Paradise Decomposed: Byron’s Decadence and Wordsworthian Nature in Childe Harold III and IV

Venice's 'evident decay' might repulse others, but Byron said he had been 'familiar with ruins too long to dislike desolation'.1 The Italian city's crumbling architecture, mildewed walls and dangerous passageways harmonised not only with recollections of his ancestral Newstead Abbey, but with the 'Orient' that had captivated and liberated him on his journey with his friend John Cam Hobhouse in 1810-11. That trip had inspired Childe Harold's Pilgrimage I and II, The Giaour, The Bride of Abydos, The Corsair, Lara, Parisina and The Siege of Corinth. In a letter to Thomas Moore of 17 November 1816, Byron presents Venice, the current source of his inspiration, as an amalgam: a paradisal 'greenest island' that is also a decadent city,2 only one step in thought away from the lawless Eastern regions that had provided scope for the indulgence of his homosexual passions. Thus, Byron consciously locates the keenest pangs of the ardour that fed his imagination in what is decadent, desolate, buried and ruined. As Dame Rose Macaulay once observed, there is 'no end to the disinterment of ruined antiquity in Asia Minor, for more, no doubt, is under the ground than above it'.3 And more is under the psyche than can be observed on its surface, for, as many have noted, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage III and IV touch (paradoxically?) several times upon Wordsworthian nature, as if it might after all prove important as a creative source.4 It is a strange and interesting moment in Byron's career, and one in which Wordsworth certainly played a part, but, ultimately, only a minor one. Byron generally focused on Wordsworth as an object of satire, but he also learned from the older poet. In the first two cantos of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, one finds the occasional Wordsworthian note: 'Oh! there is sweetness in the mountain air, / And life, that bloated ease can never hope to share' (CHP I, 30). Alan Rawes has argued that such borrowing is superficial compared to the deeper engagement Byron had with Wordsworthian 'procedures' and 'the Greater Romantic Lyric'.5 Overt Wordsworthian touches in Childe Harold I and II do indeed seem more like grace-notes lost in a thundering fugue of war, bloodshed and political and amorous treachery. Byron's engagement with Wordsworthian ideas about nature seems transient and superficial. Wherever he travels, from Portugal to Spain or Greece, what Byron looks for and finds is abundant historical evidence that 'keen Vengeance' has been at work (CHP I, 87). He explores battlefields from Talavera to Marathon. The Parthenon's 'broken arch, its ruined wall, / Its chambers desolate, and portals foul' make an apt counterpart to a skull, that 'dome of Thought' and 'palace of the Soul' which seems to peer at him 'through each lack-lustre, eyeless hole' (CHP II, 6). Admittedly, in his 1812 incarnation, Harold temporarily escapes 'to hold / Converse with Nature's charms, and view her stores unroll'd' (CHP II, 25), and later pauses to remark that 'Dear Nature is the kindest mother still' (CHP II, 37). At such moments, as Rawes notes, it seems Byron is truly 'toying with, or "meditating upon", an idea of escaping into transcendent communion with nature that is very close to the Wordsworth paradigm'.6 But if Nature is the 'kindest mother', Harold still admits that he always 'lov'd her best in wrath' (CHP II, 37). Harold also takes pleasure in the barbarity of Albanian music 'half s[u]ng, half scream'd' (CHP II, 72) and other ironic or macabre moments connoting life's ephemerality. The first two cantos of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage end with the theme of time, and the loss of his friends and mother: 'Roll on vain days! full reckless may ye flow / Since time hath reft whate'er my soul enjoy'd, / And with the ills of Eld mine earlier years alloy'd' (CHP II, 98).7 Newer ills sped Byron across the channel a short four years later, and within days of his departure in April 1816 he began to write the continuation of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. …