Selected Poems
PENGUIN ENGLISH POETS
GENERAL EDITOR: CHRISTOPHER RICKS
LORD BYRON
SELECTED POEMS
GEORGE GORDON BYRON
was born on 22 January 1788 and he inherited the barony in 1798. He went to school in Dulwich, and then in 1801 to Harrow. In 1805 he went up to Trinity College, Cambridge, later gaining a reputation in London for his startling good looks and extravagant behaviour. His first collection of poems,
Hours of Idleness
(1807), was not well received, but with the publication of the first two cantos of
Childe Harol’s Pilgrimage
(1812) he became famous overnight and increased this fame with a series of wildly popular ‘Eastern Tales’. In 1815 he married the heiress Annabella Milbanke, but they were separated after a year. Byron shocked society by the rumoured relationship with his half-sister, Augusta, and in 1816 he left England for ever. He eventually settled in Italy, where he lived for some time with Teresa, Contessa Guiccioli. He supported Italian revolutionary movements and in 1823 he left for Greece to fight in its struggle for independence, but he contracted a fever and died at Missolonghi in 1824.
Byron’s contemporary popularity was based first on
Childe Harold
and the ‘Tales’, and then on
Don Juan
(1819–24), his most sophisticated and accomplished writing. He was one of the strongest exemplars of the Romantic movement, and the Byronic hero was a prototype widely imitated in European and American literature.
SUSAN J. WOLFSON
received her PhD at the University of California, Berkeley, where she met Peter Manning. She taught at Rutgers University between 1978 and 1991, and is now Professor of English at Princeton University. A noted interpreter of British Romanticism, she has published several essays on Byron. She is the author of
The Questioning Presence: Wordsworth, Keats, and the Interrogative Mode in Romantic Poetry
(1986) and
Formal Charges: The Shaping of Poetry in English Romanticism
(1996).
Borderlines: The Shiftings of Gender in British Romanticism
(with a chapter on
Don Juan
) will appear in 2006.
PETER J. MANNING
graduated from Harvard University and received his PhD from Yale University. He taught at the University of California from 1967 to 1975, at the University of Southern California from 1975 to 2000, and is now Professor and Chair of English at Stony Brook University. A widely recognized authority on Byron, he is the author of
Byron and His Fictions
(1978) and
Reading Romantics
(1990), which includes further essays on Byron. He has numerous other publications on various aspects of English Romanticism. His current project is
The Late Wordsworth
, a culturally situated study of Wordsworth’s career.
LORD BYRON
Selected Poems
Edited with an Introduction by
SUSAN
J.
WOLFSON
and
PETER
J.
MANNING
PENGUIN BOOKS
PENGUIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA
Penguin Group (Canada), 10 Alcorn Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, M4V 3B2
(a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)
Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland
(a division of Penguin Books Ltd)
Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road,
Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd)
Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi – 110 017, India
Penguin Group (NZ), cnr Airborne and Rosedale Roads, Albany, Auckland 1310, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)
Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, 2196, South Africa
Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London, WC2R 0RL, England
First published 1996
This edition with Introduction and updated Further Reading published 2005
6
Selection, Preface and Notes copyright © Susan J. Wolfson and Peter J. Manning, 1996
Introduction and updated Further Reading copyright © Susan J. Wolfson and Peter J. Manning, 2005
All rights reserved
The moral right of the editors has been asserted
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
ISBN: 978-0-14-196033-3
CONTENTS
Introduction
Table of Dates
Further Reading
A Note on This Edition
A Fragment (‘When, to their airy hall, my fathers’ voice’)
To Woman
The Cornelian
To Caroline (‘You say you love, and yet your eye’)
ENGLISH BARDS AND SCOTCH REVIEWERS
:
A Satire
Lines to Mr Hodgson (Written on Board the Lisbon Packet)
Maid of Athens, ere we part
Written after Swimming from Sestos to Abydos
To Thyrza (‘Without a stone to mark the spot’)
CHILDE HAROLD’S PILGRIMAGE: A Romaunt, Cantos I-II
Preface to the First and Second Canto
To Ianthe
Canto the First
Canto the Second
Appendix to Canto the Second
An Ode to the Framers of the Frame Bill
Lines to a Lady Weeping
THE WALTZ: An Apostrophic Hymn
Remember Thee! Remember Thee!
THE GIAOUR: A Fragment of a Turkish Tale
THE BRIDE OF ABYDOS: A Turkish Tale
THE CORSAIR: A Tale
Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte
Stanzas for Music
She walks in beauty
LARA: A Tale
The Destruction of Sennacherib
Napoleon’s Farewell (From the French)
From the French (‘Must thou go, my glorious Chief’)
THE SIEGE OF CORINTH
When we two parted
Fare thee well!
Prometheus
THE PRISONER OF CHILLON: A Fable and Sonnet on Chillon
Darkness
CHILDE HAROLD’S PILGRIMAGE: A Romaunt Canto III
Epistle to Augusta (‘My sister! my sweet sister!’ &c.)
Lines (On Hearing that Lady Byron was Ill)
MANFRED: A Dramatic Poem
So, we’ll go no more a roving
CHILDE HAROLD’S PILGRIMAGE: A Romaunt, Canto IV
Epistle from Mr Murray to Dr Polidori (‘Dear Doctor, I have read your play’)
BEPPO: A Venetian Story
Epistle to Mr Murray (‘My dear Mr Murray’)
MAZEPPA
Stanzas to the Po
The Isles of Greece
Francesca of Rimini. From the
Inferno
of Dante Canto the Fifth
Stanzas (‘When a man hath no freedom’)
SARDANAPALUS: A Tragedy
Who kill’d John Keats?
THE BLUES: A Literary Eclogue
THE VISION OF JUDGMENT
On This Day I Complete My Thirty-Sixth Year
Notes
Works Cited in the Notes
Index of Titles
Index of First Lines
INTRODUCTION
I
As the famous portrait by Thomas Phillips of Byron in Albanian costume makes clear, Byron himself impersonated his most famous poetic creation: the exotic, dashingly handsome, dangerous and seductive Byronic Hero. When visiting Trevesa he had been delighted by the ‘very “magnifique” Albanian dresses,’ as he wrote his mother, and purchased ‘some’ for himself: ‘the only expensive articles in this country they cost 50 guineas each & have so much gold they would cost in England two hundre’.
1
It is no wonder that he commissioned Phillips to paint him in this theatrical pose, but it was not the only image in circulation: another Phillips portrait, with the open collar that Byron made the vogue, was also exhibited in 1814; a portrait by Richard Westall of the previous year showed the poet in staged profile, his chin resting in his hand; in 1817 in Rome Byron sat for a bust by Bertel Thorwaldsen, who grumbled that the began immediately to assume quite another countenance to what was customary to him’ and commanded ‘you must not make these faces’. The sculptor reported that ‘everybody said, when it was finished, that I had hit the likeness’, but Byron himself objected: ‘It does not resemble me at all; I look more unhappy.’
2
The American William Edward West, who painted Byron in Italy in 1822, noted the same elision of the poet and his protagonist: ‘I found him a bad sitter. He talked all the time… When he was silent, he was a better sitter than before; for he assumed a countenance that did not belong to him, as though he were thinking of a frontispiece for Childe Harold’, as though, that is, he were imitating one of his own portraits.
3