Byron: Child of Passion, Fool of Fame by Eisler Benita

Author:Eisler, Benita [Eisler, Benita]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography, Literary Biography
ISBN: 9780307773272
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2011-01-26T08:00:00+00:00

With these lines, Augusta enclosed a curl of her hair—chestnut with glints of gold—tied with white silk. On the outside of the small folded packet of paper Byron scrawled these words, followed by a cross:

La Chevelure of

the one whom I

most loved *48

The cross of two equal branches now became their emblem. Byron and Augusta used the mathematical symbol for the joining of two parts to signify sexual consummation.49 He made a note in his journal to have a seal made for each of them with their “device.”

Two weeks later, Augusta arrived in London. They could no longer be apart. A single entry in Byron’s journal for December 14, 15, and 16 notes: “Much done, but nothing to record. It is quite enough to set down my thoughts—my actions will rarely bear retrospection.”50 On the eighteenth, Byron attended Covent Garden, possibly with Augusta, where he saw the popular comedy Love in a Village by Isaac Bickersteth. Byron’s only recorded thoughts about the evening were reflections on the number of whores, including several mother-and-daughter pairs, in the neighboring boxes. “It was as if the house had been divided between your public and your understood courtesans; the only difference between the “Intriguantes” and the “regular mercenaries,” Byron noted, was that the first might enter “Carleton [sic] and any other house,” the second were “limited to the opera and b[awdy] house.”51 The bitterness of his remarks points to what he does not say. Were he and his sister to acknowledge their relationship, every house would be closed to her; she would sink to the social level of a common whore and criminal.

After seeing Augusta back to Mrs. Villiers’s house in Piccadilly, Byron returned to his rooms in nearby St. James’s, writing until late morning. December 17 and 18 were spent on two sonnets. Both titled “To Ginevra,” together they closed his attachment to Lady Frances Webster. The first poem’s labored conceit contrasts the young woman’s physical resemblance to Guido Reni’s Repentant Magdalen (her “wan lustre” of “sorrow’s softness charm’d from its despair”) with her moral blamelessness (“Except that thou has nothing to repent”). The second sonnet is even less successful; exalting chastity did not inspire Byron, and he knew it: “I never wrote but one sonnet before … as an exercise—and I will never write another. They are the most puling, petrifying, stupidly platonic compositions.”52

Accompanying Augusta back to Cambridgeshire, he brought with him the beginnings of a new poem, begun on December 18. When he returned to London on December 27, he had completed a first draft of The Corsair, the third of his Oriental tales; he had written nearly two hundred lines a day at Six Mile Bottom. His nocturnal writing habits were untroubled by domesticity at close quarters: besides him and Augusta, now five months pregnant, the small house contained three young children from five years to eighteen months old, and several servants.

In his dedication to Tom Moore, Byron acknowledged to his friend and fellow poet that The Corsair was the most autobiographical of his poems.

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