Selected Poems (154 page)

Criticism: T.G. Steffan, ‘The Devil a Bit of Our
Beppo’
, on the composition of the poem, also the starting-point for Jerome J. McGann’s thorough Introduction to the Manuscript P text in
Shelley and His Circle
, Vol. 7; Frederick L. Beaty,
Byron the Satirist
, on the role of Sotheby; Peter Vassallo,
Byron: The Italian Literary Influence
, on the Italian models and William Keach, ‘Political Inflection’, on their English mediations; Paul W. Elledge,
Byron and the Dynamics of Metaphor
especially on the function of digression (‘Divorce Italian Style’); Peter J. Manning,
Reading Roman
tics; and Cheryl Fallon Giuliano, ‘Marginal Discourse’, on authorship, gender and gossip.

Epistle to Mr Murray (‘My dear Mr Murray’)

Dated Venice, 8 January 1818; published in part in Moore’s
Life
(1830), and collected thereafter; stanzas XII—XIV first published in Leslie A. Marchand’s
Byron: A Biography
(Vol. 2, p. 722).

Hobhouse left Venice for London on 8 January (the date of this epistle) with the manuscript of
Childe Harold IV
(1. 5). Byron refers to Murray’s intended founding of a literary journal (1. 7), and to Murray’s publication of the tales of Henry Gaily Knight,
Alashtar
and
Phrosyne
, in 1817 (11. 13-18). Sotheby, also lampooned in
Beppo
(see note to
Beppo
), was the author of
Farewell to ltaly
(1818) and translator of Tasso and Wieland’s
Oberon
(1798) (11. 20–30). Edward Malone’s edition of Joseph Spence’s
Observations
appeared in 1820, George Chalmers’s
Life
of Mary Queen of Scots in 1819,
The Monks and the Giants
, by William and Robert ‘Whistlecraf’ (John Hookham Frere) in 1817 (11. 37–41). George Canning was a prominent Tory, later Prime Minister, contributor to the
Antijacobin Review
and famous for his wit (1. 58). Byron’s cousin John Wilmot (see note to ‘She walks in beauty’) travelled on the Continent in 181.6 with Byron’s acquaintance John William Ward, as Byron had planned to do in 1813 (11. 55–66). ‘Tommy’ and ‘Sammy’ (1. 81) are Thomas Moore and Samuel Rogers.

MAZEPPA

Written April 1817—September 1818; published June 1819, with two other poems, in an edition of 8,000.

This is a frame tale, based, as Byron’s untranslated headnotes indicate, on an incident in Voltaire’s
Histoire de Charles XII
(1772). Its teller, Mazeppa, is a Polish gentleman who had been a Hetman (Prince) of the Ukraine under Peter the Great, before defecting to Charles XII of Sweden, under whom he served in the Battle of Poltáva (‘Pultowa’s day’, 8 July 1709), and to whom he tells this story in order to ease him to sleep in their retreat after a devastating defeat by Peter. The immediate historical frame of the opening stanza situates Charles’s warmongering in relation to Napoleon’s disastrous Moscow campaign of 1812. Thomas Moore suspected a still more immediate frame in ‘the circumstances of [Byron’s] own personal history’, his liaison with Teresa Guiccioli under the ambiguous approval of her much older husband; as Peter J. Manning remarks, this is yet another story in which a young man becomes the lover of the young wife of an old man, is discovered by the latter, and punished (
Byron and His Fictions
, p. 101) — in this case, tied naked to the back of a wild Arabian horse and driven off to die (the means by which Mazeppa arrived in the Ukraine).

The unexpectedly comic closing of the narrative frame signals Byron’s departure from the idiom of his previous successes in tale-telling and may be compared to the narrative manner being tested in
Don Juan I,
written during the same months. The central, sensationally elaborated episode of the horse-ride became the most famous passage, a set piece in itself; in an adaptation, it provided international celebrity for Adah Isaacs Menken, a nineteenth-century actress who, in flesh-coloured tights and lightly cross-dressed, played the title-role with a real horse. For this Byronic coda, see Wolf Mankowitz’s
Mazeppa.

Stanzas to the Po

Written 1 or 2 June 1819; published in Thomas Medwin’s
Conversations of Lord Byron
(1824), collected in the 1831
Works.

Byron and Teresa Guiccioli began their liaison in April 1819, but it was interrupted almost immediately by her removal from Venice by her husband; the poem reflects the uncertainties of the period before the lovers met again in mid June in Ravenna. Byron sent the stanzas to England in 1820, admonishing Murray that they ‘must
not
be published… as they are mere verses of Society – & written upon private feelings and passions’ (
BLJ,
Vol. 7, p. 97).

Criticism: on the biographical and textual cruxes of the poem, see Jerome J. McGann’s note in
CPW,
Vol. 4, pp. 496–9.

The Isles of Greece

Written September–November 1819; published in Canto III of
Don Juan
(1821).

By placing this passionate, patriotic song in the mouth of the trimmer poet at the court of Haidée and Juan, Byron initiated a dynamic series of perspectives on his own erotic and heroic investments; we include it because it has become, in its repeated anthologizing out of dramatic context, Byron’s most celebrated lyric.

Criticism: Jerome J. McGann, ‘The Book of Byron and the Book of a World’.

Francesca of Rimini. From the Inferno of Dante, Canto the Fifth

In June 1819, Byron read the famous passage about Paolo and Francesca in
The Inferno
with Teresa Guiccioli, his lover, who was still living with Count Guiccioli, her much older husband, in his palace in Ravenna, the city where Francesca was born and where Dante wrote
The Inferno
. When Teresa asked Byron if this episode had been translated into English he replied,
‘Non tradotto, ma tradito’
— ‘Not translated, but betrayed’ (Leslie A. Marchand,
Byron: A Biography
, Vol. 2, pp. 794–5). He rendered his own translation of
Inferno
, V: 97–142 in March 1820, and sent ‘Fanny of Rimini’ to Murray the same month, asking him to publish this ‘
cramp
English’ attempt at
terza rima
(‘line for line & rhyme for rhyme’) ‘
with the original
– and
together
with the
Pulci
translation –
or
the
Dante Imitation
’ (
BLJ
, Vol. 7, p. 58) – that is, his
terza-rima Prophecy of Dante
and his
ottava-rima
translation of Pulci’s
Morgante Maggiore
, already in Murray’s possession.
Prophecy
was published by Murray in April 1821 with
Marino Faliero
, and ‘the
Pulci’
was eventually ceded to John Hunt, who put it in the fourth issue of the
Liberal
, July 1823; but ‘Francesca of Rimini’ languished amid Byron’s deteriorating relations with Murray and did not appear until 1830, posthumously, in Moore.

The famous and historically true story, from the late thirteenth century, of the adulterous lovers, Paolo and Francesca, and their fatal punishment by her enraged husband, bears parallels to Byron’s situation with the Count and Countess, as well as recalls the oedipal triangles in a number of his poems (see Peter J. Manning,
Byron and His Fictions
). In Dante’s scheme, the lovers are condemned to the second circle of hell, that of voluptuaries (also inhabited by Helen of Troy and Cleopatra). The circumstances of their ‘crime’ evoked sympathy in literary renderings and cultural transmissions. Dante’s own sympathy was influenced by the fact that Francesca’s father, Count of Ravenna, was his friend, protector and patron in the exile of his later days (when he wrote the
Divina Commedia
); he had probably known Francesca as a girl. Francesca’s father, to make peace with his enemy, the Count of Rimini, engaged her to Rimin’s eldest son who was (in Boccaccio’s commentary on this episode) courageous but also ‘hideously deformed in countenance and figure’. This son thought it best, in fact, to approach Francesca by the proxy of his younger, handsome brother, Paolo. When these two fell passionately in love, friends of Ravenna pleaded with him not to force Francesca into an untenable political marriage, but he was eager to end his war with Rimini. The marriage took place in 1275; the lovers were discovered and murdered some time between 1283 and 1286.

Byron admired Dante’s interview with Francesca for its ‘gentle feelings’; ’there is a gentleness in Dante beyond all gentleness, when he is tender. It is true that, treating of the Christian Hades, or Hell, there is not much scope or site for gentleness – but who
but
Dante could have introduced any ‘gentleness’ at all into
Hell
? Is there any in Milton’s? – No’ (
BLJ
, Vol. 8, pp. 39–40). The episode interested many of Byron’s contemporaries, especially after Cary’s translation of
The Divine Comedy
in 1814. It was also a politicized subject, by virtue of Leigh Hunt’s
Story of Rimini
(1816), which he dedicated to Byron, and which the Tory press, severely critical of Hunt’s liberal, anti-royalist politics, subjected to abuse and ridicule, usually coded as contempt of ‘vulgar’ poetics (see the first paper ‘On the Cockney School of Poetry’ in
Blackwood’s
, October 1817, by ‘Z’ (thought to be John Gibson Lockhart)). In June 1820, Keats, well versed in both Cary’s translation and Hunt’s
Rimini
(and similarly abused by ‘Z’ for his association with Hunt), published a sonnet in Hunt’s journal the
Indicator
, over the signature ‘Caviare’, on a poet’s dream of Paolo and Francesca.

Criticism: Frederick L. Beaty, ‘Byron and Francesca da Rimini’.

Stanzas (‘When a man hath no freedom’)

Sent to Thomas Moore in a letter, 5 November 1820; printed in Moore’s
Life
(1830), collected in the 1831
Works
.

Byron’s involvement with the Italian revolutionaries displays his usual mixture of commitment and irony; he introduced the poem to Moore by echoing Falstaff (1
Henry IV
, V.iii.60–61): ‘If “honour should come unlooked for” to any of your acquaintance, make a Melody of it, that his ghost, like poor Yorick’s, may have the satisfaction of being plaintively pitied… In case you should not think him worth it, here is a Chant for you instead’ (
BLJ
, Vol. 7, pp. 218–19).

SARDANAPALUS: A Tragedy

Written mid January to late May 1821 in Ravenna, amid Byron’s restless shifting between romance, social diversions and political intrigue with the revolutionary Carbonari (see his journal;
BLJ
, Vol. 8, pp. 15–50). Murray paid Byron £1,100 for this play,
Cain
and
The Two Foscari
, all published together on Byron’s insistence; an edition of 6,099 copies was issued in December.

In Byron’s blank-verse metres, the eponym is pronounced Sar-
day-
nah-
pay
-lus. Byron did not intend the play for the stage (
BLJ
, Vol. 8, p.
129), and it was not performed until the 1830s. Cain focused the most reviewers’ commentary, bristling with charges of blasphemy (enhanced by Leigh Hunt’s defence in the
Examiner
, 2 June 1822) and contributing to Murray’s growing nervousness in 1822 over publishing Byron, culminating in Byron’s switch to John Hunt. The most influential reactions to
Sardanapalus
were mixed at best, and some were purely negative: although Heber, writing for Murray’s
Quarterly Review
(1822), offered measured praise for the volume as a whole and a strong defence of Byron’s characterization of Sardanapalus, Jeffrey (
Edinburgh Review
, February/April 1822) found the play, indeed all the poetry in the volume, ‘heavy, verbose, inelegant’; Lockhart, writing for
Blackwood’s
(January 1822) also thought the two plays ‘dullish’ and
Cain
‘wicked and blasphemous’. Although Cain was the lightning rod,
Sardanapalus
too must have embarrassed Murray’s Tory allegiances, for notwithstanding Byron’s claim that he did not intend it as ‘a
political
play’ (
BLJ
, Vol. 8, p. 152), Act I insinuates some deprecatory parallels to George IV’s spendthrift luxury and wronging of his Queen – the divorce scandal was a notorious rallying-point for opposition to the Crown. Jerome J. McGann (‘Hero with a Thousand Faces’) has also proposed that Sardanapalus’s meeting in Act IV with his neglected but still adoring Queen Zarina is Byron’s fantasy of reconciliation with an unforgiving Lady Byron, their separation another highly public scandal. Relevant to this, Jerome J. McGann’s
CPW
adds a line from a manuscript to IV.i. at 1. 428 (italics indicate the addition): ‘… at once?
but leavest/ One to grieve o’er the other’s change?
– Zarina!’

Byron was distressed that Murray omitted the dedication to Goethe from the first edition, and Murray included it in a much smaller, separate edition of the play in 1823; Goethe was deeply touched by the gesture. In the 1832–4
Works
the dedication appears on a full page, along with Goethe’s response (Vol. 13, p. 57). Byron also asked Murray to print the relevant chapters from one of his sources: Book II of
Bibliothecae Histori-cae
, by Diodorus Siculus, a Greek historian (born in Sicily) of the first century BC (
BLJ
, Vol. 8, pp. 128–9). Murray did not honour the request in the early editions, but
Works
supplies an ample note (Vol. 13, p. 64).

Along with Diodorus Siculus, Byron cites his reading of William Mit-for’s
History of Greece
(1818) and his admiration for its sympathetic portrait of Sardanapalus (BLJ, Vol. 8, p. 26). Mitford gives the translation of the epitaph that Sardanapalus ordered for his tomb (which Aristotle reported in Greek, and judged ‘fit for a hog’): ‘Sardanapalus, son of Anacyndaraxes, in one day founded Anchialus and Tarsus./Eat, drink, play: all other human joys are not worth a fillip.’ Byron consciously refigured the negative precedents for his hero – in, for instance, Lydgate’s
Fall of Princes,
Surrey’s sonnet, ‘Th’Assyrians king’, and their touchstone
in Diodorus’s characterization of the ‘effeminate’ king as a degenerate: a companion of courtesans and eunuchs, a transvestite, bisexual, coward, reprobate, gross indulger of appetites, and an utterly selfish and cruel tyrant in defeat. Byron makes Sardanapalus emphatically heterosexual and converts his love of luxury and cynicism about the exercise of civic and imperial power into a rhetoric of enlightened pacifism and human sympathy. He cast his hero as
‘brave’
and
‘amiable’
as well as ‘voluptuous’ (BLJ, Vol. 8, p. 127), and he radically altered the accounts of his self-mmolation to have him release all his slaves and send his soldiers off with his wealth, instead of forcing them all to die with him. The scene in Act III in which Sardanapalus calls for a mirror to view himself in military garb Byron referred to Juvenal’s Satire II on Otho, describing this self-regard as ‘natural in an effeminate character’ (BLJ, Vol. 8, p. 128); Murray printed Byron’s comment as well as the passage from Juvenal and Gifford’s English translation in Works, 1834 (Vol. 13, p. 132). In addition to these historical sources and references, there are several literary influences, most obviously Shakespeare’s tragedies (
Hamlet, Macbeth
), histories (Richard II, Richard III), and, patently,
Antony and Cleopatra,
as well as Dryden’s
All for Love;
on the last, see Michael G. Cooke’s essay, ‘The Restoration Ethos of Byron’s Classical Plays’.