Byron's Poetic Experimentation

Childe Harold, the Tales and the Quest for Comedy

Alan Rawes

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351953894
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature
• Index: Literature

In this study, the author examines the evolution of Byron's poetry from Childe Harold I and II through to the composition of Beppo. Beginning with a close reading of the sustained poetic experimentation that constitutes Childe Harold I and II, he charts the progress of that experimentation in the Tales where Byron's poetry gets entrenched in a tragic idiom. The author then describes Byron's prolonged struggle to break clear of the imaginative limitations imposed by that tragic idiom and to break into a sustainable comic mode: a struggle that drives Childe Harold III, The Prisoner of Chillon, and The Dream only to culminate in success in Childe Harold IV. It is here, as Rawes demonstrates, that the path forward into the comic mode of Beppo and Don Juan is discovered. Byron's Poetic Experimentation also offers a substantial reconsideration of Byron's shifting attitude towards Wordsworthian idealism and a detailed analysis of the structured eclecticism of Manfred.

CHAPTER ONE

‘Mix’d in One Mighty Scene with Varied Beauty Glow’

In many of the poems we will be looking at, Byron entertains and tries to synthesize a number of contradictory ideas about the nature of poetry.¹ The first place where these contradictions are allowed full scope, and indeed almost write the poem, is in cantos I and II of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. This is accordingly where we begin.

In 1813, Byron famously wrote:

I by no means rank poetry or poets in the scale of intellect – this may look like Affectation – but it is my real opinion – it is the lava flow of the imagination whose eruption prevents an earth-quake.²

Byron often used poetry as a kind of cathartic self-therapy, venting not only a boiling imagination, but heated emotions. For instance, The Waltz vented ‘the prudishness of his libertinism’ and the ‘pangs of the lame watcher on the sidelines of London and provincial balls’.³ In cantos I and II of Childe Harold, this cathartic use of poetry is insisted upon. In stanza 91, for example, ‘unavailing woe / Bursts from my heart’ (CHP I, 927–928).

Yet the idea that emotional outpourings are a legitimate source of poetry is also ridiculed in Childe Harold I and II. When Harold pours his ‘last “Good night’” to ‘the elements’ (CHP I, 117), he is made to look ridiculous. Indeed, his outburst is offered as a burlesque of a particular kind of poetry rather than an example of it. Similarly, in the midst of Cadiz’s ‘jubilee’ (CHP I, 693), Harold pours forth an utterly inappropriately gloomy ‘lay’ (CHP I, 835) and once more looks slightly ludicrous. We can say, then, that the first instalment of Childe Harold is ‘in touch with a number of contradictory viewpoints’ even about its own procedures.⁴ Correspondingly, the poem is difficult to describe, though not to read, because it is

constantly inventing itself, bringing into being the point of view from which it might be conceived but never from which it must be conceived. It lives in its own presentness and each Spenserian stanza becomes the realization of the moments that constitute that present.⁵

This openness to invention is a form of generation, but it is also a way of trying to move forward into new possibilities. Childe Harold I and II explore new ways of writing and imagining, and progress without a fixed sense of where they will lead to, or of what they will become. This opening chapter will, in trying to describe that progress, echo the poem’s openness to what is new and disruptive. While we will be guided by the question, ‘What kind of poem does Byron finally write?’, we must postpone any attempt at a comprehensive answer until the end of the chapter. For now, we will limit ourselves to describing the succession of ‘moments that constitute’ the poem’s present.

As we begin to read the poem, that reading is conditioned by the title. It does two things. Firstly, it leads us to expect a narrative poem centred on Harold.⁶ Secondly, it leads us to expect a particular kind of narrative. The words ‘Pilgrimage’ and ‘Childe’, in conjunction with the subtitle, clearly evoke the tradition of romance. William H. Marshall describes its procedures as follows:

the protagonist of the verse romance is sent upon a mission, the fulfilment of which will prove his courage and other qualities needed for moral survival: the end of the pilgrimage must be the test itself.⁷

Harold does not fulfil these conditions, and we quickly realize, on reading the opening stanzas, that we are not going to get this kind of narrative. Harold does not embark upon a mission, but simply ‘for change of scene’ (CHP I, 54). If anything, Harold’s journey is an escape rather than a quest.

Why, then, does Byron set up the expectation of a romance narrative only to disappoint that expectation? The title claims for the poem an allegiance with a particular tradition, that is, with the imitations of Spenser’s stanza that were common in the eighteenth century, such as The Castle of Indolence and The Minstrel.

The allegiance implicitly claimed by the title is explicitly claimed by the Preface:

The stanza of Spenser, according to one of our most successful poets, admits of every variety. Dr. Beattie makes the following observation: ‘Not long ago I began a poem in the style and stanza of Spenser, in which I propose to give full scope to my inclination, and be either droll or pathetic, descriptive or sentimental, tender or satirical, as the humour strikes me; for, if I mistake not, the measure which I have adopted admits equally of all these kinds of composition’– Strengthened in my opinion by such authority, and by the example of some in the highest order of Italian poets, I shall make no apology for attempts at similar variations in the following composition; satisfied that, if they are unsuccessful, their failure must be in the execution, rather than in the design sanctioned by the practice of Aristo, Thomson, and Beattie. (CHP I and II, Preface, 32–44)

Byron’s project is that of Beattie: ‘variety’, ‘variation’, ‘all … kinds of composition’, to ‘give full scope to my inclination’, and Byron claims his poem belongs with those of ‘Aristo, Thomson, and Beattie’. But as Bernard Beatty suggests, Beattie and Thomson are ‘exemplars … more in theory than in fact’. While these precursors ‘suggest possibilities’, they only began to ‘realize the varied possibilities of the form’.⁸ Byron’s aim is to fully realize those possibilities.

His means to this end, however, are not those of Beattie and Thomson. The Castle of Indolence is an allegorical and moral romance narrative. The Knights of Art and Industry triumph over the Wizard of Indolence. The Minstrel, on the other hand, is a psychological narrative, which traces ‘the progress of a Poetical Genius, born in a rude age, from the first dawning of fancy and reason’.⁹ As we shall see, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, though it contains narrative elements, is not really a narrative in either of these senses. Furthermore, while its opening stanzas are structured as narrative, as the poem progresses this structure is pushed to one side, and replaced with a looser lyric form. The first instalment of Childe Harold is a ‘medley’,¹⁰ a ‘collection of lyrics’.¹¹

Canto I begins, then, by acknowledging the poem’s eighteenth-century precedents and situating the poem in the context of the particular tradition it continues. But it also begins by announcing Byron’s desire to do something new within that tradition. The title, and to some extent the first few stanzas, lead us to anticipate a romance narrative, possibly a knightly narrative, along the lines of Spenser filtered through, say, Beattie. The poem’s refusal to fulfil the expectation thus generated articulates Byron’s determination to do something new and different.

Nevertheless, Byron did not begin with a clear and fixed plan of the poem he was writing. Much more obvious is a clear sense of the kinds of poem he did not want to write. For example, Harold’s character and imminent departure quickly generate a narrative which seems to be tracing ‘a therapeutic movement toward a better self than the one he was at the outset’.¹² Harold begins ‘Sore given to revel and ungodly glee’ (CHP I, 15), but becomes ‘sore sick at heart’ (CHP I, 46) in stanza 6, and eager to ‘flee’ his ‘fellow bacchanals’ (CHP I, 47). Yet Byron fends off this kind of narrative progression almost as soon as it takes shape.¹³ His narrator’s attitude oscillates between optimism and contempt, or as Richard Cronin puts it, ‘between sympathy and disapproval’,¹⁴ but a sarcastic and mock-heroic portrayal of Harold runs through his narration which ironizes the suggestion that Harold aches to be a ‘better self’.¹⁵ This can be heard in the extract below, especially in the pause stressed by a semicolon at the end of line 33.¹⁶ It holds the reader’s expectation, aroused by the phrase ‘Worse than adversity’, only to answer that expectation with bathos:

But long ere scare a third of his pass’d by,

Worse than adversity the Childe befell;

He felt the fullness of satiety. (CHP I, 32–34)

On occasion, the narrator even seems to feel contempt, indeed outright dislike, for Harold, as in these lines:

Ah, happy she! to ’scape from him whose kiss

Had been pollution unto aught so chaste;

Who soon had left her charms for vulgar bliss,

And spoil’d her goodly lands to gild his waste,

Nor calm domestic peace had ever deign’d to taste. (CHP I, 41–44)

Byron fends off one kind of narrative with another, or rather, he fends off the idea of a narrative of spiritual growth with the idea of a narrative of villainy, in which the hero moves on only because satiated, and moves on only to further villainous exploits and ‘ungodly’ acts:

And now Childe Harold was sore sick at heart,

And from his fellow bacchanals would flee;

’Tis said, at times the sullen tear would start,

But Pride congeal’d the drop within his ee:

Apart he stalk’d in joyless reverie,

And from his native land resolv’d to go,

And visit scorching climbs beyond the sea;

With pleasure drugg’d he almost long’d for woe,

And e’en for change of scene would seek the shades below. (CHP I, 46–54)

The opening lines here suggest a movement towards a ‘better self’, but the words ‘sullen’, ‘pride’, ‘stalked’ carry forward the suggestion of villainy.¹⁷ Even though the narrator distances himself from these suggestions, reporting them as a rumour (“Tis said’), he does not refute them. Indeed, a degree of contempt creeps into his own voice: ‘with pleasure drugg’d’. Does he also hint at the possibility of future villainies when he says that Harold ‘almost long’d for woe’? It is not clear, but this is my point. One possibility is held at bay by others. And in the final Alexandrine, while Byron stresses Harold’s desire to ‘change’, move on, leave the ‘scene’ of bacchanalia, we also see that Harold would be prepared to do anything for a change. The image Byron picks to describe the lengths to which Harold’s desire to escape ‘ungodly glee’ will go is Hell.

Though it is difficult to pick out just how many ideas are coming together here, we can isolate two of them. We can see that Byron checks the idea of spiritual growth with the idea of villainy. But it is equally significant that he fends off the idea that Harold is a villain by hitting a note of unambiguous sympathy:

Yet oft-times in his maddest mirthful mood

Strange pangs would flash along Childe Harold’s brow,

As if the memory of some deadly feud

Or disappointed passion lurk’d below:

For his was not that open, artless soul

That feels relief by bidding sorrow flow,

Nor sought he friend to counsel or condole,

Whate’er his grief mote be, which he could not control. (CHP I, 64–72)

We are naturally intrigued by these ‘strange pangs’, and by the closure of ‘none this knew’.¹⁸ The reader is curious and holds on to the possibilities offered, especially ‘disappointed passion’: it picks up on the earlier hint that ‘he lov’d but one, / And that lov’d one, alas! could ne’er be his’ (CHP I, 39–40) which was smothered by the suggestion that her escape had been a lucky one. Here the hint resonates, because of the words ‘sorrow’, ‘grief’, and the suggestion of isolation, which runs over into the next stanza: ‘And none did love him’ (CHP I, 73). These things call out for a sympathy usually denied a villain,¹⁹ and we recall that he ‘loath’d … in his native land to dwell’ not only because he is satiated with pleasure, but because it is ‘more lone than Eremite’s sad cell’ (CHP I, 35–36).

It is important to emphasize that this note of sadness, loneliness, and lovelessness opens up a new range of possibilities, and sets up various kinds of new expectations. When anticipated from the standpoint of this stanza, the poem no longer seems likely to be a catalogue of villainy, for example. We modify our expectations accordingly, and a number of possibilities suggest themselves: a ‘therapeutic movement’ into a better existence, certainly, and per...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• General Editors’ Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 ‘Mixed in One Mighty Scene with Varied Beauty Glow’
• 2 ‘The Frame of Things Disjoint’
• 3 ‘A Narrow Escape into Faith’
• 4 ‘Tears, and Tortures, and the Touch of Joy’
• 5 ‘To Increase our Power Increasing Thine’
• 6 A ‘More Beloved Existence’
• Bibliography
• Index