The Byronic hero
Byronic hero: a passionate, restless and mysterious man who hides some horrible secrets in his past. Proud individualism and rejection of moral rules.
Byronic hero: a passionate, restless and mysterious man who hides some horrible secrets in his past. Proud individualism and rejection of moral rules.
Arrogant, Cunning and able to adapt, Cynical, Disrespectful of rank and privilege, Emotionally conflicted, bipolar, or moody, Having a distaste for social institutions and norms, Having a troubled past or suffering from an unnamed crime, Intelligent and perceptive, Jaded, world-weary, Mysterious, magnetic and charismatic, Seductive and sexually attractive, Self-critical and introspective, Self-destructive, Socially and sexually dominant, Sophisticated and educated, Struggling with integrity, Treated as an exile, outcast, or outlaw
Believed in individual liberty = wanted all men to be free and fought against tyrans.
Satirical man whose feelings are reflected in the wildest and in nature in general.
STYLE: 18th-century-poetic diction in a witty style, from Spenserian stanza to ottava rima, with a predilection for colloquial language.
Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage
The first two stanzas are narrated in first person by the protagonist Childe Harold; he is probably on a ship near the coast of England . He has just woken up when he realizes that he is in the middle of a storm. After he sees how powerful nature can be he feels scared, and regrets to be in the middle of the ocean, where he can’t even see England’s shores. But on the other hand he is determined to continue sailing because he feels like he was born to do it, just like a weed that is flung from the rock on the Ocean’s foam.
In the other three stanzas there is a third person narrator, who continues to tell Harold’s story.During his life Harold travelled to mountains, oceans, deserts, forests and caverns.
He felt at ease with nature because he understood it better than a book while when he would spend too much time with men he would become restless, worn, stern and wearisome.
In the last stanza Harold has reached an interior peace and resignation, because he feels self-exiled, hopeless, and despaired in front of the power of nature, and he tries to contain his emotions.
Natural elements provoke certain emotions in Harold. For example the waters (line 2) create excitement; the winds (line 3), melancholy; the tempest (line 11) sense of wonder in front of the power of nature; the mountains (line 15) loneliness; blue sky passion of seclusion; the desert, forest, cavern (line 19) seclusion; sunbeams on the lake (line 23) restlessness; boundless air (line 27) sense of freedom.
So Byron mainly describes nature as a powerful and wild entity which men can’t overcome.
Byron uses personification (lines 3, 7-8) to project his own feelings onto nature
One of the most important literary devices used by Byron in this poem is the simile. In fact he compares Harold to a weed that is flung from a rock to the ocean’s foam. This simile underlines how the protagonist’s littleness in front of a wild nature, but also his love for freedom and solitude. Byron also compares Harold to a falcon which tries to escape from its cage. This underlines the hero’s rebellious soul against social codes and customs; he can be considered a real fighter of freedom and lover of nature’s power and beauty.
Harold is restless and bored with the world, he feels affinity with nature; he is solitary and sensitive; he faces the hopelessness of life with a certain sense of humour or, perhaps, with cynical attitude.
Nature for Wordsworth, Coleridge and Byron
Romantic poets give a lot of importance to nature in their poems, but they all deal with it differently. For example Wordsworth treats it realistically, using his five senses, but he also uses feelings to underline how men can discover moral and spiritual values in nature. Coleridge, on the contrary, introduces supernatural elements, transforming nature into something magical and unreal in order to make people see the beauty of nature and creating in the reader a feeling of love towards all God’s creations. Byron sees nature in yet another way: as something so powerful that makes men feel so little and useless. Man can be both in harmony or against nature. For Shelley, nature is at the same time a veil that hides the truth of the Divine Spirit (it's never confined to a purely physical existence) a instrument since it provides him with symbolic images for his cosmic schemes, a refuge from the ordinary world and an interlocutor of his hopes for a better future.
The poet for Shelley and Byron
At the same time a prophet and a Titan that could challenge the cosmos and have to help mankind to reach an ideal world.
England in 1819
The speaker describes the state of England in 1819. The king is “old, mad, blind, despised, and dying.” The princes are “the dregs of their dull race,” and flow through public scorn like mud, unable to see, feel for, or know their people, clinging like leeches to their country until they “drop, blind in blood, without a blow.” The English populace are “starved and stabbed”in untilled fields; the army is corrupted by “liberticide and prey”; the laws “tempt and slay”; religion is Christless and Godless, “a book sealed”; and the English Senate is like “Time’s worst statute unrepealed.” Each of these things, the speaker says, is like a grave from which “a glorious Phantom” may burst to illuminate “our tempestuous day.”
Ode to the West Wind
The Ode was written in 1820 by Shelley,one of the most important English poets, in a wood near Florence. It is composed of 14 lines and is divided into five stanzas. In each stanza he describes the effects of the wind on the nature, a wind that is considered a cosmic power that affects the whole universe. In the first stanza the wind is described as an essence of seasonal change, as a destroyer and a preserver, and there are described its effects on earth. In the second stanza are described its effects on the air, and in the third stanza the effects on and under the sea. In the fourth stanza the poet implores the wind to lift him and rescue him from prostration. In the last stanza the poet identifies with the wind, becoming the prophet of an humanity’s moment of change. In the ode there are many similes, metaphors and symbols. Key-words of the poem are destroyer and preserver, which sintesize the main concepts of the ode: the death and the rebirth of human society. This concept of a new birth implies a negative view of society and underlines the prophetic role of the poet. Eventually in this ode the poet shows his desire for personal renewal and for the successful spreading of his revolutionary ideas.
Ode on a Grecian Urn
In the first stanza, the speaker stands before an ancient Grecian urn and addresses it. He is preoccupied with its depiction of pictures frozen in time. It is the “still unravish’d bride of quietness,” the “foster-child of silence and slow time.” He also describes the urn as a “historian” that can tell a story. He wonders about the figures on the side of the urn and asks what legend they depict and from where they come. He looks at a picture that seems to depict a group of men pursuing a group of women and wonders what their story could be: “What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape? / What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?”
In the second stanza, the speaker looks at another picture on the urn, this time of a young man playing a pipe, lying with his lover beneath a glade of trees. The speaker says that the piper’s“unheard” melodies are sweeter than mortal melodies because they are unaffected by time. He tells the youth that, though he can never kiss his lover because he is frozen in time, he should not grieve, because her beauty will never fade. In the third stanza, he looks at the trees surrounding the lovers and feels happy that they will never shed their leaves. He is happy for the piper because his songs will be “for ever new,” and happy that the love of the boy and the girl will last forever, unlike mortal love, which lapses into “breathing human passion” and eventually vanishes, leaving behind only a “burning forehead, and a parching tongue.”
In the fourth stanza, the speaker examines another picture on the urn, this one of a group of villagers leading a heifer to be sacrificed. He wonders where they are going (“To what green altar, O mysterious priest...”) and from where they have come. He imagines their little town, empty of all its citizens, and tells it that its streets will “for evermore” be silent, for those who have left it, frozen on the urn, will never return. In the final stanza, the speaker again addresses the urn itself, saying that it, like Eternity,“doth tease us out of thought.” He thinks that when his generation is long dead, the urn will remain, telling future generations its enigmatic lesson: “Beauty is truth, truth beauty.” The speaker says that that is the only thing the urn knows and the only thing it needs to know.
The Ode was written in 1820 by Shelley,one of the most important English poets, in a wood near Florence. It is composed of 14 lines and is divided into five stanzas. In each stanza he describes the effects of the wind on the nature, a wind that is considered a cosmic power that affects the whole universe. In the first stanza the wind is described as an essence of seasonal change, as a destroyer and a preserver, and there are described its effects on earth. In the second stanza are described its effects on the air, and in the third stanza the effects on and under the sea. In the fourth stanza the poet implores the wind to lift him and rescue him from prostration. In the last stanza the poet identifies with the wind, becoming the prophet of an humanity’s moment of change. In the ode there are many similes, metaphors and symbols. Key-words of the poem are destroyer and preserver, which sintesize the main concepts of the ode: the death and the rebirth of human society. This concept of a new birth implies a negative view of society and underlines the prophetic role of the poet. Eventually in this ode the poet shows his desire for personal renewal and for the successful spreading of his revolutionary ideas.
Ode on a Grecian Urn
In the first stanza, the speaker stands before an ancient Grecian urn and addresses it. He is preoccupied with its depiction of pictures frozen in time. It is the “still unravish’d bride of quietness,” the “foster-child of silence and slow time.” He also describes the urn as a “historian” that can tell a story. He wonders about the figures on the side of the urn and asks what legend they depict and from where they come. He looks at a picture that seems to depict a group of men pursuing a group of women and wonders what their story could be: “What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape? / What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?”
In the second stanza, the speaker looks at another picture on the urn, this time of a young man playing a pipe, lying with his lover beneath a glade of trees. The speaker says that the piper’s“unheard” melodies are sweeter than mortal melodies because they are unaffected by time. He tells the youth that, though he can never kiss his lover because he is frozen in time, he should not grieve, because her beauty will never fade. In the third stanza, he looks at the trees surrounding the lovers and feels happy that they will never shed their leaves. He is happy for the piper because his songs will be “for ever new,” and happy that the love of the boy and the girl will last forever, unlike mortal love, which lapses into “breathing human passion” and eventually vanishes, leaving behind only a “burning forehead, and a parching tongue.”
In the fourth stanza, the speaker examines another picture on the urn, this one of a group of villagers leading a heifer to be sacrificed. He wonders where they are going (“To what green altar, O mysterious priest...”) and from where they have come. He imagines their little town, empty of all its citizens, and tells it that its streets will “for evermore” be silent, for those who have left it, frozen on the urn, will never return. In the final stanza, the speaker again addresses the urn itself, saying that it, like Eternity,“doth tease us out of thought.” He thinks that when his generation is long dead, the urn will remain, telling future generations its enigmatic lesson: “Beauty is truth, truth beauty.” The speaker says that that is the only thing the urn knows and the only thing it needs to know.
