Quote of the Day (Lord Byron, Dreaming That ‘Greece Might Still Be Free’)

“The mountains look on Marathon—
    And Marathon looks on the sea;
And musing there an hour alone,
    I dream’d that Greece might still be free;
For standing on the Persians’ grave,
I could not deem myself a slave.”— English Romantic poet George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788-1824), “The Isles of Greece” (1821)
 
Two centuries ago today, Lord Byron died of a fever in Missolonghi, contracted while participating in the Greek War of Independence against the Ottoman Empire.
 
In some ways, his demise was filled with the kind of ironies that would have amused the creator of the mock epic Don Juan: Despite using his own fortune to raise an army to fight for the Greek cause, he was able neither to win any battles outright himself nor reconcile opposing factions; and he died not on a battlefield but at the hands of doctors whose bloodletting technique fatally weakened him against his fever.
 
At the same time, by focusing international attention on the Greeks’ struggle for autonomy, he brought an attention to the fight that it might not have received otherwise.
 
He is still remembered as a hero in that nation to this day, even though in his native England his reputation is more ambivalent, with respect for his enormous writing skill sometimes obscured by a private life that might charitably be termed complicated.
 
For more on Byron’s full-throated advocacy of freedom and liberalism at home and abroad, I urge you to read Paul Trueblood’s essay in the January 1976 issue of The Byron Journal.
 
The eight-year Greek War of Independence is examined in this fascinating online exhibit, coinciding with the conflict’s bicentennial, from the University of Michigan Library.
 
Byron’s involvement in the conflict occurred in the context of Britain’s diplomatic maneuvers, which the exhibit discusses here. America’s “Greek Fever” also forms part of the exhibit.

Spiritual Quote of the Day (Lord Byron, on Samuel Called From the Dead to Predict the Fate of King Saul)

“Death stood all glassy in his fixed eye:
His hand was wither'd, and his veins were dry;
His foot, in bony whiteness, glitter'd there,
Shrunken and sinewless, and ghastly bare;
From lips that moved not and unbreathing frame,
Like cavern'd winds, the hollow accents came.
Saul saw, and fell to earth, as falls the oak,
At once, and blasted by the thunderstroke.”—English Romantic poet George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788-1824), “Saul,” from Hebrew Melodies (1815)
 
One of the most notorious rakes of all time—and one who spiced many of his verses with biting wit—Lord Byron was, at first glance, the least likely of poets to write on a religious subject, let alone with anything like a reverent attitude.
 
You can imagine my surprise, then, when I discovered in an anthology of Byron’s work that he had not only written the lines above, describing the Old Testament King Saul’s encounter with the deceased prophet who set him on the path to ruling Israel, Samuel, but that he had written a whole collection of poems with an Old Testament setting, Hebrew Melodies.
 
The verses were meant to accompany melodies created by Byron’s Jewish friend, Isaac Nathan. As Louis Finkelman noted in a March 2011 article for The Forward, Nathan “adapted some of the melodies straight from those used in the Sephardic synagogues of London,” including, for the more secular poem “She Walks in Beauty,” the Sephardic tune for “Lekha Dodi.”
 
With “Saul,” Byron uses verses narrative—to which he would return more flamboyantly in his mock epic Don Juan—for a specific Bible episode (1 Samuel 28:3–25). A desperate Saul, unable to perceive a sign from God, calls on the “Witch of Endor” (in violation of his own royal decree banning mediums) -to summon from the dead Samuel, in order to advise Saul what to do on the eve of battle against the Israelites’ longtime foe, the Philistines.
 
The result is not at all what Saul expected or wanted. At the very sight of Samuel, Saul collapses, “blasted by the thunderstroke”—a foreshadowing of what will happen during battle, when, the “shrunken and sinewless” ghost advises him, not only will the Israelites lose, but Saul and his heir will die. And so it came to pass, as defeat led Saul to commit suicide, even as the captured Jonathan and his brothers are put to death by the Philistines.
 
So many scandals attached to Lord Byron even during his lifetime that any assessment of his overall morality is, at best, fraught. But at some level, what he read in the Bible left a deep impression on him (even if he did not, of course, conform to its strictures against adultery). In an October 9, 1821 letter to his friend John Murray, Byron wrote that he saw reading the New Testament as “a task,” but that he was a great reader and admirer” of the Old Testament and had even “read them through and through before I was eight years old.” The power of its stories and verses could not be erased.
 
[The image accompanying this post, The Shade of Samuel Appears to Saul, was created by Italian Baroque painter Salvator Rosa (1615 –1673).]

Quote of the Day (Lord Byron, on Love and Marriage)

“’Tis melancholy, and a fearful sign
Of human frailty, folly, also crime,
That love and marriage rarely can combine,
Although they both are born in the same clime;
Marriage from love, like vinegar from wine—
A sad, sour, sober beverage — by time
Is sharpen’d from its high celestial flavor
Down to a very homely household savour.” — English Romantic poet George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788-1824), Don Juan (1819-1823)
 
In the most popular month for weddings, it really does go against the grain to post such a cynical view of marriage. And these verses were written by a man spectacularly unfit for this institution—a walking advertisement for scandal who was once famously described by a future lover, Lady Caroline Lamb, as “mad, bad and dangerous to know.”
 
No matter. Whatever interest might derive from the romantic escapades of Lord Byron, that curiosity would likely fade if these adventures were ranked next to those of history’s other great lotharios. 
 
There’s a far better, more lasting reason to be fascinated by this poet: his work. And nothing in the rest of his career can quite prepare you for his great, rollicking, mock-epic of the last stage of his short life, Don Juan. 

Erect whatever defenses you want against Byron's irreverence, but by the time you finish stanzas such as this, it seems to me impossible not to put this poem down without one’s sides shaking with laughter.
 
(For an interesting blog post on the satirical knock-offs inspired by this poem—which itself was a satirical knock-off—see this post, centered around the work of early 19th-century editor-publisher William Hone, from nine years ago.)

Quote of the Day (Lord Byron, on Being Caught Between the Present and the Future)

“Between two worlds life hovers like a star,
  'Twixt night and morn, upon the horizon's verge.
How little do we know that which we are!
  How less what we may be! The eternal surge
Of time and tide rolls on, and bears afar
  Our bubbles; as the old burst, new emerge,
Lash'd from the foam of ages; while the graves
Of empires heave but like some passing waves.”—English Romantic poet George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788-1824), Don Juan (1819-1823), Canto XVI

Quote of the Day (Lord Byron, on ‘The Moral of All Human Tales’)

“There is the moral of all human tales:
   'Tis but the same rehearsal of the past,
   First Freedom, and then Glory—when that fails,
   Wealth, vice, corruption—barbarism at last.” — English Romantic poet George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788-1824), Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Canto IV (1812)
 
Over the weekend, while watching a DVD of the 1935 horror classic, The Bride of Frankenstein, I groaned for a second as I listened to that sequel’s opening, a framing sequence featuring author Mary Shelley and her circle. The moment that offended me came courtesy of actor Gavin Gordon, playing one of the Shelleys’ dearest friends, Lord Byron.
 
Whether taking the initiative to try it himself or doing so at the urging of director James Whale, Gordon, a Southerner, spoke his lines in the plummiest possible English accent. To eradicate the impression, I found the above quatrain, much to my relief.
 
The tough-minded observer of the human spectacle behind these verses was nothing like the creature of the film: a pompous poet in love with his own voice, even while speaking to his friends. In his forecast of the fate of great powers, the real-life Byron also identified the third stage in which America finds itself now: “Wealth, vice, corruption.”

Quote of the Day (Lord Byron, on ‘The Glad Waters of the Dark Blue Sea’)

“O’er the glad waters of the dark blue sea,    
Our thoughts are boundless, and our souls as free,   
Far as the breeze can bear, the billows foam,
Survey our empire, and behold our home.” —English Romantic poet George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788–1824), The Corsair: A Tale (1814)

I took the image accompanying this post while on vacation in Hilton Head, SC, in November 2014.

Photo of the Day: ‘Rapture on the Lonely Shore’—Hilton Head, SC

“There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,
   There is a rapture on the lonely shore,
   There is society where none intrudes,
   By the deep Sea, and music in its roar:
   I love not Man the less, but Nature more,
   From these our interviews, in which I steal
   From all I may be, or have been before,
   To mingle with the Universe, and feel
What I can ne'er express, yet cannot all conceal.” — English Romantic poet George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788-1824), Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812)

Lord Byron never visited America, let alone the shore of South Carolina. When I took this photo while on vacation in Hilton Head six years, the beach at that point in the day was not “lonely.” But I certainly felt the “rapture” he evoked in this passage as I pedaled my bike on the shoreline.

In these dying days of a year darkened by COVID-19, memory is the only way to experience vistas like this once taken for granted in the era of untrammeled travel. But memory—and the magical verses like these—remain, for all that, enormously powerful.

Let’s hope that, at some point in the new year, we will have once again the opportunity “to mingle with the Universe” without fear.

Quote of the Day (Lord Byron, on Pleasure, Sin—and Lots of Confusion)

“Man's a phenomenon, one knows not what,

         And wonderful beyond all wondrous measure;

    'Tis pity though, in this sublime world, that

         Pleasure's a sin, and sometimes sin's a pleasure;

    Few mortals know what end they would be at,

         But whether glory, power, or love, or treasure,

    The path is through perplexing ways, and when

    The goal is gain'd, we die, you know--and then----

    What then?--I do not know, no more do you--

         And so good night.”—English Romantic poet George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788-1824), Don Juan, Canto I (1819)

Quote of the Day (Lord Byron, on the Power of Words)

“But words are things, and a small drop of ink,

 Falling like dew, upon a thought, produces

 That which makes thousands, perhaps millions, think.”—English poet Lord Byron (1788-1824), Don Juan, Canto III (1821)

Quote of the Day (Lord Byron, on Not Reasoning)

"Those who will not reason, are bigots, those who cannot, are fools, and those who dare not, are slaves." —British poet Lord Byron, The Two Foscari (1821) 

Quote of the Day (Lord Byron, on Our Unsatisfied Need for Heroes)

“I want a hero: an uncommon want, 

  When every year and month sends forth a new one, 

Till, after cloying the gazettes with cant, 

  The age discovers he is not the true one.”— Lord Byron, Don Juan, Canto I (1819)