shrineless pilgrimage of Childe Harold who
searches relentlessly for he is not sure what.
While Shelley—even in Byron’s presence—
found ‘‘flowering isles’’ in the ‘‘sea of life and
Agony’’ (imaginatively, if not actually), Byron
allowed Manfred to die out of an unbearable,
guilt-ridden existence. While Keats was steeling
himself against misery with his doctrines of dis-
interestedness and ‘‘soul-making,’’ Byron pre-
pared Don Juan to play cleverly and sometimes
heartlessly with a world which shifted constantly
beneath his feet. Unlike his contemporaries, who
were capable of affirmationinthefaceofmis-
ery, Byron affirmed, then doubted his own
affirmations. Unable to realize, intellectually
or emotionally, the stability and sanctity of
Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s organically uni-
fied world, Byron faced a world in which there
was yet no adequate defense against chaos.
Like T. S. Eliot one hundred years later, Byron
felt the need to shore some fragments against his
ruin. In his poetry he first explores a fragmented
world, then builds a refuge against it. Byron spent
the balance of his poetic career haunted by what
Harold Bloom has called the ‘‘specter of meaning-
lessness’’ (The Visionary Company,1961). He used
the force of his poetic genius to deal with this spec-
ter, first by shouting defiance of the world, then by
mocking it, laughing that he might not weep. Ironi-
cally, the power of Byron’s opposition made the
specter materialize; the poetry fromChilde Harold’s
PilgrimagethroughDon Juanprogressively reveals
an incoherent, essentially meaningless world.
Although there are moments inChilde Har-
old’s Pilgrimagewhen the pilgrim seems to have
found what he seeks, something of extraordinary
beauty and value, most of the pilgrimage wanders
from one disillusioning experience to another.
From the beginning there is a poignant sense of
burned-out life, of energy so purposelessly spent
that only a void remains. In the very first stanza
the poet sets the tone by denying himself a muse:
‘‘Nor mote my shell awake the weary Nine / To
grace so plain a tale—this lowly lay of mine.’’
This initial humility is the poet’s, but the pilgrim
will eventually realize it as well. No muse could
elevate and inspire the poem, for the subject itself
is base. From ‘‘Childe Harold’s Good Night’’ till
the end of Canto IV, the pilgrim wanders; less
heroically than Tennyson’s Ulysses, he defines his
existence in terms of quest and new experience.
Each new experience, though, disappoints. The
shining, enchanting beauty of Lisbon seen from
afar becomes the wretchedness and poverty of the
city seen in close-up. Heroic and legendary
Greece has a modern sculptor; an Englishman,
Lord Elgin, hacks away at Grecian monuments,
forcing Byron to write ‘‘The Curse of Minerva.’’
Countless experiences and themes from the poem
might be cited to support the claim that the poet
is beginning to develop a nihilistic view of things:
the lasting disparity between ideal and real, aspi-
ration and achievement, imagination and reason;
thesic transit gloria munditheme which informs
Cantos III and IV; the lonely soul theme which
the alien Harold reiterates so boldly but sadly.
But ultimately there is hope inChilde Harold’s
Pilgrimage.The poet found at least one way of
dealing with a disappointing world: the crea-
tion of art. The fear of nothingness leads
nowhere, so Byron seized, almost in despera-
tion, the idea of living through imaginative
structuring of experience:
’Tis to create, and in creating live
A being more intense, that we endow
With form our fancy, gaining as we give
The life we image, even as I do now...
(III, iv)
This concept, reinforced by the Shelleyan-
Wordsworthian optimism that appears in the
middle of the canto, suggests that Byron had
reached despair but passed beyond it. Shelley’s
optimism, though, is unnatural to Byron, and
there is a regression to bleakness in Canto IV.
But the notion of living by creating gave Byron
one defense against chaos; he finds another in
Canto IV, a tremendous faith in the power of the
human mind and will.
As Childe Harold enters Venice in Canto IV,
Byron is still sustained by his newly achieved
conviction that the creative imagination gives
structure and meaning to the poet’s existence.THE REJECTION OF MOST LITERARYSTANDARDS COMPLEMENTED HIS REJECTION OF THE
IDEA OF AN ORDERED UNIVERSE. WITH THE
FREEDOM AFFORDED BY THEOTTAVA RIMA,BYRON
DEVELOPED HIS LAST DEFENSE AGAINST
INCOHERENCE.’’
Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage