He has added to the interest of his works by their adoption he has shown his sense of their beauty by the selection but they have done that for him which no human being could do for them” (note to III, l. As Byron explains in one of his many footnotes, which are essential to the poem’s integrity, when describing the scenery of the Alps where Rousseau set his novel Julie: “If Rousseau had never written, nor lived, the same associations would not less have belonged to such scenes. 725 cantos III and IV are significant influences on Percy Bysshe Shelley’s The Triumph of Life, which also contains a memorable account of the French philosopher JeanJacques Rousseau, perhaps the first romantic) all lead to the placement of nature above any human significance. The final defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo, the battlefield Byron visits in canto III (and describes in a passage that will incite William Makepeace Thackeray’s great Waterloo scene in Vanity Fair), the later autobiographical projection he undertakes in his praise of “the selftorturing sophist, wild Rousseau” (III, l. 47–54).Īll experience testifies to the nothingness that affords Byron the intensity of its own apprehension: “There is a very life in our despair” (III, l. Indeed, Byron sees him as a kind of avatar by whose creation he can transform his nothingness into “A being more intense,” by an apprehension of that very nothingness, “feeling still with thee”-his fictional avatar Harold-“in my crush’d feelings’ dearth” (III, ll. He is Byron reduced to his own poetic perception, judgment, and feeling, “The wandering outlaw of his own dark mind” (III, l. Harold, who barely exists in the poem (he was originally to be called Burun, the old spelling of the Byron family name), is attempting to escape his own past by leaving England for the wastes of ocean and of a fabulous elsewhereness. The work of the poem is to transmute that feeling into one of freedom. It is this sense of pointlessness-to be found in the ultimate insignificance of poetry as well as of political power-that Byron finds everywhere. Byron’s predilection for battlefields (which he explicitly mentions in a footnote to canto III) is for them as a place in which the most intense passion and pain display their ultimate pointlessness. Everywhere it is the indifference of time and fate and nature to human ambition. In Greece the loss is that of the glorious past and the great writers who belong to that past in Albania it is the sublime emptiness of the wilderness. In the poem, what he sees everywhere he goes is emptiness and loss. In particular, this takes the form of commitment to Greek independence, a cause for which Byron would later fight and die. Accordingly, Byron traveled through Portugal, Spain, Malta, Albania, Greece, and Turkey, whose Ottoman Empire extended over Greece, and Byron would die championing the cause of Greek independence, the loss of which he laments in Childe Harold. Those cantos are more or less the poetic journal of a trip Byron took with friends (in particular his close confidant John Cam Hobhouse) through the regions of Europe not occupied by Napoleon Bonaparte’s French forces the areas held by Napoleon were enemy territory for an Englishman. These are the basic questions of romanticism.īyron famously woke up to find himself famous after the publication of cantos I and II of Childe Harold when he was 24. The question always to keep in mind about Childe Harold is why Byron would write a combination travelogue, political tract, autobiography, lamentation, and paean to nature as a poem, and why such a poem should be so spectacularly popular. In many ways it is the archetypal first approximation of a romantic poem, both for Lord Byron’s contemporaries and disciples and for an understanding of English romanticism’s conception of the relationship between nature and literature. The crucial fact about Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage is that it is a poem. Analysis of Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimageīy NASRULLAH MAMBROL on Febru
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