Selected Poems (3 page)

This literary celebrity was enhanced by Byron’s lionizing in Whig society. He was swept into a liaison with Lady Caroline Lamb, whose summary of him as ‘mad – bad – and dangerous to know’
¹⁵
captured his notoriety. She was succeeded in his affections by the ‘autumnal’ Lady Oxford, but it was his relationship with his half-sister Augusta, now married to Colonel George Leigh, that gave rise to most scandal; her daughter Medora, born in 1814 and given the name of the heroine of
The Corsair,
was widely thought to be Byron’s. Seeking to escape these agitating affairs (obliquely reflected in the Eastern tales), and to repair his debts, Byron proposed (a second time) in September 1814 to the heiress Anne
Isabella (‘Annabella’) Milbanke, who had laid particular stress on ‘the Irreligious nature of his principles’ in declining his first proposal in 1812.
¹⁶
After a dilatory courting, the marriage took place in January 1815; their daughter, Augusta Ada, was born on 10 December 1815. In January 1816 Annabella unexpectedly left Byron to live with her parents, and, amid rumours charging Byron with insanity, incest and sodomy, the darker for never being explicitly articulated, she obtained a legal separation in April. Pirated editions of Byron’s poems on the separation, such as ‘Fare thee well!’ (1816), made marital discord into public scandal. Byron’s resourceful and desperate attempt to influence opinion in his favour brought forth counter-blows, pamphlets, and other defences of Lady Byron. The battle to write the public narrative intensified, though it also darkened, the poet’s celebrity.

In April 1816 Byron quit England, bearing ‘the pageant of his bleeding heart’, in Matthew Arnold’s famous phrase,
¹⁷
across Europe. He settled at Geneva, near Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Godwin, who had eloped, and William Godwin’s step-daughter by a second marriage, Claire Clairmont, with whom Byron had begun an affair in England. Shelley, he reported, ‘used to dose me with Wordsworth physic even to nausea’;
¹⁸
the influence and resistance the phrase shows are evident in the third canto of
Childe Harold
(1816). The canto also memorably invokes Rousseau, Napoleon and Waterloo, the battlefield turned tourist shrine Byron visited on the way to Switzerland. He wrote
The Prisoner of Chillon
at this time, and began
Manfred
(1817), which he subtitled ‘A Dramatic Poem’, whose protagonist, haunted by remorse for his treatment of his beloved Astarte (the name taken from an incestuous Eastern goddess), turns the exhausted excess of Byro’s Titanism to faintly comic extravagance. At the end of the summer the Shelley party left for England, where on 12 January 1817 Claire gave birth to Byron’s daughter Allegra.

Byron went to Italy and described his Venetian life in brilliant letters, some of which were meant for circulation in the Murray circle. Margarita Cogni, a baker’s wife, succeeded Marianna Segati, his landlord’s wife, as his principal mistress, but his sexual life was hardly monogamous, and its prodigious activity was accompanied by substantial literary productivity. Byron studied Armenian, completed
Manfred
and in May joined Hobhouse in Rome, gathering
materials for a fourth canto of
Childe Harold
. Published in 1818, this last canto was his longest and most sublime, and its invocation of Freedom’s torn banner streaming ‘
against
the wind’ (xcviii, 2) fixed his revolutionary reputation. Yet Byron began to feel trapped by the poetic modes that had won him popularity; determining to ‘repel the charge of monotony & mannerism’,
¹⁹
he wrote
Beppo
, the tale of a Venetian
ménage á trois
, written in
ottava rima
, an eight-line stanza form derived from Italian comic poets, and published anonymously by Murray in 1818. Turning his self-exile into comic contrast between English and Italian mores,
Beppo
marks a crucial shift in tone, as would
Mazeppa
(1819), which encloses the violence of the Eastern tales in a comic, nearly self-parodic framework.

In the colloquial, digressive ease of
Beppo
Byron was testing the form of his greatest poem,
Don Juan
, at once fictional autobiography, picaresque narrative, literary burlesque and exposure of cant. The first canto, completed summer 1818, uses the name of the legendary libertine for a guileless boy through whose growth and sexual misadventures Byron slyly retells his childhood as ‘An only son left with an only mother’
²⁰
and satirizes Annabella in the guise of Juan’s hypocritical mother. The first two cantos were published in 1819, in an expensive edition designed to forestall charges of blasphemously corrupting the poor and uneducated, and which bore neither the author’s nor the publisher’s name. The provenance was easily deduced:
Blackwoods
criticized Byron for ‘a filthy and impious’ attack on his wife,
²¹
and the second canto, which turns from the amusements of the first to shipwreck and cannibalism, redoubled charges of nihilism. Shocking the proprieties of one audience, Byron moved towards another; the poem sold well in increasingly cheap editions.

In April 1819 Byron met and fell in love with Countess Teresa Gamba Guiccioli, nineteen years old and married to a man three times her age. Byron followed her to Ravenna, and she later accompanied him to Venice. Byron returned to Ravenna at Christmas 1819 as Teresa’s
cavaliere servente
(that is, a publicly acknowledged ‘escort’), a role that somewhat chafed. He won the friendship of her father and brother, who initiated him into the clandestine Carbonari, a revolutionary society seeking Italy’s independence from Austria. His deepening involvement with Italian patriotism may be seen in such poems as
The Prophecy of Dante
(1821). As he
continued with fresh cantos of
Don Juan
Byron was also writing
Marino Faliero, Sardanapalus
and
The Two Foscari
(all 1821), dramas that in various historical settings explore the relationship between the powerful individual and the post-revolutionary state. Byron insisted that their neo-classicism unfitted them for stage representation and was angered when an unauthorized version of
Marino Faliero
failed at Drury Lane, but all three would be staged. To the same year belongs
Cain
, a ‘mystery’ drama at once declared beyond copyright for its unorthodoxy and immediately pirated by radicals, and
The Vision of Judgment
, a devastating rebuttal to poet-laureate Robert Southeys eulogy of the late George III,
A Vision of Judgement
, in the Preface to which the laureate had alluded to Byron as the head of a ‘Satanic schoo’ of literature.

When Teresa followed her father and brother into exile for their part in an abortive uprising, Byron reluctantly moved with them to Pisa, where Shelley had rented the Casa Lanfranchi for him. He arrived in November 1821, having left his daughter Allegra in a convent near Ravenna, where she died of typhus on 20 April 1822. In early summer Byron went with the Shelleys to Leghorn, where he had leased a villa near their house on the Bay of Lerici.

Shelley and Byron had jointly planned a radical journal, the
Liberal
, and Byron paid for Shelley’s friend Leigh Hunt to join the collaboration. Hunt had dedicated his poem
The Story of Rimini
(1816) to Byron, but he was less famous as a poet than as the editor of the
Examiner
who had been imprisoned in 1812 for libelling the Prince Regent. Hunt and his large family arrived in July, and were installed in Byron’s house in Pisa. Despite the drowning of Shelley on 8 July and increasing friction with the Hunts, the periodical went forward. The first number contained
The Vision of Judgment,
the second Byron’s unfinished heterodox drama,
Heaven and Earth
(1823), the third his satire,
The Blues
(1823). At the end of September he moved to Genoa, where Teresa’s family had found asylum; Mary Shelley leased another house nearby for herself and the Hunts.

Byron had begun
Don Juan
intending ‘to be a little quietly facetious upon every thing’,
²²
but his purposes had deepened. As he narrated Juan’s career from Spain to Greece and Turkey through the Siege of Ismail and the Empress Catherine’s court to Regency London, he surrounded it with mordant commentary on the
Europe of restored sovereigns at the moment of writing. The darling of fame, who had stamped his name on the Byronic hero, had become a demystifier of glory and a critic of English society. Murray had published Cantos III-V of
Don Juan
in 1821, but, alarmed by Byron’s politics and verbal indecencies, hesitated thereafter; undaunted, Byron transferred his works to Leigh Hunt’s brother John, publisher of the
Liberal
. The shift from the prestigious Tory to a disreputable radical signaled Byron’s break from the literary system that had nurtured him. Reflecting ruefully that he had formerly been reckoned ‘the grand Napoleon of the realms of rhyme’ (XI, 55; his inheritance, through his wife, of the Noel estates enabled Byron also to sign himself ‘NB’), Byron’s rupture affirmed his difference and liberated his cultural criticism. John Hunt published all Byron’s later work, including
The Age of Bronze
(1823),
The Island
(1823) and Cantos VI-XVI of
Don Juan
(1823–4), which were ignored by the established reviews but avidly read.

Restive in domesticity with Teresa, Byron agreed to act as the agent of the Greek Committee in London, which had been formed to aid the Greeks in their struggle for independence. In July 1823 he left Genoa for Cephalonia. Newstead and Rochdale had been sold; clear of debt and now attentive to his literary income, Byron devoted his forture to the Greek cause. He sent £4,000 to prepare the Greek fleet and then sailed for Missolonghi on 29 December to join Prince Alexander Mavrokordatos.

The venture was no less idealistic than theatrical – Byron landed in scarlet military uniform, to welcoming crowds – and erotically tinged. Byron was accompanied by his page Loukas Chalandritsanos, an unreciprocated last passion and the subject of ‘On This Day I Complete My Thirty-Sixth Year’, published posthumously in the newspapers and influential in shaping the after-images that he had anticipated to Lady Blessington. Philhellenic idealism was soon confronted by the rivalrous and undisciplined Greek patriots, but Byron founded, paid and trained a brigade of Souliot soldiers. The malarial geography of Missolonghi provoked him to ominous puns: ‘if we are not taken off with the sword – we are like to march off with an ague in this mud-basket – and to conclude with a very bad pun – to the ear rather than the eye – better –
martially
– than
marsh-ally
’.
²³
A convulsion, perhaps epileptic, aggravated by
tension and hypertension, in February 1824, followed by the usual remedy of bleeding, weakened him; in April he contracted the fever, treated by further bleeding, from which he died on 19 April. Deeply mourned, he became a Greek national hero, and throughout Europe his name became synonymous with Romanticism. In England the stunned reaction of the young Tennyson, who, on hearing the news, sadly wrote on a rock ‘Byron is dead’, spoke for many; as Arnold later recalled, in placing Byron with Wordsworth as the great English poets of the century, he had ‘subjugated’ his readers,
²⁴
and his influence was immense and lasting. His body was taken to England and, denied burial in Westminster Abbey, placed in the ancestral vault near Newstead. The refusal attests the transgressive qualities in Byron, qualities that continue to resist even the canonization implied by the placement of a memorial to him in the Abbey in 1969.

NOTES

1
.
Byron’s Letters and Journals
, ed. Leslie A. Marchand, 12 vols. (Cambridge, Mass./London: Harvard University Press/John Murray, 1973–82), Vol. 1, p. 231.

2
. Quoted in Ernest J. Lovell, Jr. (ed.),
His Very Self and Voice: Collected Conversations of Lord Byron
(New York and London: Macmillan, 1954), P. 212.

3
. Quoted in Thomas Moore,
Letters and Journals of Lord Byron: With Notices of His Life
, 2 vols. (London: John Murray, 1830), Vol. 2, p. 602.

4
. Alfred Lord Tennyson, ‘Ulysses’ (1842), l. 11.

5
. Hector Berlioz,
Memoirs of Hector Berlioz
, trans. and ed. David Cairns (New York; Knopf, 1969), p. 225.

6.
.Eugène Delacroix,
The Journal of Eugène Delacroix
, tr. Walter Pach (1937; New York, Grove Press, 1961), p. 89.

7
. [Walter Scott]
Quarterly Review
16 (issued February 1817), p. 177.

8
. James Gillman,
The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge
(London: William Pickering, 1838), pp. 266–7.

9
.
Byron’s Letters and Journals
, ed. Marchand, Vol. 4, pp. 112–13.

10
. Lady Blessington,
Conversations of Lord Byron
, ed. Ernest J. Lovell, Jr. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), p. 220.

11
. John Scott, ‘Living Authors, No. IV: Lord Byron’,
London Magazine
3 (January 1821), p. 51.

12
. [John Wilson], review of Canto IV of
Childe
Harold’s Pilgrimage, Edinburgh Review
30 (June 1818; issued September 1818), p. 90. Wilson, poet, essayist (chiefly under the pseudonym Christopher North for
Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine
), and from 1820 Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh.