(from Childe Harold, Canto iv, Verse 178)

Another very common poetic theme - the desire for wild, lonely places seems to strike a responsive chord in most people, whether as a renunciation of society (and its attendant sensory overload), a wish to be ‘closer to nature’ or a sense of beauty that city streets and people do not satisfy. Or perhaps it is an extension of (or even a cause of) the wanderlust that pervades poems like yesterday’s ‘Golden Road to Samarkand’ and Stevenson’s ‘Vagabond’.

One of the problems I usually have with Byron is that his verse tends to sound glib - one of the things that tempered my admiration of his admittedly brilliant Don Juan. Thankfully, today’s poem avoids that, being unobtrusively crafted while maintaining the quiet solemnity that the subject matter calls for.

Construction

Spenserian stanzas. Here’s what the Cambridge History of English and American Literature has to say:

In his letter to Moore, prefixed to The Corsair, Byron confesses that the Spenserian stanza is the measure most after his own heart, though it is well to remember that when he wrote these words he had not essayed the ottava rima. Disfigured as the stanzas of Childe Harold often are by jarring discords, it must be confessed that this ambitious measure assumed, in Byron’s hands, remarkable vigour, while its elaborately knit structure saved him from the slipshod movement which is all too common in his blank verse. Yet, this vigour is purchased at a heavy price. Rarely in Byron do we meet with the stately, if slow-moving, magnificence with which Spenser has invested the verse of his own creation; the effect produced on our ears by the music of The Faerie Queene is that of a symphony of many strings, whereas, in Childe Harold, we listen to a trumpetcall, clear and resonant, but wanting the subtle cadence and rich vowel-harmonies of the Elizabethan master.

– http://www.bartleby.com/222/0209.html

On Childe Harold:

There’s a nice essay on the significance of Childe Harold at Bartleby (from which the above note on the construction is quoted):
http://www.bartleby.com/222/0209.html

Some quotes:

   The surprising success of the first two cantos of Childe Harold on their
   first appearance in 1812 was in no small measure due to the originality
   of the design, and to Byron's extension of the horizon of romance.
   [...]
   There was much that appealed to the jaded tastes of English society
   under the regency in the conception of Childe Harold as `Pleasure's
   palled victim,' seeking distraction from disappointed love and Comus
   revelry in travel abroad; but, placed amid scenes which quiver with an
   intensity of light and colour, Childe Harold remains from first to last
   an unreal, shadowy form. He is thrust into the picture as fitfully as the
   Spenserian archaisms are thrust into the text, and, when, in the last
   canto, he disappears altogether, we are scarcely conscious of his
   absence.

Random associations:

“Light breaks where no sun shines” - Dylan Thomas “I could not love thee, dear, so much/ Loved I not honour more” - Lovelace, ‘To Lucasta’

Links

We’ve run a couple of Byron’s poems in the past: see poem #169 for a biography and The Wondering Minstrels for the rest of the poems.

The Childe Harold essay (once again): http://www.bartleby.com/222/0209.html

Today’s poem evoked far too many others to list them all, but worth rereading are: poem #1, poem #2
[if only to note the oblique similarity between the first two poems we ran]
poem #113, poem #309

— Martin