Me, Myself and Lord Byron by Julietta Jameson

Author:Julietta Jameson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Allen & Unwin
Published: 2016-07-14T04:00:00+00:00

The morn is up again, the dewy morn,

With breath all incense, and with cheek all bloom,

Laughing the clouds away with playful scorn,

And living as if earth contain’d no tomb,—

Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Canto III

He saw God in the small, natural things.

But he also often felt forsaken by God and most often troubled by hypocrisy in his name. As someone thought to be the devil himself by his own pious society, he had firsthand experience.

He was, a lot of the time, a man torn between hedonism and mysticism. Even while he was spending his Venetian evenings engaged in feasting and ‘fair fucking’ as he called it, for a period of time he daily rowed his gondola to the Isola di San Lazzaro to study with the Armenian monks who had colonised it. The Mechitarists were a Christian order exiled from their homeland by the Ottomans. Lord Byron had empathy for their statelessness. He found in their scholarliness welcome cerebral relief from the ‘pantaloon humour’ of many of his associates. He met a challenge in learning their language, which he described as having a ‘Waterloo of an alphabet’. And he had the fallen Christian’s love of the Old Testament legends with which Armenia was associated. It was on the Ararat Range in Armenia that the Book of Genesis claimed Noah’s Ark came to rest.

The islet’s isolation, too, made it an ideal spot for its long-past use as a leper colony, and as a hermitage for Lord Byron, in stark contrast to his other daily outing, a trip to the island of Lido for horse riding.

In physical exercise there was for him communion with nature, and in exercise of the mind and soul connection with the divine. In them he could still feel his realness, when all about him was masks and folly. We all need that. When the storms of the world’s distractions batter us, our connections to earth and sky are what anchor us and soothe us after the bruising is done.

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