II My days are in the yellow leaf; The flowers and fruits of love are gone; But 'tis not thus and 'tis not here Such thoughts should shake my soul, nor now, Where glory decks the hero's bier, Awake, my spirit! Think through whom Thy life-blood tracks its parent lake, And then strike home! 5 ΙΟ 15 20 25 NOTES AND COMMENT (Roman numerals refer to stanza; Arabic numerals to line) CHILDE HAROLD'S PILGRIMAGE, CANTO III (Page 1) THE third canto of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage was written at Ouchy, near Lausanne, in Switzerland, in the months of May and June, 1816. It is Byron's noblest utterance up to that time in his life. He had left England deep in social disgrace and burning with mortification and self-reproach, and had joined his brother poet, Shelley, in Switzerland. The poem expresses the reaction of travel among scenes of great natural beauty and historical interest upon the mind of one whose experience with life and popularity had brought only bitterness and disappointment. This reaction was in some measure influenced and controlled by Byron's intercourse with Shelley. The poem, therefore, shows the most definite and unmistakable evidence of the influence of Byron's poetical contemporaries upon him; for Shelley was an admirer of Wordsworth, held Wordsworth's theory that nature has power to restore happiness to the unhappy, and believed, like Wordsworth, in the power of the unseen world of the spirit. The Prisoner of Chillon, Manfred, and the Epistle to Augusta belong to the same period in Byron's career as a poet and show the same poetical qualities as the Third Canto. In the first two cantos of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage Byron had related, with at least a show of faithfulness, the itinerary of a fictitious character, Childe Harold, a youth old beyond his years and disappointed with life, otherwise rather vaguely portrayed, who journeyed through Portugal, Spain, Greece, and Turkey, and commented upon what he saw with a zest which, though inconsistent with his pessimistic character, constituted the principal charm of the cantos. Childe Harold appears in the Third Canto in only a dozen stanzas and is then forgotten until the end of the Fourth Canto, where he reappears only to say farewell. Byron was of course not writing fiction; it was his own thoughts and emotions that he wished to express; and he felt that any disguise, however thinly veiled, was in his way. The poem is in the form of a pilgrimage, though the itinerary is imperfect, and the following outline will serve to show the subjects treated and the course of the journey: Address to his infant daughter Ada and to England, stanzas i-ii; Reintroduction of Childe Harold, iii-xvi; Waterloo, xvii-xxxv; Napoleon, xxxvi-xlv; Journey along the Rhine, xlvi-lxi; Drachenfels, lv ff.; Coblentz, lvi-lvii; Ehrenbreitstein, lviii; Switzerland, lxii-cix; the Alps, lxii; Morat, lxiii-lxiv; Aventicum and the Story of Julia, lxv-lxvii; Lake Leman, lxviii; Nature and Solitude (personal), Ixix-lxxv; Rousseau and the French Revolution, lxxvi-lxxxiv; Lake Leman in the Hush of Night, lxxxv-xci; Night and Storm, xcii-xcvii; Daybreak on Lake Leman, xcviii; Clarens, xcix-civ; Lausanne and Ferney, Voltaire and Gibbon, cv-cviii; the Cloudland of the Alps, cix; the Prospect of Italy, cx; the Author's final Comment, cxi-cxiv; Ada, the Farewell, cxv-cxviii. i, 2. Ada: Byron's daughter, Augusta Ada, born December 10, 1815, subsequently Countess of Lovelace, died in 1852, leaving three children. She was a woman of marked ability in music and mathematics, inheriting in some measure her father's intellectual and emotional intensity. i, 5. Awaking with a start. Observe the sudden and unexpected break in the continuity of the discourse, a favorite device of Byron's for attracting the reader's interest. It is as if he had been suddenly recalled from his musing about his daughter to find himself on shipboard leaving England and all his past life in sadness and disappointment. The reader is thus instantly put into possession of the details of the situation. i, 9. Albion: a poetical name for England. ii, 1. Once more upon the waters. Byron is one of the greatest of sea poets. Read the apostrophe to the ocean in Canto IV, stanzas ́clxxix-clxxxiv and the notes to the passage. There are brilliant descriptive passages dealing with the sea in The Corsair, The Siege |