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Paper: part 3. April 22, 2007

Posted by jophine in : Childe Harold, Criticism, Hero , comments closed

 This is it! I don’t know if it’s that good, but at least it’s almost complete! Now, for editing!

*****

iii. Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage: the evolution of the Byronic hero

 

            The first half of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage was published in 1812; the two cantos describing a brooding young gentleman’s voyage through Spain and Greece brought Byron immediate success and international fame (McCarthy *****). Five years later and matured by experience, Byron resumed Harold’s journey down the Rhine and into the Swiss Alps; by the time he published Canto IV in 1818, he had admitted reluctantly that there was no distinction between the poet and the pilgrim (Byron 146). The gradual conflation of Byron with Harold marks a change in his poetic style: more personal ruminations flow into the rhythm of the poem and Byron allows himself passionate digressions on his own opinions of history.

At the beginning of the pilgrimage, Byron gives his brooding, psychologically immature hero two options: “he shall calm his breast, or learn experience sage” (stanza XXVIII, line *****). Though Harold’s journey does not have a specific destination in mind, Byron has planned for his hero to grow into a person who is not controlled by “the harlot and the bowl” (line *****). Yet, in Cantos I and II, Byron fails dramatically to accomplish this goal for two important reasons. First, he had not completed his conceptualization of the hero—as a result, Cantos I and II present many problems without offering emotional or actual resolution for either Harold or Byron. Second, Byron had not confronted the fact that he himself wanted to be the hero of the pilgrimage. However, by the end of Canto II, the initial personality of Harold has almost entirely given way to the thoughts and maturation of Byron himself. In the first half of the pilgrimage, Byron begins an exploration of the world and of the world’s history that changes his philosophy of heroism for the rest of his poetic career.

            In Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage—and throughout his entire career—Byron is looking for a hero. Mozer examines the first four stanzas of Don Juan and remarks on Byron’s mimicry of advertisement language (*****). In the pilgrimage, however, Byron’s call for heroism is prompted often by outrage at history, evident both in his poetry and in his comments. In stanza XXXVI of Canto I, after traveling through Spain, Byron writes, “Awake, ye sons of Spain! awake! advance! / Lo! Chivalry, your ancient goddess cries!” (lines *****). Similarly, in Canto II, he cries, “Ancient of days! august Athena! where / Where are thy men of might? thy grand in soul? / … Sons of the morning,[1] rise! Approach you here!” (lines *****, 19). In both Spain and Greece, he personifies the past as goddesses rendered powerless by the passage of time. In each, he calls specifically to the people of that region to defend their land. Byron’s desire for both Spain and Greece is similar to Manfred’s desire for Astarte: both believe the present should resemble the past, and both desires are futile. By the end of Canto II, Byron has experienced much of modern Greece, but he is still enraptured with the ideal of the ancient and continues to plea for its rescue: “when / Can man its shatter’d splendour renovate, / Recall its virtues back, and vanquish Time and Fate?” (lines 798-800). However, he does acknowledge that time must continue, and beckons to it, “Roll on, vain days! full reckless may ye flow” (line 924): Byron begins to acknowledge that time cannot reverse, and that every moment brings him further away from the ideal past.

            As mentioned earlier, Byron himself wished to answer the call for heroism. McGann claims that “Byron interiorizes the [travelogue] form so drastically that it mutates into a drama of personal history. The historical context in which the personal record is set is turned into a reflection of Byron’s own psychological condition” (Byron 1026). Peter Thorslev, in his analysis of the Byronic hero throughout the poet’s career, identifies Childe Harold as an amalgamation of traditional heroes (132), but later goes on to accuse Byron of being “not only too personal, but too petty and vindictive” (140). Phillip W. Martin, who himself addressed the first half of the pilgrimage in terms of its popular appeal, summed up the previous scholarship thusly: “Approving critics may not the perspicuity of the poem’s dark opinions, or the fascination of its psychology, while disapproving critics might censure the indulgence of high Romantic self-expression or dramatization” (77). Though opinions and methods differ, critics unfailingly return to Byron’s psychology and the disappearance of the Harold persona in the text.  

            This paper argues, instead, that Byron created Harold with a specific heroic persona in mind; the poet’s obsession with absorbed history eclipsed the fictional persona and replaced it with Byron’s. Thorslev isolates the Harold of Cantos I and II, saying “however many details of ancestry of biography he may have acquired from Byron’s personal life… [Harold] is a compound of many distinct and even disparate elements of [other] heroes” (132). The poem, with its genre-schizophrenia, supports this claim. Byron begins the poem in media res and with an invocation to the muse, which mimics Greek epic. The appellation of “childe” implies chivalric tradition with “Love, Honour, and so forth” (Byron *****). Harold himself takes deep pleasure in scenic vistas, which points towards a romantic, “child of nature” tradition (Thorslev 132). Byron also constructs Harold as a bacchanal with few concerns beyond women and wine. Though Harold as an Englishman might understand and consider the Convention at Cintra (stanzas *****), it is unlikely that he would ruminate upon the events during eighth-century Spain allowing Moors to invade (canto I, line 389) or concern himself with the Spanish prime minister Godoy. Canto II, set in Greece, has even more Byron-specific moments, and his personal outrage in this canto is far more tangible than in the first. In his notes, Byron says, “Never did the littleness of man, and the vanity of his very best virtues, of patriotism to exalt, and of valour to defend his country, appear more conspicuous in the record of what Athens was, and the certainty of what she is now” (Byron 85). Reminiscences on historical events are the most obvious moments where the poet intercedes on the pilgrim’s travels. Though Harold absorbs the experience of seeing the world, Byron supplies his protagonist with a historical commentary which eventually overwhelms—and later becomes a part of—the hero. Thus, because it is of utmost importance to Byron, absorbed history comes to the fore in Harold’s later development.

            In the earlier cantos, Byron’s personal mourning persists to an unending extreme. In Canto I, he addresses the dead John Wingfield and claims, “unavailing woe / Bursts from my heart” (lines 927-8) and that he will mourn until his “frail frame return to whence it rose, / And mourn’d and mourner lie united in repose” (lines 943-4). This funereal language is very reminiscent of the Giaour’s, indicating a grief process that ends only at death. In Canto III, however, Byron revises his process of grief:

Yet must I think less wildly:—I have thought

Too long and darkly,

………………………………………………………………….

Yet I am changed; though still enough the same

In strength to bear what time can not abate,

And feed on bitter fruits without accusing Fate. (lines 54-63)

Where in the first half of the pilgrimage, he acknowledged that time must move, here he understands that time heals nothing; human strength bears the weight of human experience. Byron blames his previous melancholy on his education, claiming that he was “untaught in youth my heart to tame” (Canto III, line 51)—he would return to the emotional education of youths in Don Juan. Five stanzas later, Byron transmits his new emotional maturity to Harold, who “would not yield dominion of his mind / To spirits against whom his own rebelled” (lines 105-6). In addition, Harold’s heart “could find / A life within itself, to breathe without mankind” (lines 107-8). One year after the composition of Canto III, Byron gives these same conclusions to Manfred, directly echoing the rebellion against external forces as well as the “life within,” a though which he would perfect in Cain. Here, Byron and Harold triumph over their emotional natures, and in the rest of Canto III, the Harold persona disappears.

            At the end of Canto III, Byron says, “I have not loved the world, nor the world me,— / But let us part fair foes;” (lines 1058-9), and in Canto IV, traveling through Italy, he evinces the reconciliation between his personal life and his vehement historical outrage. Upon visiting the Coliseum, Byron’s vivid historical imagination fills the stadium with a crowd, then a gladiator who “Consents to death, but conquers agony” (line 1254), a shortened version of the heroic success. McGann argues that the Coliseum passage the beginning of a movement away from eye-for-an-eye justice, in which “history is pictured as a process in which each age bequeaths to the next its ‘inborn tyranny,’ its ‘hereditary rage’” (43). He goes on to suggest that Byron does not resolve this cycle of death for death until the story of the Caritas Romana, in which punishment for tyranny is replaced by love and forgiveness, thus ending cyclic process (46).

However, this paper argues that the gladiator is not representative of a brutal justice, but a reenactment of the earlier sentiments of the first two cantos balanced with a more neutral understanding of time. When the gladiator dies, Byron cries, “Shall he expire / And unavenged?— Arise! ye Goths, and glut your ire!” (lines 1268-9), an echo of the nationalistic calls to arms in Spain and Greece. But by now, Byron has universalized his sense of heroism; he has constructed the Gothic warrior as metonymy for the arena and for Rome, evident in the subsequent stanzas describing the Coliseum. The arena in its ruin “will not bear the brightness of the day” (line 1286), though it is a central figure for the reconstruction of Rome. By contrast, at night, “the stars twinkle through the loops of time / … / The garland-forst, which the grey walls wear, / Like laurels on the bald first Caesar’s head” (lines 1290-3). Similarly, the dying gladiator hears the roar of the crowd, “but he heeded it not—his eyes / Were with his heart, and that was far away” (lines 1261-2). Byron creates two sets of parallel present circumstances—the gladiator killed by Rome, and the Coliseum decayed by man—and shows how each can look to past happiness and glory and ignore their agony. The present does not disappear, but – viewed simultaneously with the knowledge of history – can be endured.

            Harold and Byron progressed simultaneously through Europe, accumulating both personal experience and historical knowledge. After Canto III, however, Byron never returned to England, and perhaps never intended to: he wrote his beloved half-sister Augusta, “we shall not meet again for some time, at all events – if ever” (McCarthy 277). This lent not only universality to his later poetry but also a distinct sense of homelessness. Deborah Lutz writes thoughtfully on the Byronic hero’s exile, saying, “Voyaging is tragic… [The Byronic hero’s] dark thoughtfulness keeps him moving, deferring the possibility of settling, and of restfully stopping in a hometown, with intellectual closure and fully formed ideas” (25). Lutz, however, views the need for travel, the melancholy, and the distant possibility of bliss as a failure (27), whereas this paper argues that the decision of self-imposed exile is triumphant. Byron ends Harold’s pilgrimage with an ode to the ocean, unchanging though everything on land is subject to time. He concludes by entrusting himself to the ocean (line 1656), despite the danger and uncertainty it presents. He claims inspiration from Metella’s tomb, sitting by it and imagining himself on a boat which crashes against a shore:

And from the planks, far shattered o’er the rocks,

Built me a little bark of hope, once more

To battle with the ocean and the shocks

Of the loud breakers, and the ceaseless roar

Which rushes on the solitary shore

Where all lies foundered that was ever dear:

But could I gather from the wave-worn store

Enough for my rude boat, where should I steer?

There woos no home, nor hope, nor life, save what is here. (lines 937-45)

This is Byron’s resolution: to henceforth collect what he knows and what he has experienced around him and continue traveling. Byron himself, in the course of writing Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, enacts a heroic success, by accumulating the past, but choosing to live constantly in the present.

[1] Jerome McGann identifies these as Levantines (Byron 1028).

Milton, Byron, and Intertextuality. March 23, 2007

Posted by jophine in : Childe Harold, Dramatic Plays, Hilarious Things, Miscellany , comments closed

Just got back from a third of the Milton Read-a-thon, having wimped out after only four hours. I had to put something down, though:


I have not loved the world, nor the world me;

I have not flattered its rank breath, nor bow’d


To its idolatries a patient knee,–


nor coin’d my cheek to smiles,– nor cried aloud


In worship of an echo; in the crowd


They could not deem me one of such; I stood


Among them, but not of them; in a shroud


Of thoughts which were not their thoughts, and still could,


Had I not filed my mind, which thus itself subdued. (CHP, Canto III, stanza 113).

 

Versus:

This knows my punisher; therefore as farr
From granting hee, as I from begging peace:
All hope excluded thus, behold in stead
Of us out-cast, exil’d, his new delight,
Mankind created, and for him this World.
So farewel Hope, and with Hope farewel Fear,
Farewel Remorse: all Good to me is lost;
Evil be thou my Good; by thee at least
Divided Empire with Heav’ns King I hold
By thee, and more then half perhaps will reigne;
As Man ere long, and this new World shall know. (Paradise Lost, Book IV, lines 103-113).

This is so much cooler in my head. I have to reread Cain. Oh man, why didn’t I read Milton earlier?

Cain and the Infinite Sadness February 26, 2007

Posted by jophine in : Childe Harold, Hero , comments closed

What type of man is Byron’s Cain in Byron’s Cain? I think, when he depicts the second man, Byron is in essence creating a simplified version of all of his heroes, including the naive Childe Harold of cantos I and II, Manfred, the giaour, and the matured Childe Harold of cantos III and IV. Cain sees the world through specific filters which all of Byron’s heroes suffer, and the most important and potent of these filters is history. Cain perceives the world through the very little human history that exists, and he absorbs what Lucifer shows him of pre-human history. Armed with the knowledge of his and the earth’s past, Cain interprets his present differently from his entire family, and ultimately chooses free will over subservience to God.

If I were writing a paper on Cain alone, that’s how I would begin it, but since this is a blog, I’ll take liberties and just let it be a space where I can clarify my thoughts. Cain, I think, is a human that is concerned not with all of human history, but with the extremes of it — the beauties of a Paradise and the despair of a fall which he did not witness, but envisions and mourns:

And this is

Life! — Toil! and wherefore should I toil? — because

My father could not keep his place in Eden.

What had I done in this? — I was unborn,

I sought not to be born; nor to love the state

To which birth has brought me.

Even before he meets Lucifer, Cain is already concerned with his own history’s greatest and worst moments. In his other heroes, Byron usually merges these. For example, though Harold (Byron) was not there for the battle of Waterloo in Canto III, he walks on the land imagining the trials his cousin endured, and considers the affects of the battle knowing the outcome rather than the process. The pain he feels, though — the loss of a cousin and the loss of Napoleon — affects him gravely. Just as Cain did not personally fall, Harold did not personally battle, and the loss is merely a response to the events he has internalized, seemingly on behalf of the dead.

Cain, however, also internalizes more distant history, which he can be told, but which he cannot understand — it is completely out of his scope of social understanding. In their grand tour of the universe, Lucifer shows Cain Hades, and Cain discovers that there were creatures inhabiting earth and cast into hell long before humans existed: dinosaurs (awesome, dinosaurs!) He absorbs this history as part of the history of Earth, and is astounded by these beasts whose size and majesty would be too great for the Earth he inhabits. Similarly, Harold cannot witness the field of Marathon without imagining the great battle that happened there in vivid — if unknown — detail, and he also sees the subsequent irreverence with which people walk on the grounds. He then perceives the modern day, ravaged version of Marathon, and can only mourn the bloodshed and glory that were once there. Because of the internalized history which he was not a part of but which nevertheless affects him, Harold, like Cain, can only despair his own position as witness without agency, helpless in the face of a higher order.

I think Cain, too, helped me to understand canto III of Childe Harold a little better. Byron frames canto III with a message to his daughter, whom he saw only when she was a baby, and whom he would never see again. Cain, though he tries to force his wife and son away, is nevertheless swayed by her unconditional love and insistence; he asks if she fears the first murderer, and she replies, “I fear / Nothing except to leave thee, much as I / Shrink from the deed which leaves thee brotherless.” Byron has only the child to leave, and so wanders alone, but like Cain has to reconcile himself with the fact that he is one of those cliched “doomed to live.” But I don’t think that either Harold or Cain (or Byron) really feel that life is their punishment, but in truth, it’s the extension of remembering history as well as witnessing the sufferring of the future. Towards the end of canto III, Harold/Byron says,

I have not loved the world, north the world me, —

But let us part fair foes; I do believe,

Though I have found them not, that there may be

Words which are things, — hopes which will not deceive,

And virtues which are merciful, nor weave

Snares for the failing: I would also deem

O’er others’ griefs that some sincerely grieve;

That two, or one, are almost what they seem–

That goodness is no name, and happiness no dream.

And the earlier Cain:

Oh! thou dead

And everlasting witness! whose unsinking

Blood darkens earth and heaven! what thou now art,

I know not! but if thou see’st what I am,

I think thou wilt forgive him, whom his God

Can ne’er forgive, nor his own soul. — Farewell!

At the end of both Cain and Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage canto III, both heroes reconcile themselves not with the higher power, but with the events of their time. They distinguish themselves through in Harold’s case social out-casting and unique thought, and in Cain’s case crime. But each one is reconciled with his antagonist. For Cain, this is Abel whom, though he suffered under the same weight of their parents’ fall, nevertheless bows and prays to God with pure faith. For Harold, this is the world which, perceived through the lens of history, rapes itself and tortures him with irreverence for both history and nature and glory — such as that of Napoleon. Both men have to reconcile their personal histories with their internalized histories, and then make peace with the world that they witness.