Harold, who barely exists in the poem (he was originally to be called Burun, the old spelling of the Byron family name), is attempting to escape his own past by leaving England for the wastes of ocean and of a fabulous elsewhereness. The work of the poem is to transmute that feeling into one of freedom. It is this sense of pointlessness-to be found in the ultimate insignificance of poetry as well as of political power-that Byron finds everywhere. Byron’s predilection for battlefields (which he explicitly mentions in a footnote to canto III) is for them as a place in which the most intense passion and pain display their ultimate pointlessness. Everywhere it is the indifference of time and fate and nature to human ambition. In Greece the loss is that of the glorious past and the great writers who belong to that past in Albania it is the sublime emptiness of the wilderness. In the poem, what he sees everywhere he goes is emptiness and loss. In particular, this takes the form of commitment to Greek independence, a cause for which Byron would later fight and die. Accordingly, Byron traveled through Portugal, Spain, Malta, Albania, Greece, and Turkey, whose Ottoman Empire extended over Greece, and Byron would die championing the cause of Greek independence, the loss of which he laments in Childe Harold. Those cantos are more or less the poetic journal of a trip Byron took with friends (in particular his close confidant John Cam Hobhouse) through the regions of Europe not occupied by Napoleon Bonaparte’s French forces the areas held by Napoleon were enemy territory for an Englishman.
These are the basic questions of romanticism.īyron famously woke up to find himself famous after the publication of cantos I and II of Childe Harold when he was 24. The question always to keep in mind about Childe Harold is why Byron would write a combination travelogue, political tract, autobiography, lamentation, and paean to nature as a poem, and why such a poem should be so spectacularly popular.
In many ways it is the archetypal first approximation of a romantic poem, both for Lord Byron’s contemporaries and disciples and for an understanding of English romanticism’s conception of the relationship between nature and literature. The crucial fact about Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage is that it is a poem. Analysis of Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimageīy NASRULLAH MAMBROL on Febru
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