Wordsworth and Byron: "The After-Vacancy"

Action is transitory,--a step, a blow,
The motion of a muscle--this way or that--
'Tis done, and in the after-vacancy
We wonder at ourselves like men betrayed:
Suffering is permanent, obscure, and dark,
And shares the nature of infinity.

--William Wordsworth,
headnote to "The White Doe of Rhylstone"
(originally a bit of speech
from the suppressed drama The Borderers)


The world is full of orphans: firstly, those
Who are so in the strict sense of the phrase
(But many a lonely tree the loftier grows
Than others crowded in the forest's maze);
The next are such as are not doomed to lose
There tender parents in their budding days,
But merely their parental tenderness,
Which leaves them orphans of the heart no less.

--Lord Byron,
the opening stanza to the final -- and unfinished -- canto of Don Juan


I am not sure why I am putting these two passages together, but they rise up in my mind that way, often.  Of course, both pieces concern emotional loss and absence, concern consequence: "after-vacancy" As an exercise in grad school, I'd often ponder how one poet would speak another poet's words, how one poet would cast the same thought into different words, but I must said that I always felt that Lord Byron would have ended up with phrasing quite close to Wordsworth's original "Action is transitory" and so forth;  that was an invigorating insight since I'd mostly approached these two poets as poles in an agon, as antagonists in the Romantic Battle-Royal.  Much of Cantos III and IV of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage reveals Wordsworthian themes, Byronized (of course) . . . .