Pilgrimage, but in Canto III, which he wrote
while directly under the influence of Shelley in
Switzerland and the Alps. Stanza LXXII of
Canto III, for example, shows this influence:
I live not in myself, but I become
Portion of that around me; and to me
High mountains are a feeling, but the
hum
Of human cities torture: I can see
Nothing to loathe in nature, save to be
A link reluctant in a fleshly chain,
Class’d among creatures, when the soul
can flee,
And with the sky, the peak, the heaving
plain
Of ocean, or the stars, mingle, and not
in vain.
Like the first stanza of the apostrophe of the
ocean, the final stanza of the apostrophe is also a
celebration of nature, in the form of the ocean,
although this time without any notion of the
individual self mingling with something larger
than itself. The description in which the speaker
remembers the enjoyment he had as a boy swim-
ming in the ocean is in substance if not form
(Wordsworth only rarely wrote in Spenserian
stanzas) reminiscent of Wordsworth’s recollec-
tions, in the first two books ofThe Prelude, of his
boyhood spent among the lakes and the hills
in England’s Lake District and specifically of
swimming in Derwent Water.
What makes the apostrophe to the ocean a
Romantic poem, then, is the amount of feeling
there is in it. Byron does not merely describe the
scene as it appears to his eyes, he interacts with it
in terms of his feelings. He tells the reader what it
means to him personally. It is as much about
the poet himself as about what he is observing
in the world—a typical Romantic stance. It is
this sincerity of feeling, which readers have never
doubted, in the apostrophe to the ocean, as well
as inChilde Harold’s Pilgrimageas a whole, that
makes the poem representative of the era in
which it was written.
Source:Bryan Aubrey, Critical Essay onChilde Harold’s
Pilgrimage,inPoetry for Students, Gale, Cengage Learning,
2010
Vitana Kostadinova
In the following essay, Kastadinova discusses the
poem’s ideas on the nature of things as being
uncertain, contradictory, and changeable.
InChilde Harold’s Pilgrimage IV,Byron’s
treatment of imagination and reality, art and
nature, subjectivity and objectivity, reason and
feeling, freedom and tyranny, time and eternity,
demonstrates a Romantic logic that defies one-
sidedness. In this essay I want to argue against a
number of familiar critical readings of the canto
that want to read it according to the binary logic
of ‘either/or’—whereby Byron becomes either
(mostly) optimistic or (mainly) pessimistic. I want
to suggest that the poem is not characterised by
a predominant mood or perspective but by an
ambivalence towards all moods and perspectives.
From the outset, the canto’s discursive amal-
gamation of seemingly incompatible elements is
foregrounded. Byron’s original intentions were to
publish the poem with Hobhouse’s notes on
the historical facts behind the canto’s allusions.
Byron’s Preface, written with the prospect of such
an edition in view, prepares the reader for an
encounter with both the personal time of the
lyric persona and the historical time of Europe’s
past. The enterprise envisages a complex inter-
weaving of past and present, subjectivity and
objectivity, imaginative writing and historical
fact. This was not realised as originally planned,
since Murray refused to have the poem and the
notes printed together—and only reluctantly
agreed to publish Hobhouse’s contribution in a
separate volume. Nevertheless, the initial design
seems to have influenced the final product, as the
text of the poem itself blurs the boundaries
between, and undermines oppositions between,
the self and outer world, literature and history,
time and eternity. Where the first and second
cantos ofChilde Haroldmight well be called a
‘descriptive medley mixing travel and history’,
and the third ‘a poem in the confessional mode
of Rousseau and Wordsworth’, the fourth canto
is a ‘synthesis of the previous two poems’ and of
the many contradictory elements the earlier can-
tos bring together.
At the very beginning ofChilde Harold IV,
Byron famously introduces duality by juxtaposing
‘a palace and a prison’ (i). This binary can be, and
has been, seen as symbolising two contradictoryONE OF THE STRIKING EXPRESSIONS
OF BYRONIC AMBIVALENCE IS MORAL RELATIVITY.’’Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage