Canto I introduces the hero as "a shameless wight / Sore given to revel and ungodly glee." Isolated even in the crowds of revelry, however, the Childe leaves his home feeling: "'My greatest grief is that I leave / No thing that claims a tear.'" Following the Childe to Lisbon, Cintra, Seville, and Cadizall significant sites in the Peninsular War (18081814), the narrator of the poem begins Canto II meditating on the past glories of Athens. The ruins of the Acropolis serve to link the past and present. The Childe reappears traveling to Albania, where helike Byronis received by Ali Pasha.
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In his self-imposed exile from England, Byron published Canto III in 1818, taking the Childe"the wandering outlaw of his own dark mind"and the narrator, who has not "loved the world, nor the world me," to Waterloo, to the Rhine, and to Lake Leman and the nature of Wordsworth, Rousseau, and Shelley. In a letter of 1819 Keats reports that four thousand copies of Canto IV have been sold even before the work has appeared in print. Standing on the Bridge of Sighs in Venice, the narrator suggests that "states fall, arts fadebut Nature doth not die." Finally, it is the ocean that remains for the pilgrim Childe and for the consciousness that pens the tale: "Time writes no wrinkle on thine azure brow."
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To create Childe Harold is to "live / A being more intense." In the figures of the Turkish Tales, Conrad the Corsair, Lara, the Giaour, Selim of
The Bride of Abydos
, Byron shapes beings that embody the intense notion of maleness that so fascinated nineteenth-century readers.
Manfred
, a "dramatic poem" of 1817, seems obsessed with autonomous male power. "Power" and two cognates are spoken over forty times in an insistent debate within and about Manfred's mountainous individualism, as John Martin's watercolor
Manfred on the Jungfrau
(1837) heroically illustrates. In the death scene Manfred faces down infernal spirits that try to claim him for having knowledge they can't comprehendwon "by superior science . . . and skill / In knowledge of our fathers."
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Both rumor and Manfred's own search among weird realms for oblivion or forgiveness indicate that he crossed into incest, which killed his sister Astarte. Appearing as raised premonitory phantom, Astarte is the only human female figure in
Manfred
. The tyrannous spirits that harangue Manfred's tortured freedom revert to the devils of morality plays. By 1821 Byron was proclaiming Shakespeare "to be the
worst
of models," but an epigram from
Hamlet
precedes this poem, and its
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