NOTES AND COMMENT

(Roman numerals refer to stanza; Arabic numerals to line)

CHILDE HAROLD'S PILGRIMAGE, CANTO III (Page 1)

THE third canto of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage was written at Ouchy, near Lausanne, in Switzerland, in the months of May and June, 1816. It is Byron's noblest utterance up to that time in his life. He had left England deep in social disgrace and burning with mortification and self-reproach, and had joined his brother poet, Shelley, in Switzerland. The poem expresses the reaction of travel among scenes of great natural beauty and historical interest upon the mind of one whose experience with life and popularity had brought only bitterness and disappointment. This reaction was in some measure influenced and controlled by Byron's intercourse with Shelley. The poem, therefore, shows the most definite and unmistakable evidence of the influence of Byron's poetical contemporaries upon him; for Shelley was an admirer of Wordsworth, held Wordsworth's theory that nature has power to restore happiness to the unhappy, and believed, like Wordsworth, in the power of the unseen world of the spirit. The Prisoner of Chillon, Manfred, and the Epistle to Augusta belong to the same period in Byron's career as a poet and show the same poetical qualities as the Third Canto.

In the first two cantos of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage Byron had related, with at least a show of faithfulness, the itinerary of a fictitious character, Childe Harold, a youth old beyond his years and disappointed with life, otherwise rather vaguely portrayed, who journeyed through Portugal, Spain, Greece, and Turkey, and commented upon what he saw with a zest which, though inconsistent with his pessimistic character, constituted the principal charm of the cantos. Childe Harold appears in the Third Canto in only a dozen stanzas and is then forgotten until the end of the Fourth Canto, where he

reappears only to say farewell. Byron was of course not writing fiction; it was his own thoughts and emotions that he wished to express; and he felt that any disguise, however thinly veiled, was in his

way.

The poem is in the form of a pilgrimage, though the itinerary is imperfect, and the following outline will serve to show the subjects treated and the course of the journey:

Address to his infant daughter Ada and to England, stanzas i-ii; Reintroduction of Childe Harold, iii-xvi; Waterloo, xvii-xxxv; Napoleon, xxxvi-xlv; Journey along the Rhine, xlvi-lxi; Drachenfels, lv ff.; Coblentz, lvi-lvii; Ehrenbreitstein, lviii; Switzerland, lxii-cix; the Alps, lxii; Morat, lxiii-lxiv; Aventicum and the Story of Julia, lxv-lxvii; Lake Leman, lxviii; Nature and Solitude (personal), Ixix-lxxv; Rousseau and the French Revolution, lxxvi-lxxxiv; Lake Leman in the Hush of Night, lxxxv-xci; Night and Storm, xcii-xcvii; Daybreak on Lake Leman, xcviii; Clarens, xcix-civ; Lausanne and Ferney, Voltaire and Gibbon, cv-cviii; the Cloudland of the Alps, cix; the Prospect of Italy, cx; the Author's final Comment, cxi-cxiv; Ada, the Farewell, cxv-cxviii.

i, 2. Ada: Byron's daughter, Augusta Ada, born December 10, 1815, subsequently Countess of Lovelace, died in 1852, leaving three children. She was a woman of marked ability in music and mathematics, inheriting in some measure her father's intellectual and emotional intensity.

i, 5. Awaking with a start. Observe the sudden and unexpected break in the continuity of the discourse, a favorite device of Byron's for attracting the reader's interest. It is as if he had been suddenly recalled from his musing about his daughter to find himself on shipboard leaving England and all his past life in sadness and disappointment. The reader is thus instantly put into possession of the details of the situation.

i, 9. Albion: a poetical name for England.

ii, 1. Once more upon the waters. Byron is one of the greatest of sea poets. Read the apostrophe to the ocean in Canto IV, stanzas clxxix-clxxxiv and the notes to the passage. There are brilliant descriptive passages dealing with the sea in The Corsair, The Siege

of Corinth, The Island, and in other poems, and a vivid description of a shipwreck in Don Juan, Canto II.

ii, 2. As a steed that knows his rider. This powerful simile is thought to have been derived from The Two Noble Kinsmen, a play attributed to Shakespeare, Fletcher, and Massinger, act II, scene ii, lines 73 ff.:

iii, 1. I did sing of One: Childe Harold, the hero of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Cantos I and II, the poem published in 1811 of which this canto is a continuation. In this and the four stanzas which follow Byron comments bitterly upon the experiences of the years which have intervened since that time.

iii, 7. Leave a sterile track behind. The figure is that of a flood which plows its way through the land and leaves a rough and barren track behind it; over this the poet imagines himself obliged to travel on through the years.

vi, 1. 'Tis to create, and in creating live. Byron here expresses a theory of art. Life in its actuality has gone wrong with him, but he will take refuge in the ideal world of his own creation. He recurs to this idea in Canto IV, stanzas v-vii. It is closely connected with the idea of the healing power of nature by the absorption of the individual in the contemplation of natural beauty. This might be called the subjective theory of poetry as opposed to the objective theory, that in which the poet is an impartial observer of nature and life and a builder of ideals without being himself in any way affected for happiness or misery by what he builds.

vii, 9. Without accusing Fate. Byron's final attitude is one of stoicism. He recognizes a power outside of and beyond himself, as it seems to him, a hostile power; he will merely see if he cannot bear the worst that fate has in store for him.

xii, 1-2. He knew . . . unfit to herd with Man. Byron makes it clear that his withdrawal from England was voluntary; below he refers to himself as "self-exiled Harold.”

xiii, 1–9. Where rose the mountains, etc. This stanza sets the tone of much of the canto. Harold finds pleasure in the pathless woods, in the mountains and streams. It will be seen that he passes from the stage indicated here to a strain of comparative peace at the end of the canto (see stanzas cxi ff.), and it is a peace which arises from communion with nature.

xiv, 1. Chaldean: an inhabitant of ancient Chaldea; hence, an astrologer or watcher of the stars.

xvii, 1. An Empire's dust: the battlefield of Waterloo, where only a year before Wellington and Blücher had overthrown Napoleon and the French Empire. Byron visited the battlefield during a short stay which he made at Brussels.

xviii, 5. "Pride of place": a term in falconry, meaning the highest pitch of flight of the falcon before striking its prey; compare Macbeth, act II, scene iv, lines 12-13:

"A falcon towering in her pride of place

Was by a mousing owl hawked at and killed.”

xviii, 5. The eagle: Napoleon. Byron first wrote "Then tore with bloody beak the fatal plain" in a first draft of stanzas xvii and xviii in an autograph album for a friend of his in Brussels. They inspired an artist, R. R. Reinagle, to produce a pencil sketch of “a spirited eagle, grasping the earth with his talons." When Byron saw the sketch, he wrote to his friend, "Reinagle is a better poet and a better ornithologist than I am; eagles and all birds of prey attack with their talons, and I have altered the line."

xviii, 9. He wears the shatter'd links, etc. Napoleon was a prisoner at St. Helena when Byron wrote.

xix, 2. Is Earth more free? This thought is also found in the Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte; see stanzas xviii-xix.

xix, 6. The patch'd-up idol: the "Holy Alliance," an agreement among the nations of Europe after the fall of Napoleon by which peace was to be maintained and the original boundaries and dynasties were restored. Against the reactionary tyranny of this alliance Byron was always bitterly hostile.

xx, 9. Harmodius: with Aristogeiton the slayer of the tyrant

Hipparchus; they liberated Athens in 514 B. C. from the rule of Hippias and Hipparchus. They carried their swords concealed in the myrtle which was borne in a religious procession.

xxi, 1. There was a sound of revelry by night, etc. This brilliant and familiar passage describing the battle of Waterloo has been compared to Scott's description of Flodden in Marmion. On the evening of the fifteenth of June, 1815, the eve of the battle of QuatreBras, many of the British officers, including Wellington himself, attended a ball given by the Duchess of Richmond in Brussels. While the ball was in progress, they were summoned to their commands, and many of them went straight from the ball into the battle.

xxiii, 2. Brunswick's fated chieftain: Frederick William, Duke of Brunswick, nephew of George III, who fell almost at the beginning of the battle of Quatre-Bras two days before Waterloo.

xxiii, 7. His father: Charles William Ferdinand, Duke of Brunswick, who was killed at Auerbach in 1806.

xxvi, 1. "Cameron's Gathering": the slogan or rallying cry of the Cameron clan, used by a regiment of Cameron Highlanders, of whom John Cameron the chieftain was mortally wounded at Quatre-Bras. He is spoken of as "Lochiel," the name of the seat of his ancestors.

xxvi, 2. Albyn: Gaelic name for Scotland.

xxvi, 4. Pibroch: the wild, irregular, martial music of the bagpipe. xxvi, 9. Evan's, Donald's: Sir Evan Cameron, who fought against Cromwell, and his grandson, Donald Cameron of Lochiel, celebrated in Campbell's Lochiel's Warning, who was wounded at Culloden while fighting for Prince Charles Edward in 1745.

xxvii, 1. Ardennes: the wood of Soignies between Brussels and Waterloo, which Byron thought was a remnant of the ancient forest of Ardennes; that, however, was in Luxembourg.

xxix, 1. Loftier harps than mine. This refers especially to Scott and his poem, The Field of Waterloo.

xxix, 9. Howard: Major Howard, son of Byron's guardian, the Earl of Carlisle. Byron had satirized the Earl in English Bards and Scotch Reviewers. He made amends to almost everybody he there attacked.