''Childe Harold's Pilgrimage: A Romaunt'' is a long
narrative poem in four parts written by
Lord Byron
George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron (22 January 1788 – 19 April 1824) was an English poet. He is one of the major figures of the Romantic movement, and is regarded as being among the greatest poets of the United Kingdom. Among his best-kno ...
. The poem was published between 1812 and 1818. Dedicated to "
Ianthe", it describes the travels and reflections of a young man disillusioned with a life of pleasure and revelry and looking for distraction in foreign lands. In a wider sense, it is an expression of the
melancholy and disillusionment felt by a generation weary of the wars of the post-
Revolution
In political science, a revolution (, 'a turn around') is a rapid, fundamental transformation of a society's class, state, ethnic or religious structures. According to sociologist Jack Goldstone, all revolutions contain "a common set of elements ...
ary and
Napoleonic eras. The title comes from the term ''
childe'', a
medieval
In the history of Europe, the Middle Ages or medieval period lasted approximately from the 5th to the late 15th centuries, similarly to the post-classical period of World history (field), global history. It began with the fall of the West ...
title for a young man who was a candidate for
knighthood.
The poem was widely imitated. It contributed to the cult of the wandering
Byronic hero who falls into melancholic reverie as he contemplates scenes of natural beauty. Its autobiographical subjectivity was widely influential, not only in literature but in the arts of music and painting as well, and was a powerful ingredient in European
Romanticism
Romanticism (also known as the Romantic movement or Romantic era) was an artistic and intellectual movement that originated in Europe towards the end of the 18th century. The purpose of the movement was to advocate for the importance of subjec ...
.
Summary
The youthful Harold, cloyed with the pleasures of the world and reckless of life, wanders about Europe, making his feelings and ideas the subjects of the poem. In Canto I he is in Spain and Portugal, where he recounts the savagery of their invasion by the French. In Canto II he moves to Greece, uplifted by the beauty of its past in a country now enslaved by the Turks. Some stanzas of Canto II are dedicated to Harold's journey in Albania, describing its natural and manmade beauties, its history, and the traditions of the Albanians. Canto III finds him on the battlefield of Waterloo, from which he journeys up the Rhine and crosses into Switzerland, enchanted by the beauty of the scenery and its historic associations. In Canto IV Harold starts from Venice on a journey through Italy, lamenting the vanished heroic and artistic past, and the subject status of its various regions.
Origins
The poem contains elements thought to be autobiographical, as Byron generated some of the storyline from experience gained during his travels through
Portugal
Portugal, officially the Portuguese Republic, is a country on the Iberian Peninsula in Southwestern Europe. Featuring Cabo da Roca, the westernmost point in continental Europe, Portugal borders Spain to its north and east, with which it share ...
, the
Mediterranean
The Mediterranean Sea ( ) is a sea connected to the Atlantic Ocean, surrounded by the Mediterranean basin and almost completely enclosed by land: on the east by the Levant in West Asia, on the north by Anatolia in West Asia and Southern ...
and
Aegean Sea
The Aegean Sea is an elongated embayment of the Mediterranean Sea between Europe and Asia. It is located between the Balkans and Anatolia, and covers an area of some . In the north, the Aegean is connected to the Marmara Sea, which in turn con ...
between 1809 and 1811.
[.] The "Ianthe" of the dedication was the term of endearment he used for
Lady Charlotte Harley, about 11 years old when ''Childe Harold'' was first published.
Lady Charlotte Bacon, ''née'' Harley, was the second daughter of 5th Earl of Oxford and
Lady Oxford, Jane Elizabeth Scott. Throughout the poem, Byron, in character of Childe Harold, regretted his wasted early youth, hence re-evaluating his life choices and re-designing himself through going on the pilgrimage, during which he lamented various historical events including the
Iberian Peninsular War.
Despite Byron's initial hesitation that the first two cantos of the poem revealed too much of himself, they were published "at the urging of friends" by
John Murray in 1812 and brought both the poem and its author to immediate and unexpected public attention. Byron later wrote, "I awoke one morning and found myself famous".
Published on March 3, 1812, the first run of 500 quarto copies sold out in three days. There were ten editions of the work within three years. The first two cantos in John Murray's edition were illustrated by
Richard Westall, a well-known painter and illustrator who was then commissioned to paint portraits of Byron. In 1816 Byron published a third canto of ''Childe Harold'', and in 1818 a fourth. Eventually these were added to the previous cantos to form a composite work.
Byron chose for the epigraph for the 1812 edition title page a passage from ''Le Cosmopolite, ou, le Citoyen du Monde'' (1753), by
Louis-Charles Fougeret de Monbron, in the original French. Translated into English, the quote emphasizes how the travels have resulted in a greater appreciation of his own country:
The universe is a kind of book of which one has read only the first page when one has seen only one's own country. I have leafed through a large enough number, which I have found equally bad. This examination was not at all fruitless for me. I hated my country. All the impertinences of the different peoples among whom I have lived have reconciled me to her. If I had not drawn any other benefit from my travels than that, I would regret neither the expense nor the fatigue.
Structure
The poem's four
cantos are written in
Spenserian stanzas, which consist of eight
iambic pentameter lines followed by one
alexandrine (a twelve syllable iambic line), with the
rhyme scheme ABABBCBCC.
Lyrics in a different form occasionally punctuate these stanzas: the farewell to England following Canto I's stanza 13 and later the address "To Inez" following stanza 84; and in Canto II the war song that follows stanza 72. Then in Canto III there is the greeting from
Drachenfels following stanza 55.
The fictive narrator
For the long poem he was envisaging, Byron chose not only the Spenserian stanza but also the archaising dialect in which ''
The Faerie Queene
''The Faerie Queene'' is an English epic poem by Edmund Spenser. Books IIII were first published in 1590, then republished in 1596 together with books IVVI. ''The Faerie Queene'' is notable for its form: at over 36,000 lines and over 4,000 sta ...
'' was written, possibly following the example of Spenser's 18th-century imitators. Thus in the ''Pilgrimage''s first three stanzas we find ''mote'' (as past tense of the verb ''might''); ''whilome'' (once upon a time) and ''ne'' (not); ''hight'' (named) and ''losel'' (good-for-nothing). If such stylistic artificiality was meant to create a distance between hero and author, it failed – protest though Byron might in the preface that his protagonist was purely fictitious. No sooner had
Walter Scott
Sir Walter Scott, 1st Baronet (15 August 1771 – 21 September 1832), was a Scottish novelist, poet and historian. Many of his works remain classics of European literature, European and Scottish literature, notably the novels ''Ivanhoe'' (18 ...
read the work than he was commenting in a
private letter to
Joanna Baillie that "the hero, notwithstanding the affected antiquity of the style in some parts, is a modern man of fashion and fortune, worn out and satiated with the pursuits of dissipation, and although there is a caution against it in the preface, you cannot for your soul avoid concluding that the author, as he gives an account of his own travels, is also doing so in his own character."
In the public sphere, the ''Anti-Jacobin Review'' came to the similar conclusion that Childe Harold "appears to be nothing but the dull, inanimate, instrument for conveying his poetical creator's sentiments to the public. Lord Byron avows the intent of this hero's introduction to be the "giving some connection to the piece"; but we cannot, for the life of us, discover how the piece is more connected, by assigning the sentiments which it conveys to a fictitious personage, who takes no part in any of the scenes described, who achieves no deeds, and who, in short, has no one province to perform, than it would have been had Lord Byron spoken in his own person, and been the "hero of his own tale".
In the face of unanimous scepticism, Byron gave up the pretence and finally admitted in the letter to his fellow-traveller
John Hobhouse that prefaced Canto IV: "With regard to the conduct of the last canto, there will be found less of the pilgrim than in any of the preceding, and that little slightly, if at all, separated from the author speaking in his own person. The fact is, that I had become weary of drawing a line which everyone seemed determined not to perceive."
Imitations
The first two cantos of ''Childe Harold's Pilgrimage'' had scarcely been published before its world-weary hero was satirised in the popular ''
Rejected Addresses'' of 1812. ''
Cui Bono
''Cui bono?'' (), in English "to whom is it a benefit?", is a Latin phrase about identifying crime suspects. It depends on the fact that crimes are often committed to benefit their perpetrators; especially financially.
Use
The phrase is a dou ...
?'' enquires "Lord B" in the Spenserian stanza employed by the original:
Byron was so amused by the book that he wrote to his publisher, "Tell the author I forgive him, were he twenty times our satirist".
He was not as forgiving of the next tribute to his work, ''Modern Greece: A Poem'' (1817) by
Felicia Hemans
Felicia Dorothea Hemans (25 September 1793 – 16 May 1835) was an English poet (who identified as Welsh by adoption). Regarded as the leading female poet of her day, Hemans was immensely popular during her lifetime in both England and the Unit ...
, which was dependent for its subject on the second canto of the ''Pilgrimage''. At first published anonymously, it was even taken to be by Byron himself in one contemporary review. While it was written in a similar rhetorical style, her poem used a slightly longer 10-line stanza terminating in an alexandrine. This too deplored the land's Turkish enslavement and mourned its decline, although pausing to admire the occasion in the past when "woman mingled with your warrior band" (stanza 50) in resisting invasion. Where the author diverged to take direct issue with Byron was on the controversy over the
Elgin Marbles
The Elgin Marbles ( ) are a collection of Ancient Greek sculptures from the Parthenon and other structures from the Acropolis of Athens, removed from Ottoman Greece in the early 19th century and shipped to Britain by agents of Thomas Bruce, 7 ...
, championing instead their removal to a land that can still cherish their inspiration. To Byron's assertion that
she had replied
Over the years, others wrote works dependent on the ''Pilgrimage'' to a greater or lesser degree.
George Croly celebrated the victory at the
Battle of Waterloo
The Battle of Waterloo was fought on Sunday 18 June 1815, near Waterloo, Belgium, Waterloo (then in the United Kingdom of the Netherlands, now in Belgium), marking the end of the Napoleonic Wars. The French Imperial Army (1804–1815), Frenc ...
with his ''Paris in 1815: A Poem'' (London, 1817). It was prefaced by 21 Spenserian stanzas in the Byronic manner, followed by many more sections in couplets. This was followed in 1818 by the anonymous collection ''Childe Harold's Pilgrimage to the Dead Sea (and other poems)''. There the Byronic outcast of the title poem relates a catalogue of sins through thirty pages of irregular couplets, wound up by a call to last-minute repentance. By 1820 the habit of imitation had crossed to the US, where five Spenserian stanzas dependent on the ''Pilgrimage''s Canto II were published under the title "Childe Harold in Boetia" in ''The Galaxy''.
But the Childe was to be found applying himself to other activities than travel. The 62 pages of
Francis Hodgson's ''Childe Harold's Monitor, or Lines occasioned by the last canto of Childe Harold'' (London 1818), are given over to literary satire in the manner of Byron's ''
English Bards and Scotch Reviewers''. Written in heroic couplets, it champions the style of the
Augustan poets against the emergent
Romantic style, particularly of the
Lake Poets. ''Childe Harold in the Shades: An Infernal Romaunt'' (London, 1819) displays much the same sentiments. The poem is set in the Classical
underworld
The underworld, also known as the netherworld or hell, is the supernatural world of the dead in various religious traditions and myths, located below the world of the living. Chthonic is the technical adjective for things of the underworld.
...
and its anonymous youthful author has since been identified as Edward Dacres Baynes.

Byron's death in the
Greek War of Independence
The Greek War of Independence, also known as the Greek Revolution or the Greek Revolution of 1821, was a successful war of independence by Greek revolutionaries against the Ottoman Empire between 1821 and 1829. In 1826, the Greeks were assisted ...
initiated a new round of imitations.
William Lisle Bowles responded to his interment with a generous elegy in the six stanzas of "Childe Harold's Last Pilgrimage" (1826). These were written in the same form as Byron's poem and, forgiving the bitter insults that had passed between them in the course of a public controversy, now paid a magnanimous tribute to the manner of his dying.
There was also a crop of French imitations on this occasion, of which the foremost was
Alphonse de Lamartine's ''Le Dernier Chant du Pélerinage d'Harold'' (Paris, 1825). Despite the poet's assertion of the originality of his 'Fifth Canto', a contemporary English review found it often dependent on Byron's works. Its English translation by J. W. Lake, ''The Last Canto of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage'', was published from Paris in 1826. Another in heroic couplets followed from London in 1827. Another French enthusiast,
Jules Lefèvre-Deumier, had actually been on the way to join Byron in Greece in 1823 but a shipwreck robbed him of the opportunity to join the cause. He too recorded a pilgrimage from Paris into Switzerland in ''Les Pélerinages d'un Childe Harold Parisien'', published in 1825 under the pseudonym D. J. C. Verfèle. In the following year Aristide Tarry published the pamphlet-length ''Childe-Harold aux ruines de Rome: imitation du poème de Lord Byron'', which was sold in aid of the Greek combatants.
A later imitation of ''Childe Harold's Pilgrimage'' lay unacknowledged for more than a century.
John Clare
John Clare (13 July 1793 – 20 May 1864) was an English poet. The son of a farm labourer, he became known for his celebrations of the English countryside and his sorrows at its disruption. His work underwent major re-evaluation in the late 20t ...
had started to compose his own "Child Harold" in 1841, during the years of his madness, sometimes identifying himself as Byron, sometimes as a bigamist Byronic hero. Its intricate narrative stanzas are interspersed with many more lyrics than had been Byron's poem, often on the subject of Clare's youthful love for Mary Joyce. But, though "more sustained in thought than anything else he ever attempted", it was written piecemeal and the fragments were never unified or published until midway through the 20th century.
Influence
The Byronic hero
The protagonist of ''Childe Harold's Pilgrimage'' embodied the example of the self-exiled
Byronic hero. His antinomian character is summed up in
Lord Macaulay's essay on ''Moore's Life of Lord Byron'' (''Edinburgh Review'', 1831). "It is hardly too much to say that Lord Byron could exhibit only one man – a man proud, moody, cynical, with defiance on his brow, and misery in his heart; a scorner of his kind, implacable in revenge, yet capable of deep and strong affection…It is curious to observe the tendency which the dialogue of Lord Byron always has, to lose its character of dialogue and to become soliloquy."
The type was caricatured as the melancholy Mr Cypress in
Thomas Love Peacock
Thomas Love Peacock (18 October 1785 – 23 January 1866) was an English novelist, poet, and official of the East India Company. He was a close friend of Percy Bysshe Shelley, and they influenced each other's work. Peacock wrote satirical novels ...
's ''
Nightmare Abbey'', published in 1818, following the appearance of the ''Pilgrimage's'' Canto IV. The poet's misanthropic and despairing announcement there sums up the 'heroic' point of view: "I have no hope for myself or for others. Our life is a false nature; it is not in the harmony of things; it is an all-blasting upas whose root is earth, and whose leaves are the skies which rain their poison dews upon mankind. We wither from our youth; we gasp with unslaked thirst for unattainable good; lured from the first to the last by phantoms – love, fame, ambition, avarice – all idle, and all ill – one meteor of many names, that vanishes in the smoke of death." Almost every word is transcribed from two of the canto's stanzas, 124 and 126.
Once Byron's poem had launched the heroic prototype, it went on to be an influence on
Alexander Pushkin
Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin () was a Russian poet, playwright, and novelist of the Romantic era.Basker, Michael. Pushkin and Romanticism. In Ferber, Michael, ed., ''A Companion to European Romanticism''. Oxford: Blackwell, 2005. He is consid ...
's ''
Eugene Onegin
''Eugene Onegin, A Novel in Verse'' (, Reforms of Russian orthography, pre-reform Russian: Евгеній Онѣгинъ, романъ въ стихахъ, ) is a novel in verse written by Alexander Pushkin. ''Onegin'' is considered a classic of ...
'' (1825–32), where the poem's protagonist is compared several times to Childe Harold. Onegin shares the hero's melancholy that cannot be pleased (1.38) and his dreaminess (4.44); but perhaps his mixture of behaviours are only so many masks, and in this respect he is likened to
Melmoth the Wanderer as well as to Childe Harold (8.8). Tatiana too ponders whether Onegin's guises make him "a Muscovite in Harold's dress, a modish second-hand edition" (7.24).
But however much that pose may have been appreciated in the first half of the 19th century, by
World War II
World War II or the Second World War (1 September 1939 – 2 September 1945) was a World war, global conflict between two coalitions: the Allies of World War II, Allies and the Axis powers. World War II by country, Nearly all of the wo ...
the reaction to the hero's attitudes had veered to scepticism.
C. S. Lewis
Clive Staples Lewis (29 November 1898 – 22 November 1963) was a British writer, literary scholar and Anglican lay theologian. He held academic positions in English literature at both Magdalen College, Oxford (1925–1954), and Magdalen ...
, in ''
The Screwtape Letters'' (1941), bracketed Childe Harold and
Young Werther as Romantic types "submerged in self-pity for imaginary distresses" for whom "five minutes' genuine toothache would reveal
heir
Inheritance is the practice of receiving private property, titles, debts, entitlements, privileges, rights, and obligations upon the death of an individual. The rules of inheritance differ among societies and have changed over time. Offi ...
romantic sorrows for the nonsense they were". Equally, the bluff hero of
C. S. Forester's ''
The Commodore'' (1945) dismissed Byron's poem as "bombast and fustian" while flipping through its pages for inspiration.
Music
The first two cantos of the poem were launched under the title ''Childe Harold's Pilgrimage: A Romaunt, and other poems''. There were twenty of those "other poems", for the most part arising out of Byron's tour. These supplemented the three lyrics already mentioned that were incorporated into Cantos I and II. Five of the supplementary songs were set by composers, mostly during the course of the 19th century and sometimes in translated versions. "On Parting" (''The kiss, dear maid, thy lip has left''), for example, was set by
Ludwig van Beethoven
Ludwig van Beethoven (baptised 17 December 177026 March 1827) was a German composer and pianist. He is one of the most revered figures in the history of Western music; his works rank among the most performed of the classical music repertoire ...
and some 25 other composers; the song "Maid of Athens, ere we part" had a setting by
Charles Gounod
Charles-François Gounod (; ; 17 June 181818 October 1893), usually known as Charles Gounod, was a French composer. He wrote twelve operas, of which the most popular has always been ''Faust (opera), Faust'' (1859); his ''Roméo et Juliette'' (18 ...
as well as others in German and Italian.
The song "Adieu! Adieu! my native shore", which appeared in the first canto of the ''Pilgrimage'', was set as early as 1814, but with the wording "My native shore adieu", and was apparently incorporated into the long-established opera ''The Maid of the Mill''. It was also set by some twelve other composers as well as in German and Danish translations. And in addition to the songs, just two Spenserian stanzas from the ''Pilgrimage''s Canto III have had musical settings: stanza 72 by the American composer
Larry Austin in 1979 and a German translation of stanza 85 by Robert von Hornstein (1833–1890).
There were also two European Romantic composers who referenced ''Childe Harold's Pilgrimage'' in their programmatic works.
Hector Berlioz
Louis-Hector Berlioz (11 December 1803 – 8 March 1869) was a French Romantic music, Romantic composer and conductor. His output includes orchestral works such as the ''Symphonie fantastique'' and ''Harold en Italie, Harold in Italy'' ...
recorded in his memoires that, in composing ''
Harold en Italie'' (1834), he wished to draw on memories of his wanderings in the
Abruzzi, making of the solo for viola at its start "a sort of melancholic reverie in the manner of Byron's Childe Harold" (''une sorte de rêveur mélancolique dans le genre du Child-Harold de Byron''). Nevertheless,
Donald Tovey has pointed out in his analysis of the work that "there is no trace in Berlioz's music of any of the famous passages of ''Childe Harold''".
Several of
Franz Liszt
Franz Liszt (22 October 1811 – 31 July 1886) was a Hungarian composer, virtuoso pianist, conductor and teacher of the Romantic music, Romantic period. With a diverse List of compositions by Franz Liszt, body of work spanning more than six ...
's transcriptions of Swiss natural scenery in his ''
Années de pèlerinage'' (composed during the 1830s) were accompanied by epigraphs from Canto III of Byron's poem, but while the quotations fit the emotional tone of the music, they are sometimes contextually different. Thus Liszt's second piece, ''Au lac de Wallenstadt'' (By Lake Wallenstadt), with its evocation of rippling water, is accompanied by Byron's description of the still reflective surface of
Lac Leman (stanza 68). Between the next few quotations there is greater congruence, however. Liszt's fifth piece, ''Orage'' (Storm), comes with Byron's equating of meteorological and emotional weathers from canto 96. The change of tone in the sixth piece, ''Vallée d'Obermann'', is signalled by the transition of mood at the end of Byron's following stanza 97; and the peaceful beginning of stanza 98 accompanies the succeeding ''Eglogue'' (Eclogue). After this sequence drawn from three contiguous stanzas, the final piece, ''Les cloches de Genève'' (Geneva bells), returns to the Lac Leman sequence of stanzas in the poem and provides another dissonance. The two lines quoted from stanza 72 fit the serene tone of the music, but only by ignoring the rejection of "human cities" two lines later. In the case of both Berlioz's and Liszt's pieces, their association with ''Childe's Harold's Pilgrimage'' is an indication of how they are to be interpreted, in that all three works are subjective and autobiographical. The music, however, is independent of the text.
Painting

J. M. W. Turner was an admirer of Byron's poetry and made scenes from the ''Pilgrimage'' the subject of several paintings. Turner was among those commissioned to provide drawings to be engraved for
William Finden's landscape illustrations to Byron (1832), which also included views from the poem. One of Turner's earlier paintings was of the carnage on ''
The Field of Waterloo'' (1818), which was accompanied by Byron's descriptive lines from Canto III, stanza 28. For this, the poet had visited the battlefield in 1815 and Turner in 1817. Then in 1832 he exhibited a painting referencing Byron's poem in its title, ''
Childe Harold's Pilgrimage - Italy'' (1832), accompanied by lines reflecting on the passing of imperial might from Canto IV, stanza 26. Turner's ''Ehrenbreitstein'' (1835) was still another landscape carrying an epigraph, this time from the subject's appearance in Canto III, stanzas 61–3. It had captured the painter's imagination on his first visit there in 1817 and he had made studies of the place many times since then. Though the painter might first have been drawn to the spot on account of Byron's poem, what he made of it came from close personal acquaintance over the intervening years.
The American
Thomas Cole also went to Byron for the subject of one painting, though it was to ''Manfred'' in this case and is typically an imaginative reinterpretation. So too was his series of paintings
''The Course of Empire'' (1833–6), in reference to which he quoted the lines on the rise of cultures through civilisation to barbarism, from the ''Pilgrimage's'' Canto IV, stanza 108. Cole's ''The Fountain of Egeria'' (painted at about the same time and now lost) was accompanied by lines from the same poem.
[''Thomas Cole's Journey'' (2018), p.158]
See also
*
''Don Juan'' (poem)
*
Romantic literature in English
References
External links
*
''Childe Harold's Pilgrimage''at
Internet Archive
The Internet Archive is an American 501(c)(3) organization, non-profit organization founded in 1996 by Brewster Kahle that runs a digital library website, archive.org. It provides free access to collections of digitized media including web ...
(scanned books original editions illustrated)
*
*
{{Authority control
1818 books
1818 poems
John Murray (publishing house) books
Poetry by Lord Byron
Works about travel
Fiction about pilgrimage
Narrative poems
Literature about pilgrimages