Лорд Байронның «Чайлд Гарольдтың саяхаты» поэмасы

1812–1818 narrative poem by Lord Byron

Childe Harold's Pilgrimage is a long narrative poem in four parts written by Lord Byron. The poem was published between 1812 and 1818. Dedicated to "Ianthe", it describes the travels and reflections of a young man disillusioned with a life of pleasure and revelry and looking for distraction in foreign lands. In a wider sense, it is an expression of the melancholy and disillusionment felt by a generation weary of the wars of the post Revolutionary and Napoleonic eras. The title comes from the term childe, a medieval title for a young man who was a candidate for knighthood. The poem was widely imitated. It contributed to the cult of the wandering Byronic hero who falls into melancholic reverie as he contemplates scenes of natural beauty. Its autobiographical subjectivity was widely influential, not only in literature but in the arts of music and painting as well, and was a powerful ingredient in European Romanticism.

The youthful Harold, cloyed with the pleasures of the world and reckless of life, wanders about Europe, making his feelings and ideas the subjects of the poem. In 'Canto I' he is in Spain and Portugal, where he recounts the savagery of their invasion by the French. In 'Canto II' he moves to Greece, uplifted by the beauty of its past in a country now enslaved by the Turks. 'Canto III' finds him on the battlefield of Waterloo, from which he journeys up the Rhine and crosses into Switzerland, enchanted by the beauty of the scenery and its historic associations. In 'Canto IV' Harold starts from Venice on a journey through Italy, lamenting the vanished heroic and artistic past, and the subject status of its various regions.

The poem contains elements thought to be autobiographical, as Byron generated some of the storyline from experience gained during his travels through Portugal, the Mediterranean and Aegean Sea between 1809 and 1811. The "Ianthe" of the dedication was the term of endearment he used for Lady Charlotte Harley, about 11 years old when Childe Harold was first published. Lady Charlotte Bacon, née Harley, was the second daughter of 5th Earl of Oxford and Lady Oxford, Jane Elizabeth Scott. Throughout the poem, Byron, in character of Childe Harold, regretted his wasted early youth, hence re evaluating his life choices and re designing himself through going on the pilgrimage, during which he lamented various historical events including the Iberian Peninsular War. Despite Byron's initial hesitation that the first two cantos of the poem revealed too much of himself, they were published "at the urging of friends" by John Murray in 1812 and brought both the poem and its author to immediate and unexpected public attention. Byron later wrote, "I awoke one morning and found myself famous". Published on March 3, 1812, the first run of 500 quarto copies sold out in three days. There were ten editions of the work within three years. The first two cantos in John Murray's edition were illustrated by Richard Westall, a well known painter and illustrator who was then commissioned to paint portraits of Byron. In 1816 Byron published a third canto of Childe Harold, and in 1818 a fourth. Eventually these were added to the previous cantos to form a composite work. Byron chose for the epigraph for the 1812 edition title page a passage from Le Cosmopolite, ou, le Citoyen du Monde (1753), by Louis Charles Fougeret de Monbron, in the original French. Translated into English, the quote emphasizes how the travels have resulted in a greater appreciation of his own country: The universe is a kind of book of which one has read only the first page when one has seen only one's own country. I have leafed through a large enough number, which I have found equally bad. This examination was not at all fruitless for me. I hated my country. All the impertinences of the different peoples among whom I have lived have reconciled me to her. If I had not drawn any other benefit from my travels than that, I would regret neither the expense nor the fatigue.

For the long poem he was envisaging, Byron chose not only the Spenserian stanza but also the archaising dialect in which The Faerie Queene was written, possibly following the example of Spenser's 18th century imitators. Thus in the Pilgrimages first three stanzas we find mote (as past tense of the verb might); whilome (once upon a time) and ne (not); hight (named) and losel (good for nothing). If such stylistic artificiality was meant to create a distance between hero and author, it failed – protest though Byron might in the preface that his protagonist was purely fictitious. No sooner had Walter Scott read the work than he was commenting in a private letter to Joanna Baillie that "the hero, notwithstanding the affected antiquity of the style in some parts, is a modern man of fashion and fortune, worn out and satiated with the pursuits of dissipation, and although there is a caution against it in the preface, you cannot for your soul avoid concluding that the author, as he gives an account of his own travels, is also doing so in his own character." In the public sphere, the Anti Jacobin Review came to the similar conclusion that Childe Harold "appears to be nothing but the dull, inanimate, instrument for conveying his poetical creator's sentiments to the public. Lord Byron avows the intent of this hero's introduction to be the "giving some connection to the piece"; but we cannot, for the life of us, discover how the piece is more connected, by assigning the sentiments which it conveys to a fictitious personage, who takes no part in any of the scenes described, who achieves no deeds, and who, in short, has no one province to perform, than it would have been had Lord Byron spoken in his own person, and been the "hero of his own tale". In the face of unanimous scepticism, Byron gave up the pretence and finally admitted in the letter to his fellow traveller John Hobhouse that prefaced Canto IV: "With regard to the conduct of the last canto, there will be found less of the pilgrim than in any of the preceding, and that little slightly, if at all, separated from the author speaking in his own person. The fact is, that I had become weary of drawing a line which everyone seemed determined not to perceive."