Five-minute digest
Childe Harold's Pilgrimage
Summary
Childe Harold's Pilgrimage: A Romaunt is a long poem in four cantos of Spenserian stanzas, published between 1812 and 1818, which made Byron the most famous poet in Europe. The first two cantos, appearing in March 1812, follow Childe Harold, a young nobleman weary of the pleasures of his ancestral hall, as he leaves England by sea and wanders through Portugal and Spain, where the Peninsular War against Napoleon is raging, and then through Albania and Greece. Harold is a gloomy, sated wanderer, and the poem mixes his moods with the narrator's descriptions of landscape, battle and the ruins of ancient Greece, mourning that the land of liberty now lies under Turkish rule. Canto III, published in 1816 after Byron left England in disgrace, abandons the pretence of a separate hero and becomes almost a personal journal. It visits the field of Waterloo, with the famous stanzas on the ball at Brussels on the eve of battle (There was a sound of revelry by night), reflects on Napoleon's restless greatness, travels up the Rhine, and finds peace among the Alps and on Lake Leman, where Byron honours Rousseau and Gibbon. Canto IV, published in 1818, is a meditation on Italy: Venice, Petrarch's tomb, Florence and Rome, where Byron reflects on the Coliseum, the fall of empires and the vanity of human ambition. It ends with the great apostrophe to the ocean, Roll on, thou deep and dark blue Ocean, in which the sea, unchanging, mocks the ruins man makes on land. The poem created the Byronic hero, proud, melancholy and guilt-haunted, and taught a generation to travel as pilgrims of feeling. Its religious attitude is often sceptical and melancholy rather than Christian, and the opening of Canto I alludes to Harold's dissipations, so the poem is best read in selections by older students. The most anthologised passages are the Waterloo stanzas of Canto III and the ocean stanzas at the close of Canto IV.
Top Lessons
The restless heart
Harold flees pleasure and boredom but finds no rest. Augustine said our hearts are restless until they rest in God.
Ruin and empire
Greece, Waterloo and Rome all show the fall of power.
Nature's greatness
The Alps and the ocean outlast human ambition.
Verified Quotes
Frequently cited
“There was a sound of revelry by night,”
Frequently cited
“I love not Man the less, but Nature more,”
Frequently cited
“Roll on, thou deep and dark blue Ocean--roll!”
“Man marks the earth with ruin--his control Stops with the shore;”