A Day with Lord Byron

This is a man who writes, in his own phrase, "with rapidity and rarely with pains… When I once take pen in hand, I must say what comes uppermost or fling it away." Not for him that careful polishing of sentences, which other writers meticulously bestow. "I have always written as fast as I could put pen to paper, and never revised but in the proofs… I can never recast anything. I am like the tiger; if I miss the first spring, I go grumbling back to my jungle." And to this impetuous directness of onslaught, his finest poems bear witness. Some critic has remarked that Byron is too much of the earth earthy to be a great lyrical writer: yet a Promethean fire, stolen from heaven, burns immortally through some of his shorter lyrics. In Greek, it is said, there are 1632 ways of expressing the simple fact I love you: yet who has ever put it in a more convincing form than Byron does in Maid of Athens?

MAID OF ATHENSBy those tresses unconfined,Woo'd by each Ægean wind;By those lids whose jetty fringeKiss thy soft cheeks' blooming tinge;By those wild eyes like the roe,Zöe mou, sas agapo.Maid of Athens, ere we part,Give, oh give me back my heart!Or, since that has left my breast,Keep it now, and take the rest!Hear my vow before I go.Zöe mou, sas agapo.(My life, I love you!)By those tresses unconfined,Woo'd by each Ægean wind;By those lids whose jetty fringeKiss thy soft cheeks' blooming tinge;By those wild eyes like the roe,Zöe mou, sas agapo.By that lip I long to taste;By that zone-encircled waist;By all the token-flowers that tellWhat words can never speak so well;By love's alternate joy and woe,Zöe mou, sas agapo.Maid of Athens! I am gone:Think of me, sweet! when alone.Though I fly to Istambol,Athens holds my heart and soul:Can I cease to love thee? No!Zöe mou, sas agapo.

Rapidly as his pen flies over the paper, the torrent of throbbing thought flows faster still. Far on into the night, when ghostly noises echo through the sleeping palace, "that ever-gushing and perennial fount of natural waters," as Scott has described the genius of Byron, pours forth in reckless profusion. Until at last, outspent with energy, he draws a deep breath of exhaustion, and realizes that he is weariness itself. The moon has sunk in Arno: the stars are half-way across the sky: a cold glimmer of dawn is palpitating along the East, as Byron —

"Again to that accustom'd couch must creepWhere joy subsides, and sorrow sighs to sleep."

After day's fitful fever he sleeps well: and rest, a few short hours of it, is due to that perturbed spirit, which now,

…O'erlabour'd with his being's strife,Shrinks to that sweet forgetfulness of life…That sleep, the loveliest, since it dreams the least.(Lara.)