Poems of the Week: Lord Byron

This week is the second of our series in which we look at the work of a single poet, and this week it is George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron, born January 22nd, 1788, in London, England, and died April 19th, 1824, in Missolonghi (now Mesolóngian), Greece; generally called Lord Byron. My usual source, Merriam Webster's Encylopedia of Literature, remarks that his "poetry, personality, and many love affairs captured the imagination of Europe."

Byron had been born with a club foot, and he was extremely sensitive to his lameness, and especially to the 'mincing gait' which it forced upon him. His grandfather was "Foulweather Jack" who, in his youth, was a cast-away on a remote island for five years. He was rescued, and returned to England, rising to the rank of Admiral. Apparently, every voyage he ever went on ended up having bad weather - hence the nick-name. His father was the 'handsome and profligate' Captain John "Mad Jack" Byron, and his mother was his father's second wife, Catherine Gordon, a Scottish heiress, who came from a noble family (the Gordons) in which a significant fraction of her ancestors had been hanged. After her husband had squandered most of her fortune, Catherine took her infant son to Aberdeen, Scotland, where they lived in lodgings on a meager income. Mad Jack died in France in 1791. In 1798, at the age of ten, the younger Byron unexpectedly inherited the title and estates of his great-uncle William, 5th Baron Byron, the older brother of Foulweather Jack. He and his mother returned from Scotland to the 'ghostly halls and spacious ruins' of Newstead Abbey, which had been presented to the Byrons by Henry VIII. He was sent to a preparatory school in London, and then went to Harrow in 1801.

In 1803 he fell in love with a distant cousin, Mary Chaworth, who was older than him and already engaged: so she rejected his advances, as we used to say. She became for him the symbol of idealized and unattainable love. In the same year (probably) he met Augusta Byron, his half-sister from his father's first marriage.

In 1805 he entered Trinity College, Cambridge, and "piled up debts at an alarming rate." He also met John Cam Hobhouse, with whom he formed a close, and lifelong, friendship.

In 1806 he had his early poems privately published in a volume entitled Fugitive Pieces. His first published collection appeared in 1807, entitled Hours of Idleness, and it was immediately panned in The Edinburgh Review. He responded, as you might expect, with a scathing response, English Bards and Scotch Reviewers.

After he reached the age of twenty-one, he entered the House of Lords, and he and Hobhouse set off on a Grand Tour: this was a general practice for the aristocracy at that age. First they went to Spain, and then from Malta to Constantinople. On the way, they were becalmed, and Byron determined to swim the Hellespont, from the Asian coast (Sestos) to the European coast (Abydos). Legend has it that Leander, who loved Hero, made this swim every night to visit her, until one night he drowned in a storm. With his club foot, Byron had never been able to participate in sports, but he had always prided himself on his swimming. The first time he tried it, it didn't work out, because although the linear distance isn't all that great (a mile or so) the current is very strong. The second time, a week later on May 3rd, 1810, he made it. To say he was proud of himself is putting it mildly. He immediately wrote a letter to his friend Henry Drury:

"This morning I swam from Sestos to Abydos. The immediate distance is not above a mile, but the current renders it hazardous - so much so that I doubt whether Leander's conjugal affection must not have been a little chilled in his passage to Paradise."

He also wrote a poem to celebrate it:

If, in the month of dark December,
     Leander, who was nightly wont
(What maid will not the tale remember?)
     To cross thy stream, broad Hellespont!

If, when the wintry tempest roared,
     He sped to Hero, nothing loth,
And thus of old thy current poured,
     Fair Venus! how I pity both!

For me, degenerate modern wretch,
     Though in the genial month of May,
My dripping limbs I faintly stretch,
     And think I've done a feat to-day.

But since he crossed the rapid tide,
     According to the doubtful story,
To woo - and - Lord knows what beside,
     And swam for Love, as I for Glory;

'Twere hard to say fared the best:
     Sad mortals! thus the Gods still plague you!
He lost his labour, I my jest:
     For he was drowned, and I've the ague.

Byron arrived back in London on July 14th, 1811, and his mother died on August 1st before he could reach her. On February 27th, 1812, he made his first speech in the House of Lords, which was very well received, and then at the beginning of March Childe Harold's Pilgrimage was published by John Murray, and was an immediate public success.

Byron was a liberal Whig, a position he maintained throughout his life. He particularly disliked a few of his contemporaries who, having also begun life as liberals moved towards what we would now call Establishment Conservatism. Among these were William Wordsworth (1770-1850), Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834), and Robert Southey (1774-1843), all of whom lived in the English Lake District; Byron referred to them as 'The Lakers'. In 1813, Southey became Poet Laureate, and wrote what can only be regarded as a series of sycophantic poems about George III, a King despised by the majority of his subjects, and his successor George IV. George III died in 1820, and Southey published a poem called A Vision of Judgement, a celebration of the King which 'verged on idolatry, describing his triumphal entry into heaven and the presence of God himself'. (This quote is from Byron's Poetry, selected and edited by Frank D. McConnell). Byron published a long poem with the same title in 1822, a satirical attack on both Southey and the late King. Southey immediately attacked Byron and his close friend Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) as 'Satanist' poets.

I don't want to go into the details of Byron's love life, his succession of mistresses, his bisexuality, and his illegitimate children. [Drat! - Ed.] He had one very brief marriage, to Anne Isabella Milbanke; they were married on January 2nd, 1815, and Lady Byron gave birth to a daughter, Augusta Ada (1816-1852), on December 12th. In January, Lady Byron left with Ada to vist with her parents, and sent notice that she would not be returning. Shortly after, Byron left England under a cloud of scandal, and never returned. The reason I mention Ada Byron is because she was a most interesting person in her own right. When she was 17, she attended a dinner at the house of Mary Somerville, who had translated the work of the French mathematician Henri LaPlace into English, where she met Charles Babbage (1791-1871) and heard his ideas of performing mathematical calculations with machines; at this time he was Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge (a position first held by Newton; Stephen Hawking is the current occupant). Ada was fascinated by this. In 1835, she married the Earl of Lovelace, and they had three children. In 1843, she translated an important Italian article on Babbage's Analytical Engine, adding very extensive notes, which was published the same year. In the correspondence with Babbage that followed, she proposed how the machine could be programmed to calculate advanced functions, and in essence originated the idea of 'programming language'.

Now, I hear the Editor of The Mediadrome whispering in my ear, that's enough of an introduction to Poems of the Week.

So I won't tell you why Byron is a hero in Greece. Or about Don Juan.

So we'll go no more a-roving
     So late into the night,
Though the heart be still as loving,
     And the moon be still as bright.

For the sword outwears its sheath,
     And the soul wears out the breast,
And the heart must pause to breathe,
     And Love itself have rest.

Though the night was made for loving,
     And the day returns too soon,
Yet we'll go no more a-roving
     By the light of the moon.

February 28th, 1817. Isn't that nice? A melancholy little meditation on mortal transience? Ha! In fact, it was written in a letter to Thomas Moore, describing Byron's hangover after the Mardi Gras revels in Venice!

To M.S.G.

She Walks In Beauty

Sonnet on Chillon