Lord Byron: "My Mind Is A Fragment"

Happy 225th, Lord Byron!  The portions of this entry will move fragmentally, in honor of his Lordship.

200 years ago today, Lord Byron turned 25, footloose, if not exactly carefree in London.  I've been reading around in his letters, his journal from later in 1813, and a bit of poetry composed around that time to enjoy Byronic wit, self-absorption, and poetic talent.  I want to share a few bits from (or about) Byron's “The Giaour: A Fragment of a Turkish Tale,”  composed in pieces, fragmentary by design, from later in his 25th year, 1813, begun in March and published in early June.  ["Giaour" rhymes with "tower".]

Opening Lines: No breath of air to break the wave
That rolls below the Athenian’s grave,
That tomb which, gleaming o’er the cliff,*
First greets the homeward-veering skiff,
High o’er the land he saved in vain—
When shall such hero live again?

*A tomb above the rocks on the promontory, by some supposed the sepulcher of Themistocles. [Byron’s note]

My note:  The concern for the missing hero, the lost hero, the failed hero haunts the works, poetic and dramatic.   Byron’s excellent Don Juan opens with a call for a hero too, for none of the potential heroes of the period really qualify; he is forced to turn to the old seducer Don Juan (which for Byron & the English of  the time rhymes, quixotically perhaps for us, with “true one").


A favorite passage:
The Mind, that broods o’er guilty woes,
   Is like the Scorpion girt by fire,
In circle narrowing as it glows
The flames around their captive close,
Till inly search’d by thousand throes,
    And maddening in her ire,
One sad and sole relief she knows,
The sting she nourish’d for her foes,
Whose venom never yet was vain,
Gives but one pang, and cures all pain,
And darts into her desperate brain.—
So do the dark in soul expire,
Or live like Scorpion girt by fire;**
So writhes the mind Remorse hath riven,
Unfit for earth, undoom’d for heaven,
Darkness above, despair beneath,
Around it flame, within it death!—

**Alluding to the dubious suicide of the scorpion, so placed for experiment by gentle philosophers.  Some maintain that the position of the sting, when turned towards the head, is merely a convulsive movement; but others have actually brought in the verdict ‘Felo de se’. The scorpions are surely interested in a speedy decision of the question; as, if once fairly established as insect Catos, they will probably be allowed to live as long as they think proper, without being martyred for the sake of an hypothesis.

My note: I like the contrast between the poetic and the prosaic, between the melodramatic verse and the contrasting skeptical/satirical explanation.

Finally, a line from Byron's journal of 1813:

For my part, I adhere (in liking) to my Fragment.  It is no wonder that I wrote one -- my mind is a fragment.

--Byron's Letters & Journals: Volume 3: 1812-1814 -- 'Alas! The Love Of Women!',
edited by Leslie A. Marchand,
Harvard University Press: Cambridge, MA,
1974.

Byron: Shaving Tips

"I can never get people to understand that poetry is the expression of excited passion, and that there is no such thing as a life of passion any more than a continuous earthquake, or an eternal fever. Besides, who would ever shave themselves in such a state?"

-- Lord Byron, in a letter to Thomas Moore, 5 July 1821

"In A Long Rage": More Poems By Louise Bogan

I've been reading around  again in Louise Bogan's The Blue Estuaries: Poems 1923- 1968--The Noonday Press: New York, 1968--and I have four more poems I'd like to share.

I've quoted four other poems by Louise Bogan here.

Read aloud, please, and listen:


MAN ALONE


It is yourself you seek
In a long rage,
Scanning through light and darkness
Mirrors, the page,


Where should reflected be
Those eyes and that thick hair,
That passionate look, that laughter.
You should appear


Within the book, or doubled,
Freed, in the silvered glass;
Into all other bodies
Yourself should pass.


The glass does not dissolve;
Like walls the mirrors stand;
The printed page gives back
Words by another hand.


And your infatuate eye
Meets not itself below:
Strangers lie in your arms
As I lie now.




BAROQUE COMMENT


From loud sound and still chance;
From mindless earth, wet with a dead million leaves;
From the forest, the empty desert, the tearing beasts,
The kelp-disordered beaches;
Coincident with the lie, anger, lust, oppression and death in many forms:


Ornamental structures, continents apart, separated by seas;
Fitted marble, swung bells; fruit in garlands as well as on the branch;
The flower at last in bronze, stretched backward, or curled within;
Stone in various shapes: beyond the pyramid, the contrived arch and the buttress;
The named constellations;
Crown and vesture; palm and laurel chosen as noble and enduring;
Speech proud in sound; death considered sacrifice;
Mask, weapon, urn; the ordered strings;
Fountains; foreheads, under weather-bleached hair;
The wreath, the oar, the tool,
The prow;
The turned eyes and the opened mouth of love.




PACKET OF LETTERS


In the shut drawer, even now, they rave and grieve--
To be approached at times with the frightened tear;
Their cold to be drawn away from, as one, at nightfall,
Draws the cloak closer against the cold of the marsh.


There, there, the thugs of the heart did murder.
There, still in the murderers' guise, two stand embraced, embalmed.




SOLITARY OBSERVATION BROUGHT
BACK FROM A SOJOURN IN HELL


At midnight tears
Run into your ears.

Test Prompt: Is Roxane Worth The Trouble?

When I teach Edmond Rostand's Cyrano de Bergerac, I end up wanting to write lots of letters.  I also always assign the following topics--or roughly similar ones--for in-class or take-home writing:

Is Roxane really worth the trouble?

Is Cyrano just a fool?  (Use evidence from all parts of the play to support your position.)

Does the Comte de Guiche have any redeeming qualities?  And if so, are they enough, really, to redeem him?

Stuff like that.

The first is a particular favorite, and those of you who know the play understand that in the beginning, Roxane, aside from her beauty and liveliness, doesn't seem to merit such devotion from Cyrano and Christian.  In fact, in the second and third acts, she can seem petty and hurtful.  And yet if you keep reading . . . .

I also like to direct students to the balcony scene as a crescendo in the arc of the play.  What really happens amidst all those words back and forth?  Is it all just the "pretty nothings that are everything," as Roxane claims earlier, or is there something of greater depth at work?

Oh, Roxane--


I've also found the following quotation helpful in considering the overall arc of the play:


"The world is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel."
--Horace Walpole (1717-1797)


--a handful of thoughts at the end of a long day.

A Bookish Fool

I am.

Byron's Letters & Journals, heavily annotated.