Childe Harold's Pilgrimage

Childe Harold's Pilgrimage

George Gordon, Lord Byron 

Lord Byron was born in London in 1788. His father, John, was a libertine who squandered the fortunes of his first wife as well as those of his second, Byron's mother. Even his second marriage was unhappy because he went to France and died in 1791. Instead Byron's mother was a passionate woman and very lunatic and inconstant. So it was from his parents that the young Baron inherited his instability and rebellion, and from his governess that inculcated him the Calvinistic ideas of predestination to sin and damnation.

Byron the romantic: he can be regarded as a romantic in:

His exaggeration: because he magnified every emotion and sensation;

His individualism: always introduce it into his own poetry, for example in one or other of his main characters;

His interest in history: especially for fallen empires, that symbolized decay and death;

His appreciation of nature:  he interpreted nature according to his personal feeling;

The contrast between dream and reality;

His lunatic character, which led him to travel a lot and look for new experiences and sensations;

His realization of the Byronic hero.

This last was a passionate, moody, restless and mysterious man, who hides some horrible sin or secret in his past. He is an outsider, isolated and attractive at the same time. He has a great sensibility to nature and beauty and he has got an irresistible charm to which nobody can escape.

This passage is taken from Childe Harold's Pilgrimage: is an autobiographical poem in4cantos. The poem is based on Byron's travels and is interspersed with digressions and meditations. Childe Harold is another version of the Byronic Hero, moody and solitary, but it also contains strong autobiographical elements. It is written in Spenserian stanzas made up of nine lines. The first and the second cantos were published in 1812 and may be related to Byron's own travels through various countries. The third was written in Switzerland in 1816, when Byron had already left England for voluntary exile, and shows a deeper power of self-analysis. The fourth, perhaps the finest of all, published in 1818, was composed in Italy and contains impressions of various Italian towns, together with their monuments and other beauties. In the works of Byron the nature has a very important role because it represents a refuge after the escape, in fact the protagonist in the middle of the Nature feels him to house, the language that he speaks better is that of the Nature (lines 20-21) while it is telling us that in the middle of the society he lived badly, it felt him oppressed and repressed (lines 26-27).

In the last stanza the protagonist describes us all the happiness that he tries to be in the middle of the Nature, a happiness that doesn't succeed in checking.

In this passage there are a lot of similes: for example in line7 "And the waves bound beneath me as a steed that knows his rider. Welcome, to their roar". "Roar" is onomatopoeia too. There is another simile: in line 29 for example: "Then came his fit again, which to o'vercome, as eagerly the barr'd-up bird will beat . "