The years 1816-17 saw a major shift in the direction of Byron's poetry. This began in Childe Harold iii, where Byron turned away from the vision of extreme human suffering that had dominated his poetry since 1812 to explore other areas of human experience and consciousness. Here began the movement towards Don Juan, as Byron set his sights not on a future of painful memory but on the redemptive possibilities opened up by the human capacity to forget.

A glance back at the Tales will help to situate Childe Harold iii in its immediate literary context. In the Tales, the heroes are emotionally blasted by some devastating event. They are temporarily sustained by thoughts of revenge, but once this is accomplished they find themselves in a ‘dreary’ emotional ‘void’ (Giaour, 958) where the capacity to feel is crushed, the mind is a ‘leafless desart’ (Giaour, 959) and the future is a stretch of ‘journeying years . . . where not a flower appears’ (CHP, iii.3.8–9). But the Tales are studies of the power of painful memory to simultaneously devastate and, in a sense, redeem. The heroes find in their ability, indeed compulsion, to remember the pain that devastated them the capacity to still feel and the vacant bosom discovers a ‘pang’ (Giaour, 940) that makes it less vacant. Yet in remembering what devastated him, the hero subjects himself once again to its devastating power, locking himself in a tortured life of ‘sleepless nights and heavy days’ (Parisina, 547). Emotional death is escaped only through intense, indeed potentially fatal, pain. Childe Harold iii turns away from this Pyrrhic victory.