modes running through the canto: the celebratory
and the dejected. Shelley was among the first to
ignore the unifying dichotomy of the poem, refer-
ring to the spirit in which it was written as ‘the
most wicked and mischievous insanity that ever
was given forth’ and reducing the text to its
‘expressions of contempt and desperation’. A
trend of literary criticism has adopted this inter-
pretation, dismissing in various ways the canto’s
celebratory aspects and seeking to foreground its
pessimism, reading it as a sustained articulation of
‘the claims of despair’, or, at best, as ‘elegiac’.
The first stanza of the canto certainly sets up
an opposition between past and present that
assigns value to the former and dismisses the
latter as worthless, using the image of ‘a dying
Glory’ smiling over recollections of a past that is
categorically over. ‘Those days are gone.’ What
is lost is important both politically and artisti-
cally: ‘States fall, arts fade’. Nevertheless, coun-
ter arguments prohibit downright pessimism—
‘Beauty still is here’, ‘Nature doth not die’ (3).
The transience of human achievements is coun-
terbalanced by the immortality of nature, and by
the canto itself, which keeps record not just of
beauty but also of human history. On the one
hand, the ‘poem makes the past available to the
informed imagination so that it can contribute
to self-knowledge in the present’. On the other
hand, however, admiration for the past is itself
checked by the use of a vocabulary of belliger-
ence and conflict: Venice’s glorious past was
built upon the ‘spoils of nations’ (2).
Ambivalent from the outset, then, the poem
almost immediately complicates further any abso-
lute opposition between past and present and
between celebration and dejection. The Rialto
Bridge, a material monument of the past within
the present, may decay but this is not the case with
all art: the ‘Venetian’ characters in British litera-
ture will always exist. Byron’s enthusiasm invites
interpretations of his toneas ‘celebrating creativ-
ity’, with the culmination of this celebration com-
ing in stanza 5, but the poet’s choice of the word
‘trophy’ in stanza 4 gives the reader pause and
questions the positive nature of even literary art.
Resonant of warfare, ‘trophy’ paves the way for
the assertion that leaving Venice to its current
‘tyrannical’ owners ‘is shameful to the nations—
most of all,/Albion! to thee’ (17). Byron reproaches
his native country for not repaying her literary
debt by political means, establishing a link between
art, politics and historical change. Venice-inspired
characters such as Shylock and the Moor et al. are
‘keystones’ (4) of the British literary tradition. In
Venice, however, the survival of art itself is ques-
tioned and Venetian culture is in decline—no songs
of gondoliers can be heard, the greatest Italian poet
of the late Renaissance is not being re-echoed.
What Venice stands for in the speaker’s mind no
longer is—precisely because the immortal ‘beings
of the mind’ (5) have proved powerless to inspire
political action. In the complicated clash between
thepastandthepresent,the glories of the past can
be reanimated by the imagination yet the speaker’s
assessment of the imagination is undercut by the
actualities of the contemporary world. In this, no
single perspective can be maintained.
The canto is, of course, ambivalent about the
imagination at other points too. Harold Bloom
echoes Byron by stating that ‘auto-intoxication
fevers into false creation’ inChilde Harold IVand
remarks: ‘So much for the Romantic Imagination.’
Byron also makes a point of stressing how much his
writing owes to fact, and insists that the constructs
of the mind do not alter the circumstances of one’s
life. Even though he speaks Italian, reads Italian
poetry and feels at home in Italy, he cannot change
where he was born and what his first language was,
and twines his hopes with his mother tongue (9).
Yet, for Byron, the books we read, alongside sub-
jective spots of time and flights of imagination, do
play a part in making us who we are. Unlike
Bloom, Marilyn Gaull argues that, in fact, ‘Byron
affirms the life of the mind’ in the canto. Indeed, the
creative mind can be seen as Byron’s optimistic
alternative to reality: ‘what he [Byron] claimed to
find in a communion with nature—revitalization,
renewal, spiritual ‘‘growth’’—he now recognizes is
actually supplied by the imagination’. At times, for
Byron inChilde Harold IV, what the imagination
offers is not subject to time and destruction and
does not bring disappointment. Its creations are
more attractive and promising than the world in
its objective actuality:
The Beings of the Mind are not of clay;
Essentially immortal, they create
And multiply in us a brighter ray
And more beloved existence. (5)
Nature is outdone—indeed, inChilde Har-
old IV,nature offers no secure Wordsworthian
refuge and its comforts are transient and decep-
tive. Man does not find harmony in Nature; it
cannot become the Garden of Eden. A Maker in
his own right, the artist might attempt to restoreChilde Harold’s Pilgrimage