Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage

You can see the complete handwritten manuscript at the website of the National Library of Scotland.

These stanzas, in Byron’s own hand, are the introduction to a sequence that is often anthologised as The Eve of Waterloo.

The whole poem, comprising four cantos and 486 Spenserian stanzas, tells of the travels and reflections of a young man, Childe Harold, weary of the world and of his own self-indulgent lifestyle. The archaic word, Childe, meaning a candidate for knighthood, suggests a medieval setting, but the poem is set very much in Byron’s own world. Inevitably, the central character has been linked to the poet himself, particularly as both the travels and Harold’s opinions are close Byron’s own.

The first two cantos were published by John Murray in 1812 and were, in modern terminology, an immediate best seller. As Byron himself remarked: ‘I awoke one morning and found myself famous.’

Byron might never have added to the original two cantos but for the circumstances of his private life. In January 1816 his increasingly unhappy marriage to Arabella Milbanke finally broke down amid rumours of a scandalous association between Byron and his half-sister, Augusta Leigh. Once a divorce settlement had been reached, in April 1816, he left England, never to return.

As he travelled across Belgium on his way to Geneva, Byron visited the battlefield of Waterloo, which was already gaining its iconic status in British consciousness. Byron does not offer a straightforward account of the battle. Indeed, these stanzas are notably anti-patriotic. The focus is very much on the French defeat and what it says about ambition and glory, but Byron also reveals his radical instincts when in the person of Harold he asks whether ‘earth is more free’ because of Napoleon’s defeat. He wonders, ‘Did nations combat to make One submit;/Or league to teach all kings their sovereignty?’

The actual sequence of Quatre Bras and Waterloo (stanzas 21-28) is impressionistic. Only one combatant, the Duke of Brunswick, who ‘rush’d into the field, and foremost fighting, fell’ is actually named. Instead of specific detail, we are given a progression of images and emotions that convey the reality of battle and are summed up in stanza 28, where the opening line (‘Last noon beheld them full of lusty life,’) is starkly contrasted with the closing line: ‘Rider and horse, – friend, foe, – in one red burial blent!’

Byron himself died eight years later aged 36, as the result of a fever contracted while he was fighting for Greek independence against the Turks.