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Westwood, D.J. (2016) ‘Living in shattered guise’: Doubling in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage
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 ‘Living in shattered guise’:
Doubling in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage Canto III

DANIEL WESTWOOD

Abstract
This article explores how Canto III of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage stages a process of
self-division. Centring on the depiction of Napoleon and Wordsworth as doubles for
Byron as poet, it suggests that the poem crafts doubles that deliberately fail to correlate
with Byron’s self, consciously undermining an affected movement towards self-
transcendence. In doing so it argues for a reassessment of Byron’s use of the figure of
the double, proposing that the poem offers ambivalent and fractured doublings inflected
by Byron’s desire to present himself as a poet of imaginative mobility, formal ingenuity
and intellectual independence.

*
Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage Canto III subjects both quest and selfhood to scrutiny. It
achieves this by manipulating the doubling trope within a set of Spenserian stanzas that hold
true to Harold Bloom’s suggestion that quest, for the Romantics, is an ‘internalised’ process
motivated by an ‘acute preoccupation with self’.1 Developing Bloom’s view, Greg Kucich
emphasises how Byron’s readings of the Spenserian imitations of Beattie and Thomson
prompted him to ‘associate the Spenserian heritage with self-division’. 2 This influence is
manifest in the way Byron uses quest-narrative to explore his own conflicted relationship
with the self. Yet what the accounts of Bloom and, less so, Kucich risk downplaying is the
poetry’s ability to perform this process of division, a quality that comes to the fore throughout
the doubling of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage III.
Though Alan Rawes and Mark Sandy have thoughtfully focused on Canto III as an
exercise in forgetting,3 the poem’s proliferation of figures that act as potential doubles for
Byron as poet suggests a quest for something more radical than forgetfulness. Affecting a
drive towards leaving the Byronic self behind entirely, the poet presents not ‘everlasting
centos of himself’,4 to quote Hazlitt’s complaint, but instead, in Napoleon and Wordsworth, a
pair of selves that Byron might become. 5 Yet the intensity of this yearning for self-
transcendence jars with the poet’s acute awareness of the problems inherent in assuming an
alternative self. Refusing to ignore or assuage such doubts, I want to argue that Byron adopts
the technique of doubling only to repeatedly and deliberately sabotage his own designs,
consciously undermining his claims to leave the self behind. Vincent Newey writes that
‘Byron commits himself progressively to the extinction of any self prior to the word and the
image, and chooses the freedom—and the instability—of living through others and in
constantly changing guises’. 6 The poetry is, however, marked by a refusal to commit
wholeheartedly to any such scheme. Deborah Forbes captures the duality of this movement in
her description of the poem as ‘both sharply inward-turning and sharply outward-turning’,7
usefully acknowledging Byron’s ability to blend introspective meditation and a drive beyond
the self. Forbes frames her discussion of the poem’s ‘unrecognised doubles’ and
‘unassimilated voices’ in terms of Harold’s inability ‘to recognise himself definitively in the
fallen heroes, desolate landscapes and ruined buildings that he encounters on his travels’, a
failure that is seen to parallel ‘Byron’s own refusal to identify himself completely with
Harold’.8 Yet the way Byron prevents the invoked figures from ever cleanly meshing with the
Byronic self suggests an alternative motive for this disrupted doubling, as individuals who
might act as doubles for Byron become an opportunity for the poet to foreground virtues that
are uniquely Byronic.
In the case of Napoleon, Byron cites his own potential to become Napoleonic as
evidence of an imaginative mobility that the fallen conqueror now lacks. When Canto III later
moves to adopt Wordsworthian rhetoric, form acts as the crucial counter-balance to the poet’s
drive beyond the self. Capitalising on the inherent discontinuities of the Spenserian stanza,
Byron has form undermine content in order to affirm the impossibility of his assenting to a
Wordsworthian notion of self. Focusing on these self-sabotaged doublings with Napoleon and
Wordsworth as evidence of the kind of ‘conscious orchestration’ that Vincent Newey finds
lacking in the canto,9 this essay will argue for the way Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage III allows
Byron to position himself at the centre of his remodelled quest-romance.

**
Napoleon has long been regarded as one of Byron’s favourite doubles. John Clubbe posits
him as the poet’s ultimate obsession, describing a man that ‘seize[d] Byron’s imagination
more than any other living human being […] and never relinquish[ed] his grasp until Byron’s
dying hour’. 10 Simon Bainbridge foregrounds Napoleon’s centrality to the self-fashioning
present throughout Byron’s oeuvre, explaining how the poet’s ‘struggle to grasp and
formulate Napoleon’s political and imaginative meaning played an important part in his own
11
continuous process of self-assessment and self-representation’. However, if Childe
Harold’s Pilgrimage shows Byron exploring the possibility of becoming Napoleonic as a
route out of the Byronic self, Canto III sets out to complicate its already conflicted
engagement with a notoriously complex individual. Byron’s effort to negotiate the dichotomy
of poetry and action is central to this disruption. The distinction often occupies Byron’s
thoughts; ‘Who would write, who had anything better to do?’,12 Byron comments archly in
early 1813, followed swiftly by the declaration that ‘No one should be a rhymer who could be
anything better’.13 This sentiment manifests itself more extremely in Byron’s claim that ‘I
have no ambition; at least, if any, it would be aut Caesar aut nihil’,14 which, according to
Jerome McGann, shows how Byron in early 1814

still clung to a naïve conception of what constituted greatness of soul. Aut Caesar aut
nihil he said for himself, thus insuring an impasse, and his nihilism. Poetry alone
seemed to remain, and yet it rankled that this should be so. For poetry was nothing
next to a life of action, and even if it were something, he was unfit for its tasks.15

In describing poetry as ‘nothing’ to Byron, McGann maps the dichotomy of poetry and action
onto aut Caesar aut nihil, equating poetry with nihil. Yet Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage III
reveals a greater degree of ambivalence in Byron’s thinking. Though the portrait of Napoleon
allows Byron to scrutinise aut Caesar aut nihil by questioning what it is to be Napoleonic and
what it is to be nothing, it also reveals the poet muscling his way into this equation, in spite of
Byron’s apparent effort to leave the self behind. Napoleon acts as a means for Byron to
consider the possibility that while he might be nothing or he might be Napoleonic, he might
also be irrevocably Byronic. The poem gestures towards reconciling the poetry and action
dichotomy as a way of aligning Byron and Napoleon, but it also shows Byron embracing
such a distinction as evidence that he, as poet, possesses qualities that Napoleon does not. In
stanza 37 the doubling disintegrates at the point that Napoleon begins to resemble a failed
Byronic poet, rather than Byron himself:

Conqueror and captive of the earth art thou!

She trembles at thee still, and thy wild name
Was ne’er more bruited in men’s minds than now
That thou art nothing, save the jest of Fame,
Who wooed thee once, thy vassal, and became
The flatterer of thy fierceness, till thou wert
A god unto thyself; nor less the same
To the astounded kingdoms all inert,
Who deem’d thee for a time whate’er thou didst assert. (III, 37)

For Deborah Forbes, ‘this description would apply equally well to Harold or to the reputation
that Byron has made for himself, but he goes on to criticise Napoleon, without in any way
implying that he applies these criticisms to himself’.16 Yet the stanza is more ambivalent and
ambiguous than Forbes allows. Byron’s image of the fallen Napoleon as paradoxically both
‘Conqueror and captive’ suggests that his demise has not entirely effaced his previous
achievements, which, according to this stanza, lay in a capacity to create and dictate a version
of the self to others. However, as the lines begin to blur critique with admiration, the poet
vacillates between associating with and disassociating from the figure of Napoleon. With
Byron experiencing unprecedented fame at the time of the poem’s composition, the rhyme of
‘name’ and ‘Fame’ speaks to two undeniably Byronic concerns.17 While their presence in the
portrait of Napoleon suggests a shared preoccupation with heritage and reputation, to be ‘the
jest of Fame’ is a Byronic pose that is true of the self-surrendering Napoleon but less so of
Byron at this time, despite him writing in the aftermath of the separation scandal of 1816.18
While his description of a man who became ‘a god unto thyself’ has the air of a critique,
Byron places greater stress on the fact that Napoleon’s belief in his own godly status was
shared by his ‘astounded kingdoms’. The alexandrine celebrates a former version of
Napoleon who had absolute control over what he was ‘deem’d’ to be and used this ability to
facilitate his ascent.
As the closing couplet suggests, language, or the ability to ‘assert’ one’s self through
words, allows its agent to craft a self of their own making and in turn to render their foes
‘inert’. In this opposition between ‘assert’ and ‘inert’, Byron comes teasingly close to
collapsing his poetry-action dialectic by implying that utterance, the poet’s ultimate tool but
here deployed by the quintessential man of action, is a powerful form of action in its own
right. The sentiment gains additional potency from being housed in the increased articulatory
space afforded by the alexandrine. Crucially, however, the couplet also recalls the rhyme’s
previous iteration, ‘thou wert’, and this use of the past tense looms over the stanza, instilling
Byron’s observations with an elegiac quality. The tone of the alexandrine, and ultimately the
stanza as a whole, is dictated by ‘for a time’. Having refused to condemn the fact that
Napoleon was ‘a god unto thyself’, the poet instead laments the cessation of Napoleonic
assertion, deploring the loss of this power to ‘assert’ a god-like persona. The accusatory
direct address of ‘Now / […] thou art nothing’, laden with bitterness and regret, resonates
with the pronouncements of stanza 6 in its use of the term ‘nothing’, with the earlier stanza
confirming that Byron, too, knows what it is to be ‘nothing’:

’Tis to create, and in creating live

A being more intense, that we endow
With form our fancy, gaining as we give
The life we image, even as I do now.
 What am I? Nothing; but not so art thou,
Soul of my thought! (III, 6)

Napoleon, at the peak of his powers, could be ‘whate’er [he] didst assert’, as if
enacting the process described above: ‘’Tis to create, and in creating live / A being more
intense’. Yet this is no longer the case. The resemblance between the two stanzas magnifies
the impression that stanza 37 is honing in on Napoleon’s now diminished skills of self-
creation, but it also highlights the fact that though Byron and Napoleon are aligned through
their mutual nothingness, they respond to their nothingness in fundamentally different ways.
In the description of Napoleon as ‘Conqueror and captive’ (III, 37), the proximity of the word
‘still’—‘She trembles at thee still’ (III, 37)—to the term ‘captive’ in the previous line imbues
the temporal adverb ‘still’ with an adjectival sense of a physical ‘still[ness]’, characterising
the dethroned emperor as an immobilised force. Napoleon seems to succumb to the very
inertia that once paralysed his foes, presenting a stark contrast with the imaginative mobility
attributed to the Byronic self. Whereas stanza 37 dishearteningly qualifies its ‘nothing’ by
stating that Napoleon is ‘nothing, save the jest of Fame’ (III, 37), stanza 6 altogether more
optimistically qualifies ‘nothing’ through the conjunction ‘but’, which acts as the catalyst for
Byron’s envisioned movement beyond the self. ‘Gaining as [he] give[s]’ (III, 6), the poet’s
self is shaped, in part, by his creation as it comes into being. Byron’s enjambed lines teem
with activity and vigour through the use of the present tense ‘even as I do now’, enacting the
interdependent process they describe. As it was in Canto III’s earlier image of the broken
mirror that ‘makes / A thousand images of one that was’ (III, 33), creativity is the force that
allows the self to ‘brokenly live on’ (III, 32).
Jerome Christensen argues that the cult of Napoleon was indebted to ‘his own
astonishing improvisations, his gifted impersonation of a monarch’, 19 but when Michael
O’Neill observes that stanza 6 ‘spurn[s] and send[s] packing identity as empirically fixed’
allowing it to emerge ‘as a “Nothing” crying out for imaginative and aesthetic
replenishment’,20 he suggests a compelling reason for Byron’s rejection of Napoleon as a
potential double. For Byron, Napoleon’s ultimate failure was, in his surrender, to stop
creating, and to eschew the self’s demands for ‘imaginative and aesthetic replenishment’.21
The poet of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage stops aspiring to be Napoleon not because of any
belief that he as mere poet lacks the required ‘greatness of soul’,22 but upon the recognition
that Napoleon ceased to ‘assert’ (III, 37) ‘the life we image’ (III, 6). If those who encountered
Napoleon deemed him ‘whate’er [he] didst assert’ but only ‘for a time’ (III, 37), Byron
differentiates himself from his potential double by claiming a continued ability to transcend
nothingness through his apparently ceaseless creativity.
Napoleon exemplifies the fate that will befall Byron, too, should he stop creating. As a
result, Byron disrupts the pairing of himself and Napoleon not because of his own inability to
be Napoleon or even because of Napoleon’s failure to be Napoleonic, but because of
Napoleon’s failure to be Byronic. While McGann writes of Byron’s doubling that ‘Byron
puts on a mask […] and seems to invite it to exert its own power over him’, 23 here the
opposite is true. The power of the mask is checked and challenged at every juncture. The
poem’s drive beyond the self is stymied by Byron’s realisation that he does not want to
become Napoleon, and a determination to succeed where Napoleon failed charges the quest
of Canto III. If Forbes’s sense that Harold’s myopia renders him unable to draw lessons from
Napoleon invites further discussion, her reading of the structural implications of this failed
doubling is acute: ‘if Byron (or his surrogate Harold) were to explicitly recognise himself in
one of the figures he invokes, the sequential finding of new counterparts—the substance of
the narrative—would be arrested’.24 In fact, in its vacillating movements towards and away
from the self, the incessant motion of Canto III is evidence that lessons have been learned
from Byron’s portrait of Napoleon. Here, the Byronic quest exists in the ongoing process of
questing rather than the reaching of any final destination; to settle on such a resting point
would render one susceptible to the kind of shackles that the ‘still’ Napoleon must now
endure (III, 37).

***
While Napoleon exemplifies the poet’s uneasy edging towards, even as he seems to drift
away from, each of the historical figures that appear throughout Canto III, it is Wordsworth
who, as a fellow Romantic poet, represents Byron’s most challenging potential double.
Wordsworth is not subject to the kind of ambivalent but partially distanced portraiture seen in
Byron’s responses to Napoleon and Rousseau. Though this doubling shares the half-formed
quality seen in Byron’s fractious coupling with Napoleon, Wordsworth occupies an
altogether more complex position in the poem. This owes to Byron’s decision in stanzas 71-
76 to more directly embody his double by speaking in a register indebted to that of
Wordsworth’s own poetry. The assumption of a quasi-Wordsworthian voice suggests that
Wordsworth should, regardless of any antipathy between the poets, be read as one of the
numerous ‘maskings’ that McGann finds present throughout Byron’s oeuvre. McGann argues
that
 because [Byron’s] figurae are consciously manipulated masks, one has to read them
[…] in terms of a “sameness with difference.” The poetry lies exactly in the relation,
in the dialectical play between corresponding apparitional forms: on one side, the
spectacular poet, […] on the other, the various fictional and historical selvings.25

Yet this discussion of ‘corresponding forms’ implies a clean-cut quality to Byron’s doublings
that is not borne out by the poetry. Byron’s adoption of Wordsworth’s voice creates an
ambivalent and ambiguous blurring of himself and Wordsworth that destabilises any reading
based on the principle of ‘sameness with difference’, complicating McGann’s readiness to
draw a line between ‘the poet’ and his ‘various selvings’.
Contemporary reviewers commit a similar misreading in suggesting that Canto III houses
Wordsworth and Byron as two distinct presences. John Wilson’s 1817 review echoes the
sentiments of Francis Jeffrey, who reads Canto III not as Byron attempting to become
Wordsworth but as him successfully confronting Wordsworth on Wordsworth’s own terms.26
Wilson argues that Byron ‘came into competition with Wordsworth upon his own ground,
and with his own weapons; and in the first encounter he vanquished and overthrew him’.27
This claim misleadingly posits Byron as the victor of this encounter, failing to account for the
tensions of poetry that, despite its Wordsworthian inflections, is shot through with
equivocation. Rather than going to war with Wordsworth, Byron more subtly undercuts the
Lake poet’s rhetoric by wearing his mask, as is evident in the following lines:

I live not in myself, but I become

Portion of that around me; and to me,
High mountains are a feeling, but the hum
Of human cities torture: I can see
Nothing to loathe in nature, save to be
A link reluctant in a fleshly chain,
Class’d among creatures, when the soul can flee,
And with the sky, the peak, the heaving plain
Of ocean, or the stars, mingle, and not in vain. (III, 72)

The poet dons the mask but in doing so he points up the fact that this is and only ever will be
a mask; one that will never correspond fully with Byron’s poetic self. The mask seems ill-
fitting; despite a strongly affirmative opening statement that might set the tone for the poetry
to follow, what gains prominence here is the persistence of Byron’s qualifications. Veering
between the curiously over-assertive and the strangely tentative, the poet betrays his
discomfiture with his subject matter as early as the second line, which stumbles through its
heavy caesura into the inelegant repetition of ‘around me; and to me’. Metrical stresses
appear to enact a process of self-formation, with the shift from the unstressed initial ‘me’ to
the stressed ‘me’ of the final syllable suggesting the growth enabled by an embrace of the
natural world. 28 This movement from unstressed self to stressed self broadly mimics the
conceptual movement of The Prelude, Wordsworth’s ‘poem on the growth of my own
mind’,29 but the fact that Byron condenses the formative experience of Wordsworthian epic
into just four syllables knowingly invites scrutiny in its brevity and superficiality. The
emphasis placed on the individualised nature of Byron’s perceptions through the repetition of
‘me’, seen again in the subsequent iteration of the b rhyme ‘I can see’, jars against the way
that the poet, in these stanzas, is reaching beyond that which comes naturally to him, as if
trying to see through someone else’s eyes. Settling on the rather gnomic declaration that ‘to
me, / High mountains are a feeling’, the lines grope vainly towards a kind of Wordsworthian
profundity.
Yet the absence of descriptive clarity means this statement fails to convince. While such
a formulation might be defended as indicating the ineffability of the poet’s love for ‘high
mountains’, to label mountains as a ‘feeling’ seems carelessly but deliberately nonchalant.
The impression is of Byron paraphrasing a poet whom Hazlitt celebrates as poet of the
mountains and Shelley calls ‘Poet of Nature’.30 The claim that ‘I can see / Nothing to loathe
in nature’ more openly invites suspicion through its negative structure, which implies that the
poet is actively seeking reasons to spurn nature, as well as the term ‘loathe’, which seems
overly charged in the context of a denial. The listing syntax of the final couplet renders the
alexandrine cumbersome, stifled by the delaying of the sentence’s main verb, ‘mingle’. As
the verb gets lost in the irregular, lumbering rhythm of this elongated line, there is the sense
that its agent, the poet, is himself merely an afterthought, an insignificant speck in the
vastness of ‘the sky, the peak’ and ‘the heaving plain / Of ocean’. The connotations of
‘mingle’ capitalise on this implied disjunction. In this context, to ‘mingle’ is not to be fully
integrated, disrupting the earlier more confident claim that ‘I become / Portion of that around
me’. In a move typical of the canto, the demands of form appear to place Byron under duress,
with the additional syllables of the alexandrine creating additional space for prevarication.
With the line petering out into a meek qualification that this mingling will not be ‘in vain’,
this apparently defiant alexandrine, like the stanza as a whole, collapses suspiciously easily
under any kind of critical inspection. Byron resists the mask of Wordsworth even as he seems
to embrace it, with the lines affecting embodiment but actually committing only to
ventriloquism. Carefully positioning himself outside of a perspective he initially seems to
endorse, Byron’s effort to transcend the self is undercut by an apparently deliberate failure to
attain Wordsworth’s style.
Thomas Moore writes that Wordsworth objected to these stanzas on the grounds that ‘the
feeling of natural objects which is there expressed, [was] not caught by [Byron] from nature
herself, but from [Wordsworth] and spoiled in the transmission’. 31 The notion that these
sentiments are ‘spoiled in transmission’ is vital to the writing and illuminates Byron’s method.
Form proves vital in disrupting the apparent affinities between Byron and his ‘corporeal
enemy’, to use Jerome McGann’s phrase.32 With the Lake School having ‘popularised blank
verse as the vehicle of natural feeling’,33 Byron’s choice of the Spenserian stanza colours his
engagement with nature with a sharply Byronic hue. Wordsworth’s own attitude towards the
form was ambivalent. ‘The Female Vagrant’ reveals a desire to attune the Spenserian
measure with the rusticity and simplicity prized by his Preface to Lyrical Ballads, which
bemoans poets who ‘indulge in arbitrary and capricious habits of expression, in order to
furnish food for fickle tastes, and fickle appetites, of their own creation’.34 Despite his praise
for a ‘fine structure of verse’, Wordsworth’s letter to Catherine Grace Godwin laments her
decision to model her writing on ‘the broken and more impassioned movement’ of Byronic
Spenserianism, arguing that ‘it is a form of verse ill adapted to conflicting passions; and it is
not injustice to say that the stanza is spoiled in Lord Byron’s hands; his own strong and
ungovernable passions blinded him as to its character’.35
Though unduly critical in suggesting that Byron’s style is gratuitously uncontrolled,
Wordsworth correctly identifies the emphases on ‘conflict’ and rupture that contribute to
Canto III’s deliberate tendency towards division. That such techniques prevail throughout the
poem’s invocation of Wordsworth suggests that despite his desire to transcend the self and
adopt Wordsworthian rhetoric, Byron is refusing to abandon his own poetic territory. The
resulting clash allows Byron to achieve his fullest realisation of the link between the
Spenserian heritage and self-division, seen by Greg Kucich as central to the Romantic
engagement with Spenser. 36 The Byronic inclination towards disrupted doubling and the
Wordsworthian emphasis on man’s harmony with nature bleed into one another, so that
opposing drives towards unity and self-division become ‘antithetically mixt’ (III, 36). Rather
than simply staging a clash between Byron as he is now and Byron as he would like to be,
Canto III presents the fractious encounter of two competing projects of self-representation;
Byron’s desire to be Wordsworthian collides with the poetry’s need to refute the
Wordsworthian model of representing the self.37
 The movement between stanzas 72 and 73 demonstrates this conflict. Seeming to force
square pegs into round holes, Byron uncomfortably accommodates Wordsworthian poetics
within the fabric of his own poetry:

And thus I am absorb’d, and this is life:

I look upon the peopled desart past,
As on a place of agony and strife,
Where, for some sin, to Sorrow I was cast,
To act and suffer, but remount at last
With a fresh pinion; which I feel to spring,
Though young, yet waxing vigorous, as the blast
Which it would cope with, on delighted wing,
Spurning the clay-cold bonds which round our being cling. (III, 73)

John Hughes, an eighteenth-century editor of Spenser, spotlights the inherently fractured

quality of the Spenserian stanza implied by George Saintsbury 38 in commenting that ‘the
same Measure, closed always by a full Stop, in the same Place, by which every Stanza is
made as it were a distinct Paragraph, grows tiresom by continual Repetition, and frequently
breaks the Sense, when it ought to be carry’d on without Interruption’. 39 This remark,
alongside O. B. Hardison’s suggestion that the form ‘segment[s] […] narrative into arbitrary
chunks’,40 illuminates Byron’s method. Far from ‘arbitrary’, however, ‘segment[ing]’ is here
a deliberate artistic technique, as the poet uses the contours of the Spenserian stanza to
disrupt the progression of his poetry. Given that this immediately follows the previous
assertion that Byron will ‘mingle, and not in vain’, the opening line of this stanza, ‘and thus I
am absorb’d’, seems a false and illogical leap, one accentuated by the stanza gap, as if the
poet is claiming a victory that he has yet to truly achieve. The presumptuous ‘thus’ assumes
that the poetry has demonstrated the absorption it describes, but the line’s conclusive tone
makes it oddly out of place as an opening to a stanza, standing out in a manner that might not
be so apparent in continuous blank verse. If taken at face value as an indicator that
transcendent aspirations have been fulfilled, the proclamation seems better suited to the final
line of the stanza, if not the entire poem.
The opening line of stanza 73 has consequently been called ‘the most unconvincing
Byron ever wrote’ by Jerome Christensen, who sees it as abbreviating ‘the Wordsridgean
doctrine of the “one life”’ with typical ‘Byronic negligence’. 41 However, Michael O’Neill
writes engagingly on the way the line’s failure to convince ‘is its dramatic justification’, with
the upbeat emphases that fall on ‘this’ and ‘life’ failing to disguise a ‘downbeat inflection, as
though to say, “And this is “life”, this process of needing to escape from what I know only
too well as “life”’.42 This implausibility is crucial to Byron’s intended effect. Groping for
conclusion and for comfortable sanctuary beyond the self, Byron implies that he has
successfully become a Wordsworthian poet: ‘and thus I am absorb’d’ (III, 73). Yet the air of
prematurity that accompanies the line’s arrival renders its achievement facile, staining
Byron’s evocation of Wordsworth with an air of condescension. In defining Byron as ‘a
lordly writer’ who ‘is above his own reputation, and condescends to the Muses with a
scornful grace’, Hazlitt captures this aspect of Byron’s tone, 43 but Canto III suggests a
condescension borne out of poetic difference rather than class-consciousness or ‘aristocratic
individualism’. 44 The poem’s emphasis on a disruption antithetical to Wordsworthian
synthesis positions the quest of Canto III in a post-Wordsworthian landscape. Its treatment of
Wordsworth is not straightforwardly derisive. Rather, implicit in these stanzas is Byron’s
belief that he is too great to become Wordsworth or to succumb to the delusion of unifying
with nature, regardless of his own yearning for self-transcendence. ‘Could he have kept his
spirit to that flight / He had been happy’ (III, 14); though Byron wishes he could suspend his
disbelief and commit to such a ‘flight’, he presents himself as possessing greater knowledge
than the ‘Poet of Nature’,45 and the effect of the writing commands assent. As the alexandrine
sets up only to qualify the possibility of transcending earthly ‘clay’ within a single line, the
poet juxtaposes a defiant ‘spurning’ with tacit recognition that mortal bonds will inevitably
always ‘cling’ (III, 73).
Byron spotlights the antonymic relationship of these two heavily stressed verbs by using
them to bookend the alexandrine through internal rhyme, typifying the insistent self-negation
that Vincent Newey identifies in this section of the poem.46 Gradually building throughout
the preceding three lines in ‘spring’, ‘waxing’ and ‘wing’ (III, 73), the sound of the
proliferated c rhyme overbearingly ‘cling[s]’ to the stanza, culminating in the double ringing
out of ‘being cling’. With this repetition comes a sense of shackling that undermines the
vision of flight, recalling stanza fourteen’s description of ‘the link / That keeps us from yon
heaven which woos us to the brink’ (III, 14). There, as transcendent aspirations are forced
into battle with the limits imposed by form, the alexandrine flaunts its ability to accommodate
the twists and turns of a poem that seems to engage in questing even as it questions the
legitimacy of quest. Likewise, even in Byron’s invocation of Wordsworth, the act of
recalibrating Spenser’s nine-line stanza redirects the spotlight to the resourcefulness and
individuality of Byron as poet.47 By continuing to ‘cling’ to his own artistic blueprint, Byron
confirms the link between himself and Wordsworth as the product of a ‘broken mirror’ (III,
33), rather than a viable doubling that might allow him to leave the self behind.
 Earlier in Canto III Byron muses that ‘there are wanderers o’er Eternity / Whose bark
drives on and on, and anchored ne’er shall be’ (III, 70). The enjambment suggests the poet’s
own proclivity for such a ‘wander[ing]’ beyond the self, as seen in his encounters with
Napoleon and Wordsworth, and the technique is mirrored in stanza 42’s account of those who
cannot ‘tire / Of aught but rest’ and possess ‘a fire / And motion of the soul which will not
dwell / In its own narrow being’ (III, 42). However, rather than offering merely a self-
reflexive celebration of Byronic mobility, these run-on lines, in their air of obligation and
momentary flicker of frustration with the soul’s stubborn refusal to ‘dwell’, instead come to
reveal Byron’s ambivalence towards his own existential wanderings. Swirling dizzyingly
around ‘the arena of self-consciousness’,48 the quest of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage funnels
the poet back and forth, this way and that, initially away from but always back towards the
self he wishes to transcend. Yet this does not represent defeat. The trajectory of Canto III is
aptly reflected in Byron’s exclamation from Canto IV: ‘But my soul wanders; I demand it
back / To meditate amongst decay, and stand / A ruin amidst ruins’ (IV, 25). It is by the
poet’s own design that the poem impedes his affected march beyond that which is Byronic,
and Byron eschews nihilism in presenting his discovery that ‘there woos no home, nor hope,
nor life, save what is here’ (IV, 105). Having proposed a pair of potential doubles that only
ever remain half-formed, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage III instead affirms the sovereignty of
the self that endures through all of Byron’s travails, like the broken heart, ‘living in shattered
guise’ (III, 33). In the act of swerving away from potential doubles, imaginative mobility,
formal ingenuity and intellectual independence become the hallmarks of a distinctly Byronic
poetic self.
University of Sheffield

1
Harold Bloom (ed.), ‘The Internalization of Quest-Romance’, in Romanticism and Consciousness (New York,
NY & London: W.W. Norton & Co), p. 6.
2
Greg Kucich, Keats, Shelley & Romantic Spenserianism (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University
Press, 1991), p. 81.
3
See: Alan Rawes, ‘1816-17: Childe Harold III and Manfred’, in The Cambridge Companion to Byron, ed. by
Drummond Bone (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 119 (pp. 118-132); Mark Sandy,
Romanticism, Memory, and Mourning (Oxford and New York, NY: Routledge, 2016), pp. 79-96.
4
William Hazlitt, The Spirit of the Age: or, Contemporary Portraits (London: Henry Colburn, 1825), p. 165.
5
My decision not to consider Harold as one such double stems from the fact that this is already well explored in
extant criticism. Jerome McGann devotes a chapter to close examination of the poem’s intricate shifts between
narrator and Harold, as well as Byron’s blurring of the two. Philip W. Martin offers a more contentious account,
suggesting that ‘this caricature [Harold] is so imperfectly and inconsistently sketched that neither the
distinctions from Byron nor the similarities to him are made sufficiently clear’, concluding that ‘the Childe has
been used as a device by which Byron can watch himself perform’. Conversely, Andrew Rutherford views
Harold and Byron as ‘clearly differentiated’ to the extent that the poem features ‘two central characters instead
of one’. See: Jerome J. McGann, ‘The Twofold Life: Harold and his Poet’, in Fiery Dust: Byron’s Poetic
Development (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1968), pp. 67-93 (especially pp. 68-9); Philip W.
Martin, Byron: A Poet Before His Public (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), p. 21; Andrew
Rutherford, Byron: A Critical Study (Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd, 1961), p. 28.
6
Vincent Newey, ‘Authoring the Self: Childe Harold III and IV’, in Byron and the Limits of Fiction, ed. by
Bernard Beatty and Vincent Newey (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1988), p. 157 (pp. 148-90).
7
Deborah Forbes, Sincerity’s Shadow: Self-Consciousness in British Romantic and Mid-Twentieth-Century
American Poetry (Cambridge, MA. & London: Harvard University Press, 2004), p. 127.
8
Ibid., p. 125.
9
Newey, ‘Authoring the Self’, p. 156.
10
John Clubbe, ‘Byron, Napoleon, and Imaginative Freedom’, in Liberty and Poetic Licence: New Essays on
Byron, ed. by Bernard Beatty, Tony Howe and Charles E. Robinson (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press,
2008), p. 181 (pp. 181-92).
11
Simon Bainbridge, Napoleon and English Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p.
135.
12
‘Journal’ 24 November 1813, in BLJ, 3, p. 220.
13
‘Journal’ 23 November 1813, in BLJ, 3, p. 217.
14
Ibid.
15
Jerome J. McGann, Don Juan in Context (London: John Murray, 1976), p. 22.
16
Forbes, Sincerity’s Shadow, p. 128.
17
Citing the lines ‘I twine / My hopes of being remembered in my line / With my land’s language’ (CHP, IV, 9),
Jerome Christensen emphasises the way that Byron utilises his aristocratic heritage to enhance the quality of his
poetry: ‘Committing his memory to his “line”, Lord Byron now acknowledges that he has a line, rather than just
a given name—a poetic profession with a line of work and a line of products’. Jerome Christensen, Lord
Byron’s Strength: Romantic Writing and Commercial Society (Baltimore, MA.: Johns Hopkins University Press,
1993), p. 211.
18
‘To read Byron biographically is to oversimplify; what does need to be recognised is that the poem depends
for its effect on our knowing that Byron knows that we know that he is writing this canto in the aftermath of the
separation scandal; creativity may result in the escape from self into text, but the text frequently persuades us we
are in touch with the self that wishes to die itself and end up as text’. Michael O’Neill, Romanticism and the
Self-Conscious Poem (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), p. 115.
19
Christensen, Lord Byron’s Strength, pp. 170-71.
20
Michael O’Neill, ‘The Fixed and the Fluid: Identity in Byron and Shelley’, Byron Journal, 36:2 (2008), p. 113
(pp. 105-116).
21
O’Neill, ‘The Fixed and the Fluid’, p. 113.
22
McGann, Don Juan in Context, p. 22.
23
Jerome McGann, Byron and Romanticism, ed. by James Soderholm (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2002), p. 155.
24
Forbes, Sincerity’s Shadow, p. 128.
25
McGann, Byron and Romanticism, p. 106.
26
‘It would afford us still greater pleasure to find these tuneful gentlemen [Wordsworth and Southey] returning
the compliment which Lord Byron has paid to their talents, and forming themselves on the model rather of his
imitations, than of their own originals’. Francis Jeffrey, Edinburgh Review (December 1816, published February
1817), XXVII, pp. 277-310, cited in Rutherford (ed.), Byron: The Critical Heritage, p. 99 (pp. 98-109).
27
John Wilson, Blackwood’s Magazine (June 1817), I, pp. 289-95, cited in Rutherford (ed.), Byron: The Critical
Heritage, pp. 112-13 (pp. 111-14).
28
I am grateful to Bernard Beatty for his observations on the interplay of the stressed/unstressed ‘I’ offered in
response to part of this essay given as a paper at the 41 st International Byron Conference, Gdansk, 1-6 July 2015.
29
William Wordsworth, ‘Letter to Sir George Beaumont, 25 December 1804’, in The Letters of William and
Dorothy Wordsworth, ed. by Ernest De Selincourt; rev. Mary Moorman and Alan G. Hill, 8 vols (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1970), 1, p. 518.
30
Hazlitt, The Spirit of the Age, p. 239; Percy Bysshe Shelley, ‘To Wordsworth’, in Percy Bysshe Shelley: The
Major Works, ed. by Zachary Leader and Michael O’Neill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 90-91.
31
Thomas Medwin, Conversations of Lord Byron: Revised with a New Preface, ed. by Ernest J. Lovell, Jr.
([1824] Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1966), p. 194.
32
McGann, Byron and Romanticism, p. 8.
33
Jane Stabler, Byron, Poetics and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 98.
34
William Wordsworth, ‘Preface’ to Lyrical Ballads, in William Wordsworth: The Major Works, ed. by Stephen
Gill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 597 (pp. 595-615). Coleridge similarly argues that the
Spenserian stanza facilitates a ‘frequent descent to the phrases of ordinary life’. Samuel Taylor Coleridge,
Chapter IV, Biographia Literaria or Biographical Sketches of my Literary Life and Opinions, ed. with intro. by
George Watson, Everyman’s Library (London: Dent, 1977), p. 48.
35
William Wordsworth, ‘Letter to Catherine Grace Godwin’, in The Letters of William and Dorothy
Wordsworth, ed. by Ernest De Selincourt, 1, p. 439 (pp. 438-440).
36
Kucich, Romantic Spenserianism, p. 81.
37
Geoffrey Hartman foregrounds the Wordsworthian emphasis on unity, writing that ‘Wordsworth‘s recovery is
therefore a rediscovery of inner continuities’. Geoffrey H. Hartman, The Unremarkable Wordsworth, foreword
Donald G. Marshall, Theory and History 34 (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota, 1987), p. 6.
38
Saintsbury privileges the alexandrine for providing balance in a stanza predisposed to ‘vignetting’, promoting
continuity by ‘launch[ing] [the stanza] on towards its successor ripae ulterioris amore’. However, this analysis
exposes the Spenserian stanza as a site of conflicting impulses, suggesting that the alexandrine can only battle
for continuity in an inherently discontinuous form. George Saintsbury, cited in David Scott Wilson-Okamura,
‘The Formalist Tradition’, in The Oxford Handbook of Edmund Spenser, ed. by Richard A. McCabe (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 725 (pp. 718-32).
39
John Hughes, cited in David Scott Wilson-Okamura, ‘The Formalist Tradition’, p. 725.
40
O.B. Hardison, Prosody and Purpose in the English Renaissance (Chicago, IL: Hopkins University Press,
1989), p. 217.
41
Christensen, Lord Byron’s Strength, p. 189.
42
Michael O’Neill, ‘“A Very Life in Our Despair”: Freedom and Fatality in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage,
Cantos III and IV’, in Liberty and Poetic Licence, ed. by Bernard Beatty, Tony Howe and Charles E. Robinson,
p. 41 (pp. 37-49).
43
Hazlitt, The Spirit of the Age, p. 163.
44
The phrase comes from J. Michael Robertson, ‘Aristocratic Individualism in Byron’s Don Juan’, Studies in
English Literature, 1500-1900, 17:4 (Autumn, 1977), pp. 639-55.
45
Shelley, ‘To Wordsworth’ (1).
46
Newey, ‘Authoring the Self’, p. 160.
47
Greg Kucich valuably highlights the way Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage III and IV utilise Spenser’s own
‘prosodic strategies for dramatizing the mind’s conflicts’ to create a ‘new kind of [Spenserian] adaptation’ based
on ‘strengthening what is already manifest in Spenser’. Kucich, Romantic Spenserianism, pp. 120-21.
48
Bloom, ‘Internalisation’, p. 6.