Who thundering comes on blackest steed,
With slacken’d bit and hoof of speed?
Beneath the clattering iron’s sound
The cavern’d echoes wake around
In lash for lash, and bound for bound;
The foam that streaks the courser’s side
Seems gather’d from the ocean-tide.
Though weary waves are sunk to rest,
There’s none within his rider’s breast;
And though to-morrow’s tempest lower,
’Tis calmer than thy heart, young Giaour!
(180–90)
Ultimately, the challenge to Moore and any
reader of Byron’s ‘‘revolutionary’’ letter of 1818
lies in accounting for its waking echoes, the ree-
mergence of what had seemed to be swept away.
Such evocation at the very moment of
renunciation is typical of the way Byron vexes
his reader with the interplay of fiction and life; it
lures even critics who insist, like T. S. Eliot, that
they are ‘‘not concerned’’ with the poet’s life into
scanning his writing for ‘‘honesty’’ or ‘‘genuine
self-revelation.[’’] It comes as no surprise that
Leslie Marchand, still Byron’s best biographer,
characterizes the revolution of theDon Juan
manner as a sudden turn to self-representation:
‘‘With one stroke he freed himself from the fet-
ters of British propriety and theChilde Harold
manner, and something of the careless and
relaxed realism of his letters invaded his verse.
Let the critics cavil; he would be himself’’
(Marchand). But often in Byron’s writing—
even in supposedly direct self-representations,
such as the 1818 letter—the invasion runs just
the other way: verse invades his letters, and the
originating self is unsettled by the specter of fic-
tional models. The Byronic hero’s persistent
cameo in the very statement which implies his
demise should lead us to regard even the most
seemingly direct pronouncement in Byron as
stalked by the fiction it supposedly controls...
Source:Mark Phillipson, ‘‘Byron’s Revisited Haunts,’’
inStudies in Romanticism, Vol. 39, No. 2, Summer 2000,
10 pp.
SOURCESAbrams, M. H., Preface, inNatural Supernaturalism:
Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature,W.W.
Norton, 1971, pp. 11–16.
Byron, Lord George Gordon, ‘‘Sonnet, To Genevra,’’ in
Poetical Works, edited by Frederick Page, new edition
revised by John Jump, Oxford University Press, 1989,
p. 71.
———, ‘‘Sonnet, To The Same,’’ inPoetical Works,
edited by Frederick Page, new edition revised by John
Jump, Oxford University Press, 1989, p. 71.
———, ‘‘When We Two Parted,’’ inThe Poetical Works
of Byron, Cambridge Edition, edited by Robert F. Gleck-
ner, Houghton Mifflin, 1975, p. 151.
Franklin, Caroline, ‘‘Criticism,’’ inByron, Routledge,
2007, pp. 84–122.
———, ‘‘Life and Contexts,’’ inByron, Routledge, 2007,
pp. 1–30.
Gatton, John Spalding, ‘‘George Gordon Byron,’’ inDic-
tionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 96: British Romantic
Poets, 1789–1832, Second Series, edited by John R.
Greenfield, Gale Research, 1990, pp. 18–69.
Glover, A. S. B., Introduction, inByron, Penguin Books,
1954, pp. 7–16.
Marchand, Leslie A., ‘‘1816: The Separation,’’ inByron:
A Biography, Vol. 2, Alfred A. Knopf, 1957, pp. 563–608.
———, ‘‘Shorter Romantic Poems,’’ inByron’s Poetry:
A Critical Introduction, Houghton Mifflin, 1965,
pp. 117–35.
Perkins, David, ‘‘General Introduction,’’ in English
Romantic Writers, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1967,
pp. 1–24.
Phillipson, Mark, ‘‘Byron’s Haunts Revisited,’’ inStudies
in Romanticism, Vol. 39, No. 2, Summer 2000, p. 303–24.
Soderholm, James, ‘‘Byron’s Ludic Lyrics,’’ inStudies in
English Literature, 1500–1900, Vol. 34, No. 4, Autumn
1994, pp. 739–52.FURTHER READINGEldridge, Richard,The Persistence of Romanticism:
Essays in Philosophy and Literature, Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 2001.
Eldridge offers a philosophical defense of
Romanticism’s ethics and ideals and traces
the literary legacy of the philosophical move-
ment of Romanticism.
Elfenbein, Andrew, ‘‘Byronism and the Work of Homo-
sexual Performance in Early Victorian England,’’ inMod-
ern Language Quarterly, Vol. 54, No. 4, December 1993,
pp. 535–67.
Elfenbein analyzes the perceptions that early
Victorians had regarding Byron’s scandalous
sexual behavior. Elfenbein also emphasizes
the relationship between his celebrity and his
homosexuality.
Fletcher, Christopher, ‘‘Lord Byron: Unrecorded Auto-
graph Poems,’’ inNotes and Queries, Vol. 43, No. 4,
December 1996, pp. 425–29.When We Two Parted