BYRON’S CONSTANT LOVE FOR THE SEA
Posted by Rosemarie Rowley on Dec 10 2008
BYRON’S ABIDING PASSION – HIS LOVE FOR THE SEA
ROSEMARIE ROWLEY, M.A., M.LITT. (TCD) Dip.Psych.(NUI)
IRISH BYRON SOCIETY
In a life celebrated for inexhaustible variety and noted for adventure, both the amorous and exploratory, there is one constant – Byron’s love of the sea, his abiding passion.
This one constant in his life and work was essentially a predisposition from birth, and a permanent feature of his changeable character. In a life celebrated for diversity, variety, amours varied in every possible way, the inexhaustible and infinite variety of the Byron legend was in a very real sense counterparted by his steady and constant adoration, to a natural feature which itself under the appearance of eternal flux was in essence and as simple of the concept of H2O.
Bryon was aware of his unusual attachment from the sea from a very early age. To the star and confidante of his life, his half-sister Augusta, who however was not a constant presence, (1816) Byron wrote:
“A strange doom is thy father’s son’s and past
Recalling, as it lies beyond redress;
Reversed for him our grandsire’s fate of yore
He had no rest at sea, nor I on shore.”
Since he and Augusta shared the same father, but not the same mother, it could be said she was the one person with whom he could truly and essentially be himself. From this epigraph I shall draw a connection between Byron’s love of the sea and his sense of doomed destiny, how it afforded a view of infinite nature as opposed to the limited and shallow human relations, (with certain exceptions including Augusta – his one true star ), and how, even at the end, a tranquil mind eluded him, and could be revived only by the dream of liberating Greece – and how significant it was that the adventures he loved so well were initiated by a series of voyages on ships. There are many witnesses of Byron’s poems having their first incarnation at sea, with Byron composing as he stood on deck,. Notably when the ship bore him away from shame and hostility and painful celebrity in London, and he commenced his great work “Childe Harolde’s Pilgrimage.”
Predisposed through ancestry – the nature versus nurture debate finds in Byron an exemplary for the most dedicated researcher in the annals of mankind – he furnishes irrefutable material, it would seem, for the avid geneticist. Many of you here at the International Bryon Conference will be well-versed in the Byron genealogy, from the first mention of Ralph de Burun, who came over with William the Conquerer, the establishment of the family seat at Newstead, and the family’s extraordinary relationship with the sea. Ralph de Burun’s direct descendants, William |(5th Lord Byron born on 5 November l722; and John Byron, born 8 November l723, (sons of William 4th Lord Byron and Frances Berekley at Newstead) both had careers in the Royal Navy. William, known as the “Wicked Lord”, was appointed as a Lieutentant on the Falkland while his brother, later known as “Foul Weather Jack”, joined The Wager as midshipman where on l4 May l741 it was wrecked on the coast of Patagonia, north of the Strait of Magellan. Imprisoned for three years by the Spaniards, John Byron would later write of his experience in his Narrative, * published London l768) which his grandson the poet Byron used the incident to great effect in Don Juan.
There are further family connections with the sea. In l758, George Anson Byron, uncle of the poet and named for the First Lord of the Admiralty, was born. The Byron grandfather was promoted through various stages to Vice Admiral before retiring.
William resigned from the Royal Navy on reaching his majority, while “Foul Weather Jack” returned to England, was promoted to captain, and given command of the frigate Syren in l746. Two years later he married his first cousin, Sophia Trevanion. As any genealogist worth their salt with tell you, the union of cousins accentuates family traits and doubles the odds of their appearing in their progeny. If anything, if the saying “the sea ran in his blood” is to have any meaning, a study of the Byron line would provide rich evidence that in some way the Byron inheritance included a strong attachment and a predisposition for a life on the sea. We may not have found the gene yet, and I would be surprised if it could be pinned down to one gene, but there is no doubt of the richness of Byron’s genetic inheritance when it came to all matters relating to the sea.
The son of these cousins, the poet’s father, known as “Mad Jack Byron” was born on 7 February, l756.
. “Mad Jack” duly grew up, if it can be said he ever did that, and after a spell in the army, married a divorcee – close on the heels of a society scandal- Amelia.D’Arcy Barnoness Conyers.
In l784, on 26 January, Byron’s half-sister, Augusta was born. The same year her mother, Amelia died, and “Mad Jack” Byron married Catherine Gordon of Gight on l3 May l785 – whose father, George Gordon had drowned in a suspected suicide in the Bath Canal, his father, in turn, Byron’s great-grandfather, had also drowned himself – they were the 4th and 5th Lairds of Gight. – and would furnish more material for our geneticist. Catherine Gordon herself was descended from Annabella Stuart, daughter of James I of Scotland whose ancestral brief included five murders, two hangings, one excommunication, and a possible suicide.
But whereas the Byron ancestors led a life of extraordinary activity at sea, in some strange but interlinked genetic reverse dance, the only place where Byron found repose and quiet was at sea. It is almost as if the genetic dance had acquired different steps, much as the set dances of the time, (now extant in Irish “set dancing” originating in the army), had “advance and retire” in their choreography, Bryon’s genetic choreography was compounded by a double legacy which invented new steps and variations on the family theme of the sea.
Not only was Byron genetically superimposed with a blueprint for this audacious balancing act, but it seems every experience he encountered in his early years in some way furnished him with the materials to develop his personality into a unique mould and vision with the sea at its center. A recent book published on the Nature versus Nurture debate (Nature via Nurture, by Matt Ridley, reviewed by Stephen Rose in “The Guardian” of l9.4.03) has shown that genes interact with the environment, and the environment with genes, in a hitherto unsuspected way, so no one is as determined as the geneticists would have us believe.
If Byron’s bloodline furnishes us with a kind of determinism as to his provenance and life chart, his environment, or his experiences in the world from the time he was born, add a classic counterpart to a study on how environment can affect temperament. His abandonment at the age of two-and-a-half by his father, the angry rows between them, his mother’s recorded blackness of mood and changes of reaction, (the infamous taunt of his mother: “lame brat!” and her savage biting of the teacup) – “my springs of life were poisoned” he wrote in one of his desperate letters to his half-sister and the Pigots between l804- l807 – there he sought purer springs, and the source of incomparable purity, the sea, as it was then. It seems he associated the mountains with their voluminous overhanging power with his mother, and the sea with its openness and abandonment with his father. His overshadowing sorrow as a result of his mother’s cruelty to him, compounded by his nursemaid’s (Agnes Grey) gloomy Calvinistic religiosity, who taught him at his impressionable age that some people were sinners pre-destined to damnation, (a doctrine which darkened his life) his seduction by Agnes Grey’s sister, and his early rearing in an all-female household, give us a picture almost amounting to parody to account for the vacillating sensibility, the inability to form lasting attachment, the dysfunctional nature of his relationship with his wife, where he pronounced himself to be in hell on the night of his honeymoon – all these influences are by now a standard equipment of any zealous environmentalist anxious to prove that some temperaments are harmed by such vexatious incidents and such trespasses on a young child which later render him incapable of lasting intimacy or faithful and patient love of another person.
The abandonment by his father was exacerbated in that Byron was born, as everyone knows, with an apastic or club foot, and that in some way he would have regarded himself as unworthy of love by virtue of being abandoned:, that the physical deformity served as an index on his own supposed innate undesirability as a love object for a human, that his mother’s harsh words were imprinted in his brain at a crucial stage and were thus incorporated into his self-identity – all this is well-known and will confirm those positivists among us in pigeon-holing Byron as a poet who wrote in order to escape this definition of himself, to transcend his personal and physical limitations, that in some way his art was a way of healing his innate disorder physical, mental and spiritual. What is so remarkable about Byron is that none of these limitations became the subject of his poetry, on the contrary, they merely served as a springboard on which he could perform his graceful arabesques of rhyme and thought, of humour and philosophy, that he never gave in to self-pity in his verse – which is not to say he did not feel it from time to time. Rather his limitations for him were almost like an inverse mirror of his true capacities – in some way, he managed to attain the boundless, the inexhaustible adventures both of mind and body, and the sea furnished him with exactly the right backdrop for this inspired leap of the imagination, not only in the sense of being visible and present in the poetry as description, but also like an endlessly refracting mirror in some way lighting up in augmented and perfectly poised culmination the spirit of adventure which the human raced longed for but which, in spite of being perfectly equipped for adventure, somehow never came their way because they never really sought it. Or perhaps they never really wanted to break out of their bounds and bonds as much as Byron did.
Bernard Blackstone has written that Bryon is very much the poet of flight – of almost hysterical escape from life situations in which he found himself trapped, that his initial impulse was the ‘overmastering need to get away from his foolish mother.’
Blackstone has suggested that Byron’s poetry is not emotion recollected in tranquility, as Wordsworth pronounced, but rather recollection assessed in emotion.
Indeed modern sociology shows us that all the indices in Byron’s early development, his unpredictable mother and her black moods, and particularly his abandonment by his father, would suggest his sometimes anarchic disposition would have resulted from this, with the consequent inability to form lasting attachments, particularly to women – what seems to have happened to Byron is that he was very aware of these tendencies in his character and did not seem in the slightest inhibited by them. In other words, no matter what the sociologists would say, Byron was a child of nature, and nature herself was his template and his ideal, and all else was secondary.
The sea therefore was his perfect paradigm because of its irreducible reality, its beauty which did not need to be made up, but which never failed, and therefore a source of constant inspiration because being drawn to beauty it was a beauty that never disappointed him or bored him. We could also surmise it was a refuge from the constant chatter of women in his early environment. We could even say that the sea was his alter ego, if that were not in some way absurdly reductionist, because we are not talking here of ego, and the writer’s reflection, rather the abandonment of ego in favour of a higher sense of sublimity in which the self was dissolved, and therefore no longer in pain, terror, or fear, but in tranquility, peace and wonder.
Bryon experienced the loss of faith which had been brought about by the Enlightenment, without the compensation of the Enlightment’s social complacency. He was therefore uniquely placed as a Romantic poet to be a witness for both the past and the future, without the encumbrances of a fossilized faith or a need to respect merely social barriers. He found therefore that conditions at sea, with the camaraderie, the time for reflection, ideal for his particular temperament.
Byron moved from “paradise” to “paradise” – mostly by sea, in those days distance was an enhancing factor and allowed time to absorb different experiences – but each time he was aware that he was a witness to what had gone before him, and that he was uniquely placed in that history.
Looking out from the deck of the sailing “Spider” across the familiar, yet unfamiliar shore, Byron was moved to write ( “Stanzas Written in Passing the Ambracian Gulf”) on l4th November, 1809 when he was just twenty-one years old.
“Through cloudless skies in silvery sheen
Full beams the moon on Actiun’s coast
And on these waves, for Egypt’s queen,
The ancient world was won and lost.”
In a world of shifting values, which are eternal in their very transcience, Blackstone has commented on the magisterial note, the complete finality of this statement, the classical economy which came from a mind conscious of the human oxymoron.
The poem was written after swimming from Sestos to Abydos, – the flippancy of tone, the serious existential import from the historical recreation of the past to the mythological and poetical – show how Byron had already shown his genius. The occasion “Sestos to Abydos” is not, as Blackstone points out, a complete identification and does not approach the remarkable facsimile of past and present he achieved in the Olympeian, the Forum, and the Coliseum. Bryon is a ‘degenerate modern wretch”, not as, in the Forum, “a ruin among ruins.”
However, the lyric marks a hinge moment in Byron’s development.
Bryon’s poetry above all shows us that love is not what it seems, and he draws upon a wealth of disparate sources, novel reading, physical realities like glands, boredom, custom, social status, and personal insecurity, so when he swims across the Hellespont, just after his 21st birthday, he does not swim for love, like Leander did, but Byron swims for glory.
Leander swam for love, Byron for glory. Therefore Byron’s unique destiny was for the sea, in every possible way. His personal life was merely a variation and a shadow in comparison to the ineffable feelings of beauty, majesty, repose, excitement and adventure which the sea conjured up for him. It was a resource for him, over and over again, where he could be endlessly renewed and at the same time constantly bidden to reflection on the awe and majesty of nature, as compared to the fickle passions of mankind, his own short-lived amours resulting in a fatal boredom, and a balm to a spirit tried and vexated by human society in its vanity, greed, and pettiness when focussed on a man who simply challenged them to think differently. The iron laws of convention were for him the expression of vanity, hypocrisy, self-seeking and an impediment to the spirit’s journey to love, human development, an understanding of history and his own place in it at the point of its highest cultural achievements, and the eventual trajectory of civilization to which he was willing to give important, authentic, and disinterested witness.
There is no witness like Byron at that point in history where the possibilities for the future were endless, but uncharted, hopeful, because the past was called into question and repudiated in a spirit of resolute inquiry and adventure, while the spirit of love and adventure was as yet unpolluted by psychoanalytical discourse or linked to consumerist ends. Therefore when we speak of Byron and the sea, we are in some sense discoursing about what is a l9th century sea, and there is ample evidence from Byron’s writings that he was aware even at that time what dangers lay ahead for that sea – in other words, he was what he would now call an early environmentalist.
The fact that Byron said he wanted to hang himself while on shore may sound dramatic, but it does show us very clearly that Byron himself was not an unconscious artist in the Freudian sense, and the modern tendency to view biography as some sort of apologia for a character defect would be quite lost on him. He knew very well who he was. He knew he had very little tolerance for merely social boundaries, and while he respected the human capacity for love and friendship, he would never sacrifice love and friendship to social expediency or teleology. So in a way, he was loftier than the people around him, and was constantly frustrated by their narrower agenda. So he had to turn to the source of life itself, the sea, to refresh himself after these sometimes barren and time-wasting endeavours. It is to the deep self underneath which Byron returns to again and again to refresh himself after the limitations and ennui of social encounters. It is a kind of transcendence, but a transcendence which enhances the poet and draws a bigger picture of the world in which he found himself, and that world was the sea. A physical love “at homeness” and comfort, a spiritual love boundless, sublime, infinite, “trackless” as opposed to human relations and society, the nature of the sea reflecting his personality, what Lawrence Kromer has called “the oceanic experience”, where he considers the absorption of the psyche in the totality of being unique among the Romantics and post-Romantics.
Because Byron was a person of extraordinary and opposing dimensions, between freedom and a doomed fatality, between love and its imposter, lust, between boundlessness of the spirit and cramped incapacity present at birth, between reason and the ridiculous, in short a poet of contrarieties whose poetic destiny was to mirror in his work the dramatic opposition of these qualities with justly famous and bravura humour and verve. However, he was never confused, as geneticists were, but only confounded, as all great poets are, between the boundlessness of the spirit of nature and the folly and pettiness of human nature. He had written in a letter to Adair in Turkey in 1810, “I am never well adapted for or very happy in society”. Not only did he have to deal with his sense of his sense of a flawed heredity, son of “Mad Jack” with two suicided forebears on the Gordon’s, his mothers side, from his early environment, his cramped and vitriolic relations with his mother, and his absent father,Byron’s spirit embraced the vastness and adventure of the sea.
Whether it was dreaming about their exploits when he was a child with a physical handicap, his childhood in Aberdeen where he first learned to swim and where on long stretches of sand he had glimpses of an infinite and an absolute, in contrast to his very early years, Where the streets sped down to the shores, he found correlative for his own passionate nature. We know that his spirit must have been nourished by the beautiful scenes, for as he says himself, his early nature was affectionate, and only spoiled by his mother’s unpredictable and difficult personality. Later, in his adult life, the raw and natural beauty of the sea inspired him far more than his own lovers or his exploits with them. We can call this a romantic spirit, a hankering after the primal beauties and splendour of Nature, in which he could forget the petty encounters of his youth, their taunts, and immerse himself in the idea of something vast and wild, benign yet powerful, a visible echo of his own soul, in which he could encounter his spirit, so easily tortured and bored by human society. For the sea was his mirror image, as changeless and as changeable as himself, as inexhaustible as were his resources in the mind, for as Hopkins says “the mind has mountains”, we can also say it has seas, polished surfaces and fretful bubblings, shore-lapping waves which hug the sand tenderly and repeatedly like a lover, the advance and retreat of relationships, the huge cataclysms of thundering water and the deep hostile depths, the hidden dangers and lurking shadows of intimacy, the promise of stillness and the infinite beauty of its relationship with the sky above. and in that time never encounter a scene the same, never see any feature exactly the same, but still able to trust the tides and in that slow motion find the ease and lull of time.
My purpose in this paper is to trace the genesis of Bryon’s relationship with the sea, where he found himself, in the words of Wallace Stevens, more truly and more strange. Through a myriad of sexual conquests and relationships, the sea resisted him just as she supported him, was witness to his first gymnastic feats where before he had known failure and humiliation, was the connection between his forebears, his classical learning in which he re-enacted the heroic spirit of bygone eras, and his own undiminished universe where there was constancy and fidelity to a greater harmony, a testament of a harmonious world and a greater shaping spirit than any society he had experienced. The sea was also the means through which he overcame physical handicap, present at birth. The sea therefore was the only element in which he was comfortable, because of his gait, and where he obtained a respite from the taunts of childhood. Indeed as a student at Harrow, he had carried a boy on his back whilst swimming, showing his desire for physical supremacy allied with generosity of spirit. Even on land, when he rode nearly every day, his chief delight was to ride along the seashore, where from being a troubled biped, he could in quadruped majesty survey the scenes he felt most inspiring. A new world opened upon him in the Mediterranean Sea. Byron’s sense of release from the restrictions – maternal, social, political and personal comes through strongly in the “Good Night” song.
“Adieu, adieu, my native shore,
Fades o’er the waters blue,
The wight-winds sigh, the breakers roar,
And shrieks the wild sea-mew.”
He moved from the revulsion of home contacts to the solitude of the sea.
“And now I’m in the world alone,
Upon the wide, wide sea.”
Blackstone comments that the Coleridgean echo is unmistakeable, but that the Childe welcomes the desolation which fills the Mariner with dread. (stanza 10).
“Welcome, welcome, ye dark-blue wave!
And when you fail my sight,
Welcome, ye deserts, and ye caves
My native Land – Good Night!”
It is to the “deep and dark-blue ocean”, after all the deserts and caves, physical and spiritual, of Cantos II and III that Byron returns in his grand finale to “Childe Harold.”
Byron’s ‘Ancient Mariner’ stance struck the novelist John Galt, who was a fellow-passenger on the Townshend Packet which carried Byron from Gibraltar to Malta at a later stage in the tour.
“Bryon held himself aloof, and sat on the rail, leaning out to the mizzen shrouds, inhaling, as it were, poetical sympathy from the gloomy rock, the dark, the stern in the twilight. There was all about him that evening, sitting amidst the shrouds and rattlings, in the tranquility of the moonlight, churning an inarticulate melody, he seemed almost apparitional, suggesting dim reminiscences of him who shot the albatross.”
Blackstone points out that Byron, (with Blake) was the most aware of the Romantics of the problems of what we have come to call pollution.
Yet Byron had written about the Ocean, how it resisted pollution:
Roll on, thou deep and dark blue ocean – roll!
Ten thousand fleets sweep over thee in vain;
Man marks the eqarth with ruin, – his control
Stops with the shore; – upon the watery plain
The wrecks are all thy deed, nor doth remain
A shadow of man’s ravage, save his own
When, for a moment, like a drop of rain,
He sinks into they depths with bubbling groan,
Without a grave, unknell’d, uncoffin’d and unknown…
Thy shores are empires, changed in all save thee:-
Assyria, Greece, Rome, Carthage, what are they?
Thy waters wasted them while they were free,
And many a tyrant since; their shores obey
The stranger, slave or savage; their decay
Has dried up realjms to deserts: – not so thou;
Unchangeable, save to thy wild waves’ plain;
Time writes no wrinkle on thine azure brow;
Such as creation’s dawn beheld, thou rollest now.
Unfortunately, it is not true today that the ocean is as it was at the dawn of time. There are experts now writing that the ocean is in danger of being damaged beyond repair. In Byron’s time the sea was yet unpolluted, a source of renewal for the spirit of man.
Above all, the sea was itself, and remained long after the memory of great men were forgotten as we can see from Byron’s celebrated stanzas in Childe Harold Canto 4 (check Canto 3) – he had actually written the first two cantos on board ship, so it was also a good writing environment for him.
Open and sublime, it was the one element where human vagaries, or hypocrisy, or illusion did not dwell. It was answerable only to its own instincts, and guided by the lamp of night, the moon. It was here he had the most important moments of his life, from contemplation on his marriage to Annabella Millbanke when he walked along the shore at Seaham, to his arrival on ship for the Battle of Mussolinghi , moments of an almost malign fate in which his heroic spirit would fail in spite of his best intentions and his great destiny as a poet.
“O’er the dark waters of the deep blue sea
Our thoughts as boundless, and our souls as free,
Far as the breeze can bear, the billows foam,
Survey our empire, and behold our home!”
– The Corsair – (continues, etc.)
So, the sea was his home – boundless, beautiful, physically challenging and ever-changing
The sea nourished his essential self, and gave him in nearly every poem the occasion for his poetry, whether as backdrop, witness, or spiritual journey. In Canto 1 we are crossing a peninsula, and after the introductory stanzas, there is no sign of the sea, but images of man-made suffering everywhere. However, all the great lines in Canto 1 are to do with the sea:
“And Mammon wins his way where
Seraphs might despair!
which is a hint of the spoliation to come – unfortunately. But Byron continues on with his praise of the ocean:
“and traverse Pagnian shores, and pass Earth’s central line..”
“and Tagus dashing onward to the Deep,
His fabled golden tribute bent to pay”
“Swept into wrecks anon. By
Time’s ungentle tide.”…
Canto 2, stanzas xvi – xix give us a well-realised bustling extravert view of life aboard ship.
The sea was there in all its moods – even in times of loss of hope – there are new dimensions of time which is also eternity, and signs of spiritual oppression:
“no breath of air breaks the wave”
In the famous Canto 4, we have the roll-call of ruined cities and civilizations to which the sea is both witness and survivor.
Then the marvelous ephiphany of the carnival, and the evocation of life in the present
“Loud was the lightsome tumult on the shore” which brings the reader to the wonder of how life continues as a vibrant spectacle and a source of wonder.
However, there was one occasion when Byron was not able to lift his spirits by contemplation of the magic remedy of the sea. On 18 July, when the bodies of Shelley and Vivian were washed ashore on the beach near Viareggio, Trelawney took over and managed a pagan cremation on two consecutive days, l5 and l6 August. When Byron saw Williams’ remains which had been washed up first on l5, Byron cried: “Are we all to resemble that? – why, it might be the carcase of a sheep!”
At all times it was an escape and a remedy, for example, after the immolation of Shelley’s body on the beach at Lerici, Bryon swam out to his yacht, but uncharacteristically, was unable to go for a sail in it.
But after a time, he did recover, and ended up spending most of his final years in Venice, where he could view daily the vastness of the sea, and sail in her canals.
His destiny was both for the sea, where he sought unity and peace. I would go further and say it was his alter ego, where he lost his sense of limitation and frustration of human behaviour, in the experience of boundlessness and infinity known as the oceanic experience.
As I noted earlier, some people have called this a nineteenth century sea, and a typically romantic landscape, and in a sense it is, in that it breaks with classical tradition and becomes the romantic abyss of fear and alienation. However, it still retained its unsullied nature, and is far removed from the sea of today, which we have polluted through allowing it to become a receptacle for waste and a dumping ground for radioactive and nuclear waste – so necessarily limited our horizons and depriving ourselves of a great and transcendent sense of being human – what Homer called our great grey mother and what James Joyce termed, while evoking Sandymount Strand in Dublin, the “ineluctable modality of the visible” – in other words, the sea was still accessible as a medieval concept, whose substance and attributes were proofs of the Divine.
So in a Romantic sense, the sea had aesthetic appeal – both as a wonderful backdrop and a source of adventurer – there are pirates Turks, especially in the earlier poems and drama as historical description (wreck in Don Juan inspired by Byron’s senior’s account) During the first few months of his banishment from England he travelled on every kind of boat imaginable, and moved from place to place in search of adventure and beauty. In England, he had become a source of malignant mockery, and from then until his death in l824 the sea was his home, his inspiration and his recourse..
However, the development of the relationship with Augusta and the scandal besmirching of their love and friendship meant that in some sense his capacity to contemplate beauty and to obtain a sense of tranquility in reflection were impaired. On his second visit to Europe in l8l6, when he left Dover under a cloud, even the wild beauties of Switzerland failed to console him.
“I was disposed to be pleased – I am a lover of Nature – and an Admirer of Beauty – I can bear fatigue – and welcome privation – and have seen some of the noblest views of the world – but in all this – the recollections of bitterness – and more especially of recent and more home desolation – which must accompany me through life (author’s emphasis) – having preyed upon me here – and neither the music of the shepherd – the crashing of the Avalanche – nor the torrent – the mountain – the Glacier – the Forest – nor the Cloud – have for one moment lightened the weight upon my heart – nor enabled me to lose my own wretched identity in the majesty and the power and the Glory – around – above and beneath me.”
This was written on 20 September, l8l6 a final entry in the journal he was keeping for Augusta. However, as Byron embarked on the course of his sexual life, the sea remained the only unpolluted source in which he could truly be himself . In the end, however, even that failed him. We first have an inkling of this from his stay in Venice, a place on land he felt quite happy to be in, particularly since it consisted of islands and he had to go everywhere by boat or horse, in other words, not on his cramped foot. Venice was the place where had had his most amours, and also the only example of his fidelity for a love for a woman, Teresa. It seems in this environment of islands, seas and canals, Byron’s imagination in some sense found a place he wanted to call home, but with this discovery, there also emerges his first conscious sense of confinement, and how male and female nature in some way at this particular place the exact locus of his psychological feeling of what home meant to him.
In the play “The Two Foscari” we have the long shadow of his broken relationship with his father. Again, the sea is his metaphor
“as the wave
Sweeps after that before it, alike whelming
The wreck that creaks to the wild winds, and wretch
Who shrieks within its riven ribs, as gush
The waters through them, but this son and sire
Might move the elements to pause…”
and later in the play there is a Freudian, if I may be reductionist for a moment, opposition of the male principle, (freedom and the sea) to that of the dungeon (female, and full of snakes)
“A cell so far below the water’s level,
Sending its pestilence through every crevice”
However, in Venice, he was still open to possibilities of beauty, love and friendship, as Venice looked out to the openness of the sea, and , at the time the masculine freedom of the sea.
“I could endure my dungeon, for ‘t was Venice;
I could support the torture, there was something
In my native air that buoy’d my spirits up
Like a ship on the ocean toss’d by storms,
But proudly still bestriding the high waves
And holding on its course;”
However, he continues on with the prophetic words which are also the bye word of sea-faring men:
“the wind may change.”
which is the nature of love itself. His love for Teresa changed – after three years he wanted to move on. We know from his lines to Augusta that his love for her, and for contemplation of Nature, was very much impaired after his relationship with her, and in some sense, that love had changed. For although she was his “star” and his true soul-mate, nevertheless their sexual union had engendered in him the kind of guilt which could not be assuaged by contemplation of beauty, since the source of love and beauty, Augusta herself, had been defiled through an incestuous union. Henceforward this great spiritual resource after his stay in Venice somehow became unavailable to him, as he believed himself to be beyond redemption, and it is this sense of futility and doom, reinforced by his conviction of his mad bad line, that he poisoned everything and everyone he touched, finally overwhelmed him and caused him to embark on his final adventure at Mussolinghi in the hope of rescuing his most idealist and noble ideals.
The period of constant voyaging had come to a temporary respite in Venice, while he appeared to be happy there, and had his greatest number of amours,. he could not finally accept love or Venice as his ultimate destination. – what ultimately the outcome was in Paradise did not become absolutely clear to him until his maturity and eventual destination at Mussolinghi.
The sea is then seen in a different light. Formerly the witness of mankind’s greatest achievements and civilizations, the survivor of history and the constant in the eternal nature of man, Venice seems to have given him the opportunity to view his relationship with the sea as something that temporarily gave him a place of rest, but in the end was as futile as his own nature. This nature could only be assuaged by contemplation and by constant voyaging, especially on the sea, the locus of his greatest imaginative efforts, the scene of his best parties and wittiest social encounters with friends and acquaintances, and the setting for the dramatic projection of himself as a poet, where he was often observed gazing out to sea with a manuscript and a pen in his hand. Often imperious, aloof, and absorbed, but nevertheless connected in some vital way with the elements and with the whole of humanity.
However, in an important and final sense, the sea is the ultimate nemesis or destiny for Byron – not only an anodyne from the pessimism about human nature and his own nature – fatality, injuring his spirits which can only be revived by further adventures, finally catastrophic doom. How much his sense of guilt – at times apparent when he chided Annabel about her delay in accepting his proposals, which might have altered the history of his personal life, and prevented him falling into temptation with Augusta, – ( I hear you say, typical of a man to blame the woman!) His ancestral guilt, and his actual guilt finally dovetailed in and despite his best efforts finally convinced him of what he had been fighting against all his life – his feeling of doom, of his off-said that he brought doom to everyone. He then wrote out his early experience of Calvinism as a form of punishment for sinful humanity, and found expression in the cataclysm of destruction by the sea in “Heaven and Earth”, where his musings on the fallen nature of man are more Old Testament, as in the story of Cain – he was drawn to primeval guilt and primeval nature, not only because of his Romantic impulse but because his own experience. This finally led him to a fatalistic irredeemable notion of man (and woman) as inherently corrupt and doomed to final oblivion, and which he had heroically overcome for most of his life.
As his sense of doom increased, Byron’s imagination was drawn to another sort of unlawful union, that of the sons of God with the daughters of men, as he states in the epigraph from Genesis. Here even the sea cannot overcome his morbidity. It is present in all its power as an agent of destruction and vengeance, of the return of the children of Cain,which Byron believed himself to be one, to dust and futility.
“Earth shall be ocean!
And no breath,
Save of the winds, be on the unbounded wave!
Angels shall tire their wings, but find no spot:
Not even a rock from out the liquid grave
Shall lift its point to save,
Or show the place where strong Despair hath died,
After long looking o’er the ocean wide
For the expected ebb which cometh not:
All shall be void,
Destroy’d!”
- Heaven and Earth
So finally the sea was the ultimate destroyer of hope, and the nemesis for the human race.
When he decided to join battle with the cause for the freedom of Greece, he lingered on with Teresa, but his mind was made up. He even wrote to friends, enquiring what were the prospects in Greece for women. But he went on his last voyage without her.
There was a dead calm that night, the thirteenth. Bryon slept on board – the omens for the l5th were still adverse. A sudden gale battered them all night forcing the unhappy “tub” back into port, with its flimsy partitions kicked down by terrified horses, and troublesome neighbours they were in blowy weather, as Byron wrote to Augusta. Trelawney superintended the repairs on l6th. Byron and Pietro revisited the empty Casa Salazzo before finally sailing.
“Where shall we be in a year”, Bryon said wistfully. On that very day, a year hence, Byron’s body would be committed to its tomb.
As the tub rolled slowly down the Italian coast Byron mostly sat alone on deck, brooding and studying the bitter japes of Voltaire, Swift and La Rochefoucauld. On the voyage, Trelawney reports Byron again talked of his wrongs, finally comparing himself and Shelley with the crucified Christ.
“If the Christ they profess to worship reappeared, they would again crucify him.”
He told ghost stories as he sailed at night past Stromboli, which he taught was erupting, but was shown to be the lights in cottage windows – an indication of his state of mind. They had intended to make Messina their final Italian port of call, but they were sailing so well at last that they continued on straight into the Ionian Sea.
“I am better now than I have been for years” said Byron, recalling that on shore he always felt inclined to hang himself on waking. He and Trelawney swam in the warm waters practicing pistol-shooting at bottles and sometimes at poultry hanging in baskets from the mast, or played practical jokes on each other.
So the sea is his love, his recourse, his elixir, his aphrodisiac, and his destiny, and his great purifier. It was the triumph of nature against the course of civilizations and the grand dreams of mankind. It was also the ultimate destroyer of men and flawed human nature to which his poetry was the only and immortal answer.
PAPER GIVEN AT INTERNATIONAL BYRON CONFERENCE, LIVERPOOL, 2003,
FROM A VERSION PUBLISHED IN THE JOURNAL OF THE FRENCH BYRON SOCIETY, edited by Christiane Vigouroux, 2004
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