Byron's Poetry

In contemporary times Byron is often forgotten, but in his own time he was a legend. In part, his fame was of the negative sort as he drew censure for his immorality, from common church goers to writers such as Robert Southey (English History). In his life he committed crimes of adultery, incest, and beat his wife (Trueblood). A great deal of this passed over into his writing. However, that immorality towards God and society, that tendency to question the world around him, to hold strong against the morals of the time entranced his readers. It enticed them as something new and exotic, a philosophy apart from the conservative thought so widely held at the time. It was that same immorality that imbued in his poetry a feeling of authenticity. Along with immorality, there was another characteristic of his poems that allowed them to succeed. Unlike other romantic poets of the time, he freely expressed all of his emotions, dark and otherwise, and focused more on man and the nature of life rather than nature itself (English History). He never understated what he might exaggerate. It was his shocking frankness in expressing his emotions, enduring themes, and style of of writing peculiar to his particular style of poetry that gained Byron a life in literature. More importantly, in making his name immortal, he made his ideas immortal. Written in ink, and translated into the mind of the reader, he preserved ideas and philosophies that are written with enough style and emotion, and possessed of enough merit and allure of their own to become foundation stones of humanity's psyche.

Byron used a rather odd sort of writing in order to express the his emotions. T.S. Eliot labeled some of his work antiquated -- Byron no doubt influenced by his indulgence in Shakespeare -- but all the same, some of his work possessed a unique style (English History). For instance, there lie within his texts numerous examples of exclamatory remarks, shouting expressions of grief and fury. In one poem, "Remember thee!", there were six sentences, fully five of which ended in an exclamation points.

Remember thee! remember thee!
Till Lethe quench life's burning stream
Remorse and shame shall cling to thee,
And haunt thee like a feverish dream!

Remember thee! Aye, doubt it not.
Thy husband too shall think of thee:
By neither shalt thou be forgot,
Thou false to him, thou fiend to me!

With repetition, hard words and verbs like "burning" and "quench", along with the numerous exclamation points made "Remember thee!" a poem of fiery, dark, loving emotion. However, not only do individual poems have a high percentage of exclamatory punctuation, but nearly every single poem written by Byron possesses at least one, and often several exclamations. Some examples, "Fond wretch!", "Thou false to him, thou fiend to me!", and "Too soon return'd to Earth!", all show his overflow of emotion, ("Snatched away", "Remember Thee!", and "Thou art dead", respectively). All three quotes are comprised of both his anger and his sorrow that possess enough force to penetrate the callous shell, thin or thick, that the reader may possess. Essentially, with his emphatic use of language, Byron took his own emotions and packaged them within the realm of the word and through that medium, reproduced it in other human beings, thereby preserving his emotions, a crucial component of enduring ideas.

Besides his ubiquitous use of exclamation points, he always couched his poems in some sort of rhyme or verse. Such a practice was not all that extraordinary, but out of that rhyme he was able to create a subtext that added further meaning to his words. In his poem "Prometheus", which functions as a lament for a kind god and to a lesser extent, humanity, he wrote of "the deaf tyranny of Fate,/ The ruling principle of Hate." Already connected by their proximity and sequence in the poem, the fact that "Fate" and "Hate" rhyme create an added connection between the two words within the mind of the reader. That connection allows more of his anger and sorrow to come through, anger at the injustice, sorrow that that injustice should exist. Specifically, that injustice entails the way Fate may cause a kind man to suffer torture - or, in the case specific to the poem, a kind Titan. The way that Fate gives so few a happy life, and creates of life a tragic comedy. If that question does not dwell within the hearts of Men, why Fate or God allows sorrow to thrive, surely none do. That question of Fate's nature, that accusation of its character is but one example of the morbid philosophic lines of thought that Byron instills in his poems, each one granting the poems depth in specific, but important ways. But to stay on the topic of his writing, there is another characteristic of his poems that imbued in them something apart from that which was common.

Besides grammar and style, his use of poetic devices gave his poems life and the sense that "This! this is poetry." Of them all, metaphors and personifications were two more common devices. In one poem, a vibrant metaphor combined with the customary exclamation mark expressed Byron's grief over a lost loved one. "Oh! more than tears of blood can tell when wrung from guilt's expiring eye, are in that word - Farewell! - Farewell!" ("Farewell!"). The "tears of blood" metaphor denotes his sorrow, while continuing on his ever-present theme of death (which shall be discussed later). With the continued use of metaphor, combined with hyperbole, alliteration, and personification, his own opinion on emotions came through in a poem both expressed and examined sorrow. "I must weep, or else this heavy heart will burst; for it hath been by sorrow nursed," (soul is dark). What that means, is that rather than keep his emotions in, he must let his tears flow in order to exercise the darkness from his soul. Also, he used hyperbole to express his mind's movements. "The silence of that dreamless sleep I envy now too much to weep," (Thou art dead), is one example, which further expressed the overall grief of the poem, and tied it into a wish for an end. At times, in saying one thing, he said another another. The lines "To render with thy precepts less/The sum of human wretchedness," in Prometheus carried both the theme of the poem, and the authors opinion that human life is, in fact, wretched. In all of his poems, his obsessions, his dark, and fabulously deep, dark emotions come through, channeled by words to the mind of the reader. Byron's ability to express true, undiluted emotion helped give his poems on lost love and death reality with his readers. Setting up a foundation of authenticity by expressing his anger, sorrow, and resentment, he taps into the souls of his readers and imparts ideas that have breathtaking force.

Often some random lord of the time would spout off a few rhymes in order to spend his idle time and gain some small morsel of fame. But Byron's work, though lord he was, was different in more than just style. For unlike that which was common, his works were not some idle love poems repeated to cliche, nor full of butterflies or rainbows overhead, but rather dealt in fatalistic, obsessive, philosophy. Having tapped into the souls of his readers with his literary prowess and genuine emotion, Lord Byron evokes central obsession of the human mind: Death. What is death? In Byron's poetry, death is a separation of two lovers, the origin of despair, the end of life, of hope, of growth. Death is the tool of the gods, to play with mortals, death is the angel that walks among us, stilling hearts, strangling babes. Life is death. It is with that dual nature of death, the sorrow of humanity left behind and left in wait, combined with the nature of gods and potential afterlife that Lord Byron captures his reader's hearts. It is with those themes, that he made himself a legend among writers, an immortal influence on mankind.

The poem "Darkness" represents the better part of Byron's writing. Indeed, nine out of ten randomly selected poems of Byron's revolved around death. The poem "Darkness deserves a paragraph unto itself for exactly that reason, for it involves nothing less than the death of the universe. The poem sums up Byron's view of life as relatively useless and full of darkness. It displays the tendency of humanity to descend into chaos when disturbed, like some common anthill. The disturbance, in this case, within his dream was that the "bright sun was extinguish'd" (Darkness). And all around the world, "the habitations of all things which dwell, were burnt for beacons; cities were consum'd," (Darkness). Their was no kindly intervention by the gods, they had no place in his dream. There was only Darkness, personified and omnipotent in the universe. The safe havens that had been made by humans to shelter their existence, be it made of stone walls or a king's will were made as dust, burnt in the flames to grant one last shred of light before the darkness reigned forever more; and, to quote Hobbes, the life of man became "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short". In that dream, that was not all the dream, one may realize that on a lesser scale this dream might explain the actions of all people who are disturbed from their accustomed state. Realizing this, Byron's "Darkness" acquires a fearsome, almost physical force formed from despair.

Death was accompanied by, indeed, nigh inseparable, with sorrow. With overwhelming sorrow, Byron showed the suffering of those still left on Earth. In many of his poems that sorrow is told from a viewpoint that could very well be the author's own. Perhaps more importantly, it draws on an elementary emotion of those who have lost something in their lives. For instance, "Remember Thee!" concerns the love felt for a dead, adulterous woman. Byron himself engaged in numerous affairs with married women, but the talk of death is most likely a metaphor for loss due to a jealous husband or luck. This connection between death and loss also showed up in "And thou art dead". The woman, "too soon return'd to Earth", left him to suffer alone with only memories of those "better days of life" when she had lived. The poem certainly had some grounding in his own life, though whether it was dedicated to any particular woman that left him is uncertain. Beyond this, he also took that loss that he himself felt and extended it to all humanity. "And thou - who tell'st me to forget, thy looks are wan, thine eyes are wet," (Snatched away). In "Oh, Snatched Away" he first details his lost love and sorrow, and ends with the line above. The sentence shows his belief that sorrow dwells in every soul, and that those who have ceased to cry still do so where none might see, and are therefore utter hypocrites for bewailing the emotion in others. Byron's poetry transcends the walls such hypocrites have built about themselves in order to entrance them with Truth; a dark truth, and incomplete, but truth nonetheless: Sorrow is in our nature.

Discussing death, there was always a measure of either sorrow, resentment, or both in Byron's poems. In the poem "Snatched away in beauty's bloom" he wrote the following in the second stanza: "And oft by yon blue gushing stream shall sorrow lean her drooping head and feed deep thought with many a dream and lingering pause and lightly tread; Fond wretch! as if her step disturbed the dead!" The poem personifies sorrow as nothing more than a dreamer, impotent in the face of death, the pale from which no one returns despite the sorrow of those left behind. In another poem of his, it is death, rather than sorrow, that is personified. "Death stood all glassy in the fixed eye", summoned by the king's sorcerer. Death, in this poem, seems little more than spiteful, a slumbering dragon that for one transgression might snap up a curious mortal. As, indeed, Death did, pronouncing that the king and his son would die "ere the coming day is done," (Raise the dead). This theme of death as being frightfully unkind is repeated in "Thou Art Dead". By some unkind fate, "The flower in ripen'd bloom unmatch'd must fall the earliest prey," (Thou art Dead). In Byron's poems, death is not a friend to the old and sickly, nor a haven to those who in life were good. One might expect that he would view life as all that exists, a time to indulge in whatever one wishes. This was not he. According to his critics, and the nature of his nurturing nanny, he was no atheist. However, even as he labeled Death as unkind and uncaring, heedless of humanity, life was not reckoned much more kindly.

Byron made life out to be something just as inimical to the soul as death. Indeed, one seems blended into the other in terms of the suffering inherent to each within his poems. From his play Cain, Cain said in a monologue, "And this is Life? Toil!" The sentiment, while contradicted by another character, remains an integral part of Byron's life. Born with a clubbed foot and very likely emotionally unstable, he was no stranger to life's suffering (Trueblood, 19). Along with bewailing the suffering of life, he also related its boredom and pointlessness to his readers. In "Cup from skull" he wrote, "I lived, I loved, I quaffed, like thee: I died." By the which, a life is summed in ten words. When something so seemingly complex is simplified such, the message of its insignificance is clear. Added to this, with some humor but also a grasping for meaning was the following: "In me behold the only skull from which, unlike a living head, whatever flows is never dull," (Cup from skull). It is likely that the line was born from his frustration, noted by Matthew Arnold, with the philistinism possessed of of many Englishmen of the time (English History, (English History). The admission of insufficient purpose came out fully in the last stanza. "Since through life's little day our heads such sad effects produce; redeemed from worms and wasting clay, this chance is theirs, to be of use," (Cup from skull). And with that stanza he reckons the entirety of humanity and life of no more worth than a skin with which to hold wine. This, too, draws parallels with his life. Most notable of which were the orgies he engaged in, in which wine was drunk from hollowed skulls (Trueblood). One might wonder where the connection lies between death, and life. There is, of course, Byron's unkind view of both, but beyond that, their is their origin. Byron went beyond simply talking of the horrible nature of life and death. He went in search of a cause, and at least in his mind, found one, which he imparted to his readers in his writing.

In Byron's poetry there is a strong emphasis on the unkind nature of the gods. The gods, sometimes "God", are portrayed as petty, cruel, and without mercy. The most telling instance of this lies in the poem "Prometheus" in reference to heaven and fate, "Which for its pleasure doth create the things it may annihilate". The line suggests that the gods created life for no other reason than to destroy it. Another line, "Thy Godlike crime was to be kind, to render with thy precepts less the sum of human wretchedness, and strengthen Man with his own mind," (Promethius), tells a great many things by inference. For, when mercy is a crime, apathy and random destruction must be the norm. Since it refers to Promethius and his circle, that suggests that the gods were creatures that had no inkling of mercy. But there is also something else in that line that, combined with some of his other works, suggests that he thinks quite often on the origin of man's suffering. The part "strengthen Man with his own mind", ("Prometheus"), is quite similar to a line he wrote in the play Cain: Lucifer said, "One good gift has the fatal apple given - your reason." To get the full view of this, one must remember that Byron was raised by a Calvinist nanny who impressed on him the idea of predestination, which, in some respects, is not all that different from causality (Marshall, 236). Cain's main creed in writing, some scholars believe, was that in a universe ruled by an apathetic or loveless god, "the only greatness to which man can aspire lies in his foredoomed struggle for reason and justice. This idea of predestination and lack of real purpose in life certainly came through when he created the Byronic hero that perpetrated evil acts despite an underlying desire to do otherwise, forced into their acts by a chain of events that had begun long before their birth; Byronic heroes who were damned ere their father took his first breath. In relation to this, one must indeed wonder about Adam's plight in Byron's play "Cain": "The tree planted, and why not for him? If not, why place him near it, where it grew the fairest in the center?" ("Cain") In this respect, one must truly wonder at the nature of God. For if Adam had no real knowledge, how would he know to stay away from it? And in transgression, "why suffer?" (Cain). Added to this is an image of deathly Heaven extending its hand to the earth in Byron's poem "Sennacherib". An image of the Angel of Death turning cohorts "gleaming in purple and gold" into a silent field, hearts and all. Throughout all his works, the gods, or God, is not thought of as particularly kind and is related to either death or the worst parts of life. The work "Cain" has been called "a closely argued dramatic restatement of Byron's lasting creed that as the universe is swayed by a loveless God," (George). Not a particularly popular view to take in his time, but there were those, who, outside of the public eye or disdainful of it, read his works and deemed them remarkable.

Through those powerful themes of morbid philosophy and questioning, questioning why gods would allow suffering, why Fate is so unkind, combined with ever-present, true emotions, enabled Byron to capture the hearts of his readers. It is the nature of poetry to draw the reader in, good poetry such as Byron's, at least. I once thought on the nature of novels in comparison to novels. One is far longer than the other, possessed of a complicated plot that plays itself out over the course of a book, rather than a page. However, when one really looks at it, the basic ideas imparted from each are similar, despite the disparity in pages. True, a book may have numerous moral lessons and insightful comments thrown in, but the overall motif behind it does not have significantly more force than the theme gained from a poem. The reason for this becomes obvious, in time: Whereas a novel builds all of its themes up from the characters and society it has created, poems draw not on some artificial construct, but rather reality, the very character of the person reading. Poems gather momentum from the ills of society, from the inner conclusions and twists of the soul that the reader has gained over the course of the lifetime. Poetry takes a theme, and rather than set it within the pages of a book, writes the theme in the language before words, in emotions and raw tissue that was just waiting to be given order out of chaos. Byron knew this well, and gained a niche in poetry but speaking not to the golden side of humanity, but its dark side, its questions, waiting to be answered in a world that has failed to yield any true answers since childhood, a childhood of blind faith, long decayed by disuse. Poetry is nothing without a reader possessed of a soul that can comprehend its themes and emotions, and the fact that Byron's dark poetry was and is so respected and at times popular is as good a proof as any of the darkness that lies in human hearts. So long as the human race has questions about the nature of reality, holds darkness within their hearts, never quite quiescent, Byron shall not be forgotten.

Works Cited:

Abrams, M. H., ed. "George Gordon, Lord Byron." Norton Anthology of English Literature. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc, 1962. 505-659.

"Byron, George Gordon." Enotes. Enotes.Inc. 15 Jan. 2008 .

"George Gordon Noel Byron". UXL Newsmakers. (2005). FindArticles.com. 27 Jan. 2008. .

"Life and work of Lord Byron." English History. 21 Jan. 2008 .

"Lord Byron's Darkness: Analysis and Interpretation." DTIC. -- 1977. DTIC. 17 Jan. 2008 .

Marshall, William H., ed. "George Gordon, Lord Byron." The Major English Romantic Poets. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1971. 235-247.

"Prometheus, by Lord Byron." Poetry Archive. 15 Jan. 2008 .

Trueblood, Paul G. Lord Byron. 2nd ed. Boston: Twayne.

"George Gordon Noel Byron". UXL Newsmakers. (2005). FindArticles.com. 27 Jan. 2008. .