For the final instalment of my Greek shadow journey, I've been reading a little more about the fascinating figure of George Gordon Noel, Lord Byron.

Byron has haunted our journeys in recent years. We first crossed paths when, in 2018, we visited Hucknall, where he is buried, and Newstead Abbey, the "vast and venerable pile" from which Childe Harold, Byron's "hero" and alter ego, sets out on his adventures.


I will definitely be returning to this poet, whose flamboyant, contradictory life and richly layered work offer much food for thought.

But this time round, I focused on Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, which describes the 19th-century equivalent of the Big OE. Harold, after all, "from his native land resolv'd to go; And visit scorching climes beyond the sea" (you can replace "scorching" with any other adjective -- it's always the "beyond the sea" that counts).

It's a strange poem in many ways. It features an archaic title (a childe is a young nobleman who has not yet become a knight), and often archaic language, but the scenes and events it describes are contemporary. It is often hard to disentangle Byron and Harold. And the poem encompasses a variety of genres and styles.

But it's quite a treasure trove. I can kind of understand why Lansdown calls it "the greatest poem about Europe -- since the Aeneid, at any rate".

The first two cantos -- the publication of which (in 1812) brought him instant fame -- draw on a journey he made in the period 1809-11 through Portugal, Spain, and parts of what we now know as Greece, Albania, and Turkey. Canto I was finished in Athens in December 1809, and Canto II in Smyrna in March 1810. So it's a nice little bridge between my Greek and Turkish shadow journeys.

His Hellenic travels made a huge impression on Byron, who once affirmed: "If I am a poet, ... the air of Greece has made me one."




But in many ways his view of Greece was paradoxical. It is founded, Cochran maintains, on the tendency among the educated classes in Britain at the time to assume that 5th-century Greece was somehow a model era. Yet, despite its achievements, "Athens was an imperialist power, and a baffled one at that"; what its memorable records hand down for posterity is a picture of "a state as faction-ridden, domineering, violent, and sad as any other".

Byron laments the fall in fortunes that has led to Greece's subjection to Ottoman rule:

"Ancient of days! august Athena! where,
Where are thy men of might? thy grand in soul?
Gone -- glimmering through the dream of things that were,
First in the race that led to Glory’s goal,
They won, and passed away -- is this the whole?
A schoolboy’s tale, the wonder of an hour!
The warrior’s weapon and the sophist’s stole
Are sought in vain, and o’er each mouldering tower,
Dim with the most of years, gray flits the shade of power."




But he also lodges with Ali Pasha, the Albanian bandit-turned-Ottoman-ruler, who administered Ioannina and the surrounding area (in the northern part of contemporary Greece).

He is torn in two directions: "Byron (or Harold) empathises happily with the Albanian celebration of murder and plunder... But Harold (or Byron) empathises just as much with Leonidas and his three hundred heroic Spartans awaiting destruction in the pass of Thermopylae... Trying for a poetic way in which to reconcile the political and historical irreconcilables of his Levantine experience was a problem with which Byron strove for some years."

By 1814, the first two cantos of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage were being published with hefty appendices, including didactic material with a clear aim: Byron wanted to make sure his upper-class English readers were aware of the Greek cause, which became increasingly dear to his heart, "but he wishes them to see, at the same time, that the Turks are not barbarians -- or, at least, no more barbaric than the English."

Byron and his companion, John Hobhouse, arrived in Athens on Christmas night in 1809. They lodged with the widow of a Greek who had formally been British vice consul. It is her (terribly young) daughter, Theresa, that Byron addresses in Maid of Athens.

Last year, we saw the Lysicrates Choragic Monument, which had been incorporated into the local monastery where Byron was accommodated in 1810, and where he wrote the poem. We stayed in the neighbourhood of Vyronas -- named after Byron himself. And we saw the monument that Greece erected in his honour.




Byron is much admired in Greece. He vigorously opposed Lord Elgin's removal of the Parthenon marbles. He supported the Greek struggle for independence by donating funds, acting as liaison with the London Philhellenic Committee, endeavouring to mediate between the various factions of rebels, and even setting up his own military detachment. He died in Missolonghi, as a result of a bout of illness, in April 1824. The Greeks were profoundly shocked and saddened by the death of their most influential backer.

International pro-Greek sentiment was galvanized by his death, which came in the same year as the exhibition of Delacroix's The Massacre at Chios at the Paris Salon in 1824 (we saw a reproduction of it in Chios last year).

Dionysios Solomos, who wrote Hymn to Liberty, the first three stanzas of which became the Greek national anthem (and later the Cypriot national anthem as well), also penned an Ode on the Death of Lord Byron.

We crossed paths a couple more times with Harold/Byron last year. We are told that "Childe Harold sailed, and passed the barren spot, where sad Penelope o'erlooked the wave", and Byron helpfully notes that this is a reference to Ithaca -- the island we inadvertently missed when we sailed from Bari to Patras...

And, as it was for us, Patras was also Byron's gateway to Greece (the Greek photos in this post are all from our visit to this vibrant port city last year).

Canto III takes up his next major journey, which began in April 1816. This covers his experiences touring the battlefield of Waterloo, his journey down the Rhine, and his stay at Lake Geneva (scene of the ghost story challenge that produced Frankenstein and The Vampyre, the subject of the Byron-focused novel I wrote about on The Velvet Cushion). The poem was begun as soon as he left, finished just a few months later, and published in November that same year.

Byron's view of Napoleon is ambivalent and constantly evolving. But he clearly saw Waterloo "as a defeat for the forces of rationalism and enlightenment, and a victory for the forces of Europe-wide tyranny":

"How that red rain hath made the harvest grow!
And is this all the world has gained by thee,
Thou first and last of fields! King-making Victory? ...

Fit retribution -- Gaul may champ the bit
And foam in fetters -- but is Earth more free?
Did nations combat to make One submit;
Or league to teach all kings true Sovereignty?"

We came across the Waterloo section of the poem in Singapore in 2018, in the shape of an arresting work by David Kwo Da-wei. The painting is spattered as though with blood, and the rendering in both Chinese and English somehow underlines that the brutality of war is universal.

It's a brilliant piece of poetry, that shifts from sketching a glittering ball to evoking the panic of realizing an attack is imminent:

"There was a sound of revelry by night...
A thousand hearts beat happily...
But hush -- hark -- a deep sound strikes like a rising knell...
Arm -- Arm -- it is -- it is -- the Cannon's opening roar!"

A few stanzas further on is the beautiful lament for the death of Byron's cousin, Frederick Howard, which is quoted in Imposture:

"There have been tears and breaking hearts for thee,
And mine were nothing – had I such to give;
But when I stood beneath the fresh green tree,
Which living waves where thou didst cease to live,
And saw around me the wide field revive
With fruits and fertile promise, and the Spring
Came forth her work of Gladness to contrive,
With all her reckless birds upon the wing,
I turned from all she brought to those She could not bring."




Canto IV, covering Byron's peregrinations in Italy (and now they are specifically Byron's, since Harold, after appearing fleetingly in Canto III, is absent entirely in this one), was finished and published in 1818.

Again, intriguingly contradictory political views come to light, reflecting "the division in Byron between the radical and the sentimental aristocrat. If an imperialism's time has passed, as has that of Venice, that imperialism is to be lamented with nostalgia -- a sign of the culture’s vanished greatness... But if the imperialism is current, as is that of the Hapsburg Empire, it is to be deplored."

I won't linger over this canto. The Italian part of my shadow journey is over, and the only rule of shadow journeys is that you can't go backwards...

But I will just point out that Byron popped up in our Madrid visit this year (in those days, long gone it feels, when we could TRAVEL). There he was, staring at the Colosseum, the mixed impressions of which he conveys very powerfully:

"But here, where Murder breathed her bloody steam;
And here, where buzzing Nations choked the ways,
And roared or murmured like a Mountain stream
Dashing or winding as its torrent strays;
Here, where the Roman Million’s blame or praise
Was Death or Life -- the playthings of a Crowd --
My voice sounds much -- and fall the stars faint rays
On the Arena void -- seats crushed -- walls bowed --
And Galleries, where my steps seem echoes strangely loud...

But when the rising Moon begins to climb
Its topmost arch, and gently pauses there;
When the Stars twinkle through the loops of Time,
And the low Night-breeze waves along the air
The Garland-forest, which the gray Walls wear,
Like Laurels on the bald first Cæsar’s head;
When the light shines serene but doth not glare --
Then in this magic circle raise the dead:
Heroes have trod this spot -- ’tis on their dust ye tread."

As always, I would much prefer to be travelling than remembering travel. That's a given.

But as always, too, I've gained a huge amount from this shadow journey. Lansdown quotes Byron scholar Mark Storey talking about Childe Harold's Pilgrimage:

"The poem charts a journey in which the protagonist has to learn what he is looking at, and then how to look at it, which in turn affects what it is he is looking at, and how he reacts to it, and how that affects the way he feels about it. This is an extraordinarily complex process."

This is exactly what I feel I'm doing with my shadow journeys.

So... Onwards to Turkey...