
from the demons, at Sadler’s
Wells in 1863 by Samuel Phelps, with a melodramatic conclusion in which Manfred is crushed by an avalanche, and in 1873 at the Princess’s Theatre, with an interpolated ballet of female chamois-hunters.

Criticism: Peter L. Thorslev,
The Byronic Hero
, on Manfred ‘as the Byronic hero in the process of maturing’; Robert F Gleckner,
Byron and the Ruins of Paradise
, on Manfred as the embodiment of the human condition; Michael G. Cooke,
The Blind Man Traces the Circle
, on the play as testing the limits of the will; Peter J. Manning,
Byron and His Fictions
, on the psychological issues; Paul W. Elledge,
Byron and the Dynamics of Metaphor
on ‘the vacuum of Manfre’s selfhood’; and Stuart Sperry, ‘Byron and the Meaning of
Manfred
’, on the play as ‘Byron’s confrontation with his own persona’. Studies by Samuel Chew, Jr.,
The Dramas of Lord Byron
, and Martyn Corbett,
Byron and Tragedy
, elucidate the play’s dramatic form. E. M. Butler narrates the relationship of the two poets in
Byron and Goethe
.

So, we’ll go no more a roving

Published in Moore’s
Life
(1830), and collected in the 1831
Works
.

The poem appears as part of a letter Byron wrote from Venice to Thomas Moore on 28 February 1817:

The Carnival - that is, the latter part of it – and sitting up late o’nights, had knocked me up a little. But it is over, – and it is now Lent… though I did not dissipate much upon the whole, yet I find ‘the sword wearing out the scabbard,’ though I have but just turned the corner of twenty-nine. (
BLJ
, Vol. 5, p. 176)

CHILDE HAROLD’S PILGRIMAGE:

A Romaunt, Canto IV

Written 26 June-19 July 1817; expanded 3 September-7 January 1818; published 28 April 1818.

The final canto continues the parallel between Byron’s experience and the course of European civilization: I ‘stand/A ruin amidst ruins’, declares the poet (11. 218–19), dating the poem in the Dedication to Hobhouse on the third anniversary of his marriage, ‘the most unfortunate day of my past existence’. He had left Switzerland with Hobhouse for Italy in October 1817, settling in Venice on 10 November. There he remained until a
month-long visit to Rome, by way of Ferrara, Bologna and Florence (17 April-28 May 1817), followed by removal for the summer to La Mira (1(14 June-13 November), where he began Canto IV Venice, which fell to Napoleon in 1797 and passed between France and Austria before being assigned to Austria in 1814 (1.100 ), and Rome, where one cannot avoid ‘Stumbling o’er recollections’ (1. 727), exemplify the destiny of the fatal gift of beauty’ (1. 371). Abandoning the ‘unavailing’ ‘distinction between the author and the pilgrim’, Byron projects his history into the ‘Spirits which soar from ruin’ (1. 492): Michelangelo, the dramatist Vittorio Alfieri, Galileo and Machiavelli. The instances of unhappy genius include Dante and Boccaccio, mistreated by ‘ungrateful Florence’ (11. 496–522), and culminate in Tasso, author of Jerusalem Delivered (1581) and according to legend imprisoned for madness for seven years by his patron, Alfonso II of Ferrara (11. 316—51). With Petrarch, who ‘arose/To raise a language, and his land reclaim/From the dull yoke of her barbaric foes’ (11. 266—8), these writers established Italian literature. ‘I twine/My hopes of being remember’d in my line/With my land’s language’, declared (self-) exiled Byron (11. 76–8), and he found in the Italians a nationalist model. His interest overflowed into
The Lament of Tasso
(1817) and
The Prophecy of Dante
(1821). The cycles of oppression that make up the ‘one page’ of history (1. 969) from Hannibal’s defeat of the Romans near Lake Trasimene in 217 BC (11. 550— 85) to Napoleon’s career, and illustrated as well by the Roman dictator Sulla and Oliver Cromwell (11. 739–74), are epitomized in the evocation of the Dying Gladiator (11. 1252–69). Against them Byron sets figures of heroic virtue such as Cola di Rienzi, who in the fourteenth century attempted to restore Roman greatness (11. 1018–26), and apostrophes to ‘Freedom!’ (‘yet thy banner, torn, but flying/Streams like the thunder-storm
against
the wind’ (11. 874–5), but the possibilities of redemption are carried chiefly by literature and art.

Ekphrastic passages, from that on the Venus de Medici (ll. 433–77), recently restored to Florence after Napoleon’s transfer of it to Paris, through St Peter’s (ll. 1369–431), the Gladiator (now thought to be a dying Gaul) in the Capitoline Museum, and those on statues in the Vatican, the Laocoon and the Apollo Belvedere (ll. 1432–67), play a significant role in the canto. Hobhouse and Byron had been reading
Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums
(1764; translated into Italian 1779) and
Monumenti Antichi Inediti
(1767), by Johann Joachim Winckelmann, and other sources, and Hobhouse suggested sites for Byron to comment upon. Nature is less prominent than in Canto III, but the set pieces on the Clitumnus (l. 586) and the Falls of Terni (ll. 613–48) made these famous spots more famous. The theme of feminine nurture, evident in the commentary on the tomb of Cecilia Metella (ll. 883–945) and the Grotto of Egeria, the nymph who
according to legend counselled Numa Pompilius, successor to Romulus as King of Rome (ll. 1027–66), culminates in the story of the ‘Caritas Romana’ (ll. 1324–59); the fantasy is offset by the six-stanza elegy on the death in childbirth of Princess Charlotte (6 November 1817), addressee of Byron’s ‘Lines to a Lady Weeping’, and whose loss inspired national mourning (ll. 1495–548). The concluding apostrophe to the ocean (ll. 1603–56) marks a turn from the stability of sculpture and architecture to fluidity, and points towards
Don Juan
.

Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage IV
was published on 28 April 1818 in an edition of 10,000. The politics of the poem were underlined by extensive ‘historical notes’ – fifty-six pages of reduced type in the 1832 edition – but because of their length and because they were written by Hobhouse they are omitted here; Hobhouse amplified them further in his
Historical Illustrations of the Fourth Canto of Childe Harold
, also published by Murray in 1818. In the
Quarterly Review
(April 1818) Scott greeted Canto IV as Byron’s ‘gravest and most serious performance’; in the
Edinburgh Review
(June 1818) John Wilson astutely remarked upon the ‘singular illusion’ that the poem produces,

by which these disclosures, when read with that high and tender interest which attaches to poetry, seem to have something of the nature of private and confidential communications. They are not felt, while we read, as declarations published to the world, — but almost as secrets whispered to chosen ears… There is an unobserved beauty that smiles on us alone; and the more beautiful to us, because we feel as if chosen out from a crowd of lovers.

Epigraph: Ariosto, Satire IV (incorrectly cited as III): ‘I have seen Tuscany, Lombardy, Romagna,/The mountain that divides [the Apennines], and that which encloses [the Alps]/Italy, and the one sea [the Adriatic] and the other [the Tyrrhenian], that bathes it.’

Criticism: In addition to the works cited in notes to previous cantos, see Bernard Blackstone,
Byron
: A Survey, on Byron’s historical ‘ideograms’; and Peter J. Manning, ‘Childe Harold in the Marketplace’, on production and reception.

Epistle from Mr Murray to Dr Polidori (‘Dear Doctor, I have read your play’)

Published in Moore’s
Life
(1830), and collected thereafter (but without 11. 39–40).

On 5 August 1817 Murray asked Byron to furnish ‘a
delicate
declension’
of
Ximenes
, a tragedy submitted to him by J. W. Polidori (Samuel Smiles,
A Publisher and His Friends
, Vol. 1, p. 386), whose tenure as Byron’s physician in 1816 had ended unhappily. Byron volunteered this
jeu d’esprit
, part of a letter of 21 August (
BLJ
, Vol. 5, pp. 258–61). The literal interpretation of catharsis in the opening lines was particularly appropriate to its intended recipient, but there is no evidence that Murray, despite his intention ‘faithfully to copy’ Byron’s reply, sent Polidori the poem.
Ximenes
was published by Longman in 1819. Among the works Byron dismisses are Maturin’s
drama Manuel
(1817) (1. 23), Sotheby’s tragedies
Ivan and The Death of Darnley
(1814) and Southey’s 1810 epic
The Curse of Kehama
(1. 36).

On Polidori and his tangled relationship with Byron, see D. L. Macdonald,
Poor Polidori
.

BEPPO: A Venetian Story

Written October 1817; published anonymously February 1818.

On 29 August 1817 Byron heard from the husband of his mistress Marianna Segati an anecdote of a ‘buxom lady of 40’ surprised by the return of her husband, presumed lost at sea many years before. She does not suspect the identity of a Turkish stranger until

said the Turk pulling down his robe - I am your husband - I have been to Turkey - I have made a large fortune and I make you three offers - either to quit your amoroso and come with me - or to stay with your amoroso or to accept a pension and live alone. The lady has not yet given an answer, but M Zagati [
sic
] said I’m sure I would not leave my amoroso for any husband – looking at B. this is too gross even for me. (quoted in Leslie A. Marchand,
Byron: A Biography
, Vol. 2, p. 708)

This layered instance of Venetian
mores
shocked Hobhouse, who recorded it, but suited the request Murray had made of Byron in January: ‘Give me a poem - a good Venetian tale describing manners formerly from the story itself, and now from your own observations, and call it “Marianna’ ” (Samuel Smiles,
A Publisher and His Friends
, Vol. 1 p. 372). Byron acknowledged that he had written ‘in imitation of John Hookham Frere’s recently published
pseudonymous Prospectus and Specimen of an Intended National Work, The Monks and the Giants
(
BLJ
, Vol. 5, p. 269), but if Frere showed Byron how the Italian medley style might be adopted to English
ottava rima
, Byron already knew the Italian originals of Francesco Berni, Luigi Pulci, whose
Morgante Maggiore
he translated in 1819–20, and
Giambattista Casti, whose
Gli Animaili parlanti
he read in 1816 (translated by his friend W. S. Rose in 1819 as
Court and Parliament of Beasts
).

Notwithstanding Jeffrey’s judgement of
Beppo
as ‘absolutely a thing of nothing’ (
Edinburgh Review
, February 1818), it was a significant turn from the style of
Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage
and the Eastern tales on which Byron’s popularity rested; ‘it will at any rate shew’, he wrote, ‘that I can write cheerfully, & repel the charge of monotony & mannerism’ (
BLJ
, Vol. 6, p. 25). Byron dissolves the heroic style visible in the allusions to Othello (11. 139–40) and Napoleon (11. 481–5) into colloquial ease, and through the Carnival setting diffuses the violent rivalries of his tales and the pains of his separation (see the barb at Annabella’s mathematics in 1. 624). The contrast between Venice and England reveals how thoroughly he kept track of the world he had left, claiming still to know it better than bustling Botherbys’ (1. 575), based on William Sotheby (1757–1833), who, he thought, had sent him an anonymous criticism of
The Prisoner of Chillon
. Byron’s satire on authors that are ‘
all author’
(1. 593) and on ‘female wits’ (11. 569–624) stems from unease about his own commercial success and the dependence of his reputation on women; compare
The Blues
. The portrait of the Count, arbiter of taste and ‘cavalier servente’ (1. 285), mirrors these anxieties within the parallel Venetian locale. Byron sets in motion images of himself — professional writer, ‘broken Dandy’ (1. 410), one of the ‘Men of the world, who know the world like men… all the better brothers’ (11. 602–3) – that play complexly against each other. His cosmopolitanism does not preclude ‘politics & ferocity’ (
BLf
, Vol. 6, p. 9); the manner itself was read politically: the
British Review
(May 1 818) thought it symptomatic of a ‘denationalizing spirit’ and the ‘decay of that masculine decency, and sobriety, and soundness of sentiment, which, about half a century ago, made us dread the contagion of French or Italian manners’. The poem reached a fifth edition by April 1818; the success of the new mode assured, Murray affixed Byron’s name to the title-page.