into that Voltairean mood that deplores the
impossibility, or the irrevocable loss, of harmony
and happiness:
Our life is a false nature—tis not in
The harmony of things,—this hard decree,
This uneradicable taint of sin,
This boundless upas, this all-blasting
tree. (116)
The speaker appears to get very close to
Kant’s judgement ‘that the spectacle of human
history is in the main a spectacle of human folly,
ambition, greed and wickedness, and that any
one who goes to it for examples of wisdom and
virtue will be disappointed’. It is no more than
the effect of time that makes things from the past
appear precious: ‘Oh, Time! the Beautifier of the
dead,/Adorner of the ruin’ (130). In fact, Roman
times were savage, turning murder into a spec-
tacle. The values of the first part of the poem, in
which the past of Venice stands for worth, are
further shaken. Judgments are questioned. Scep-
ticism now seems to have won the day. Yet there
is cause for optimism too in historical cyclic
repetition. The powerful might fall, but the
powerless might rise up; ‘Freedom, and then
Glory’ have risen and will rise again. The world
of today is not a permanent deterioration of a
glorious past—there are different, better futures
to look to, even if these too will be transient.
Rome therefore projects contradictory mes-
sages. On the one hand, the Coliseum stands for
a continuity of decay, both moral and physical:
these three mortal things are still
On their foundations, and unaltered all;
Rome and her Ruin past Redemption’s
skill,
The World, the same wide den—of
thieves, or what ye will. (145)
On the other hand, there is the Pantheon,
‘sanctuary and home / Of art and piety’ (146).
Ancient Rome seems to be double-faced, just
like its animistic spirit of doorways, Janus. Its
history is as ambiguous as his look.
This is not a sign of the canto’s instability
but of a consistently maintained ambivalence on
the part of Byron’s speaker that seeks to stay
faithful to what the poem sees as the only stable
characteristics of the nature of things: uncer-
tainty, contradiction and change. Early on in
the canto, the antithetical relationship between
the objective and the subjective appears fixed.
The speaker’s visions of the mind ‘came like
Truth—and disappeared like dreams’ and he
would rather not replace them for other ‘over-
weening phantasies unsound’ (7). There is a real-
ity out there. Poets might sometimes escape from
it, creating in their imagination an alternative
world of their own, but it exists all the same.
Stumbling across the discrepancy between their
imagination—even their reason—and actuality,
poets are free, of course, to choose one or the
other. Yet Byron does not choose inChilde Har-
old IV—indeed, he undermines the distinction
between the objective and the subjective. We
can ‘become a part of what has been,/And
grow unto the spot, all-seeing but unseen’ 0380,
his poem tells us, by attuning ourselves to, and
sustaining an awareness of, the fundamental
and irreducible ambivalences of human exis-
tence. Consciousness thereby merges actuality
and mental projections, past and present, time
and eternity, reconfiguring succession into
simultaneity, blurring subjectivity and objectiv-
ity. Existence becomes an eruption of irreduci-
bly multiple oneness.
Byron’s sustained ambivalence in Childe
Harold IVconfronts us with this multiple one-
ness. That ambivalence is overlooked again and
again in the clash of interpretations of the canto,
which seek to make sense of it as a whole by
reducing it to one or other of its viewpoints.
Yet it is precisely to the inadequacy of any one
viewpoint thatChilde Harold IVpoints us.
Source:Vitana Kostadinova, ‘‘Byronic Ambivlence in
‘Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage IV,’’’ inByron Journal, Vol.
35, No. 1, 2007, pp. 11–18.Howard H. Hinkel
In the following essay, Hinkel asserts that writing
poetry was Byron’s way of making sense of a
world he found absurd.
In 1821, only three years before his death,
Byron wrote in his diary: ‘‘It is all a Mystery. I
feel most things, but I know nothing except—.’’
He then covered the page with a series of blanks.
The best of Byron’s poetry is a variation on that
theme. The theme assumes nearly as many dif-
ferent emphases as the poet assumed poses, but
the recurring motif, fromChilde Harold’s Pil-
grimagethrough the fragmented Canto XVII of
Don Juan, asserts an essentially absurdist view
of the world. In one sense, Byron was born out of
phase with time. While Coleridge and Words-
worth affirmed the organic unity of life and the
blessedness afforded one who participates in an
ultimately benevolent process, Byron traced theChilde Harold’s Pilgrimage