Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- Part 1 Historical Contexts
- Part 2 Textual Contexts
- 5 Heroism and history
- 6 Byron and the Eastern Mediterranean
- 7 1816-17
- 8 Byron and the theatre
- 9 Childe Harold iiv, Don Juan and Beppo
- 10 The Vision of Judgment and the visions of 'author'
- 11 Byron's prose
- Part 3 Literary Contexts
- Select bibliography
- Further reading
- Index
6 - Byron and the Eastern Mediterranean
Childe Harold ii and the ‘polemic of Ottoman Greece’
from Part 2 - Textual Contexts
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 May 2006
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- Part 1 Historical Contexts
- Part 2 Textual Contexts
- 5 Heroism and history
- 6 Byron and the Eastern Mediterranean
- 7 1816-17
- 8 Byron and the theatre
- 9 Childe Harold iiv, Don Juan and Beppo
- 10 The Vision of Judgment and the visions of 'author'
- 11 Byron's prose
- Part 3 Literary Contexts
- Select bibliography
- Further reading
- Index
Summary
Slow sinks, more lovely ere his race be run,
Along Morea’s hills the setting sun;
Not, as in Northern climes, obscurely bright,
But one unclouded blaze of yellow light! . . .
On old Aegina’s rock and Idra’s isle,
The god of gladness sheds his parting smile;
O’er his own regions lingering, loves to shine,
Though there his altars are no more divine.
(The Corsair, iii.1–4, 7–10)In the opening lines of the third canto of The Corsair (1814), Byron sets the mood for his narrative of the tragic death of Conrad's faithful wife Medora, by means of a sunset evocation of Greece, as the radiant sun of antiquity sinks over a land no longer consecrated to the antique spirit. The fact that Byron 'borrowed' the bravura sunset passage in its entirety (1-54) from his 'unpublished (though printed) poem' (CPW, iii, 448), The Curse of Minerva, suggests that he was particularly wedded to the sublimity of sunset as a melancholy symbol of modern Greece. In the latter poem, the same lines introduce another betrayed female, the battered and insulted goddess Minerva, who curses Lord Elgin for despoiling her temple, as the shades of evening lengthen over the plundered ruins of the Parthenon. Byron's recycling of his lines suggests a conscious connection between the values of Conrad's apolitical love for the 'housewifely' Medora, and the philhellenic ideology flagged by Minerva.
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- Information
- The Cambridge Companion to Byron , pp. 99 - 117Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2004
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