Childe Harold's Pilgrimage
Childe Harold's Pilgrimage is a lengthy
narrative poem by the English poet
George Gordon, Lord Byron, published between
1812 and
1818. The poem describes the travels and reflections of a world-weary young man who, disillusioned with a life of pleasure and revelry, looks 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-Revolutionary and
Napoleonic eras.
The poem is quite autobiographical, as Byron freely admitted, and is based upon his travels through the
Mediterranean and
Aegean Sea between
1809 and
1811. Despite the fact that Byron did not think the poem was all that good, feeling it revealed too much of himself, it was an instant sensation when published by
John Murray, and made Byron famous in England practically overnight. Women, especially, swooned over the poem, fascinated by the character of Childe Harold, his foreboding, and his nameless vices. Lord Byron quickly became the darling of the influential female aristocrats of the day; they recognized bits of Childe Harold in him, and he felt compelled to live up to this reputation.
The poem introduced the concept of the
Byronic hero, which is still somewhat popular today and shows up in
novels,
films and
plays on a regular basis. The Byronic hero is usually described as an outsider, and with a contradictory nature; sometimes cruel, sometimes kind, devoted but unfaithful, and never contented, but eternally seeking out new sensations.
It has four
cantos written in
Spenserian stanzas, which consist of eight
iambic
pentameter lines followed by a one
alexandrine (a twelve syllable iambic line), and
rhyme pattern ABABBCBCC.
The mood of the poem inspired
Harold en Italie by the French Romantic composer
Hector Berlioz.
Childe Harold became a vehicle for Byron's own beliefs and ideas; indeed in the preface to book three Byron acknowledges the fact that his hero is just an extension of himself. By masking himself behind a literary artifice, Byron was able to achieve what critic Jerome McGann depicts as "man's greatest tragedy is that he can conceive of a perfection which he cannot attain".
The term
childe was a
medieval title for a young man who was a candidate for
knighthood.
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Childe Harold's Pilgrimage Full Text
