Byron and the distorted prism
Byron recounts fondly ‘ [it] is a great favourite with the young girls of Athens of all classes. Their manner of singing it is by verses in rotation, the whole number present joining in the chorus. I have heard it frequently at our ‘χόροι’ [dances] in the winter of 1810-1811. The air is plaintive and pretty ’ (Byron, 1812, p. 186). ‘ The Garden of Roses ’ follows a passionate but doomed love, as the poetic voice becomes obsessed with a woman called ‘ Haidee. ’ The influence of such a snippet of Greek culture on Byron goes beyond his desire to simply include it in CHP; the heroine who appears in cantos 2-4 of his other seminal work Don Juan is also called Haidee. When considering Byron’s relationship with modern Greek culture, it is important to note that he includes progressively more examples as time goes on; Byron became more enthusiastic about wanting to share excerpts of modern Greek life with his readership, including more excerpts with every new edition of CHP . For example, in its 7 th edition, published 2 years after CHP’s initial publication, Byron added a translation of a Romaic love song in which a poet laments a lost love who has left him with a ‘ madd'ning brain ’ (line 33) and a ‘ wounded soul ’ (Byron, 1814, pp. 254-255). Alexander Grammatikos says of such inclusions of modern Greek culture: ‘ Byron's translations of ‘ I Enter the Garden of Roses ’ and ‘ Translation of a Romaic Love Song ’ in Childe Harold did not grant English readers proof of Greeks' desire for liberation, but rather would have provided them with insights into the Romaic language and modern Greek verse form, as well as into everyday contemporary Greek life ’ (Grammatikos, 2018, p. 81). Thus, in the ‘Notes’ and Appendix to Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage , for the first time in a major publication, modern Greece was explored disentangled from its ancient counterpart, as Byron strove to demonstrate the Greeks’ unique culture and to encourage his readership to become more knowledgeable about contemporary Greece. Through Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage , Byron differentiated himself from many of his contemporary philhellenes who either lamented Greece’s fallen greatness or held naively ideal ized hopes for a modern Greece based on its ancient ghost. As Nigel Leask asserts of Childe Harold Pilgrimage , ‘ Modern Greeks are given agency and voice in their ability to represent their own plight and forge an identity not based on classical texts ’ (Leask, 2023, p. 110). The final section of this dissertation will deal with Byron’s other great epic poem – Don Juan – in order to explore Byron’s relationship with Greek antiquity and Greek modernity. Written several years after Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, the poem represents a key development in Byron’s writings on Greece. Specifically, it can be argued that in Don Juan one can observe a maturation within Byron, allowing both Greek antiquity and Greek modernity to co-exist with equal weight; equilibrium achieved via the bolstering of modernity and the undercutting of antiquity. One of the most crucial developments which allowed Byron to achieve conjunction between antiquity and modernity in Don Juan was his employment of the Ottava Rima poetic system. Incredibly complex, the Ottava Rima stanza in English consists of eight iambic lines, usually iambic pentameters, with each stanza consisting of three alternate rhymes and one double rhyme, following the ABABABCC rhyme scheme (Wikipedia contributors, 2023). This of course contrasts with the aforementioned Spenserian stanza employed in CHP . Byron’s ‘emancipation’ from the tight Spenserian stanza to the invariably more intricate Ottava Rima, described by Virginia Woolf as ‘ an elastic shape which will hold whatever you choose to put into it ’, is hugely significant in considering Byron’s relationship with antiquity and modernity. Byron found he could express his difficulties in perceiving Greece much more easily in the Ottava Rima form, therefore allowing him to accommodate a conjunction between Greek modernity
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