Italy-Ravenna, Rome, and Venice, 1817-1819

Italy- Ravenna, Rome, and Venice 1817-1819

In 1817 Byron traveled to Rome. While in Rome he took inspiration and stored impressions for the fourth canto of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage.

In 1818, Byron sent a copy of Beppo to John Murray on January 19th and instructed him to "Print alone, without name..alter nothing; get a scholar to see that the Italian phrases are correctly published..."

In Spring of 1818 the recent publications of Beppo and the fourth canto of Childe Harold increased Byron's reputation. Byron finished the first canto of Don Juan in September 1818, and began work on the second canto in December of the same year.

From Hobhouse to Byron, concerning Don Juan-"The objections were, you may easily imagine, drawn from the sarcasms against the lady of seaham, from the licentiousness, and in some cases downright indecency of many stanzas, and of the whole turn of the poem; from the flings at religion, and from the slashing right and left at other worthy writers of the day..."

Byron's reaction, "Print Don Juan entire, omitting, of course, the lines on Castlereagh..it is idle to detail my arguments in favour of my own Self-love and Poeshie; but I protest. If the poem has poetry, it would stand; if not, fall: the rest is leather and prunella,' and has never yet affected any human production pro or con.' Dullness is the only annihilator in such cases."

Leslie Marchand, Byron: A Biography, v2, p.728-766.

In Venice, Tasso's echoes are no more,

And silent rows the songless gondolier;

Her palaces are crumbling to the shore,

And music meets not always now the ear:

Those days are gone-but beauty still is here.

States fall, arts fade-but Nature doth not die,

Nor yet forget how Venice once was dear,

The pleasant place of all festivity,

The revel of the earth, the masque of Italy!

Lord Byron, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage: A Romaunt, Canto the Fourth, Ill.

I stood in Venice, on the Bridge of Sighs;

A palace and a prison on each hand:

I saw from out the wave her structures rise

As from the stroke of the enchanter's wand:

A thousand years their cloudy wings expand

Around me, and a dying glory smiles

O'er the far times when many a subject land

Looked to the winged Lion's marble piles,

Where Venice sate in state, throned on her hundred isles!

Lord Byron, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage: A Romaunt, Canto the Fourth, I.

Italia! too, Italia! looking on thee

Full flashes on the soul the light of ages,

Since the fierce Carthaginian almost won thee,

To the last halo of the chiefs and sages

Who glorify thy consecrated pages;

Thou wert the throne and grave of empires; still,

The fount at which the panting mind assuages

Her thirst of knowledge, quaffing there her fill,

Flows from the eternal source of Rome's imperial hill.

Lord Byron, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage: A Romaunt, Canto the Third, CX