Of the numerous outrageous behaviours which make Lord Byron famous (keeping a bear in his rooms at Trinity College Cambridge, swimming the Hellespont to prove Leander could have, conducting an affair with his half-sister, &c), his decision to enter into self-exile in April of 1816 may not rank particularly highly. Yet it was his decision to accept a separation from his wife and leave England which led to both his most prolific years as a poet and his most significant contributions to world history. If Byron had not found himself at the Villa Diodati that June, the year without a summer would have also likely been robbed of Frankenstein; if he had not discovered the pleasures and possibilities of Italy we would have been denied the joy of Don Juan; if he had not committed to the Greek War of Independence then, arguably, the Levant would look rather different even today. How far Byron anticipated the significance of his decision is at once impossible to know and exciting to consider.
Byron did not necessarily intend his departure from England to be permanent, nor did he cast himself as an exile until some years later. He initially refers to his exit from English society as ‘my pilgrimage’ in a playful allusion to his early literary creation, Childe Harold. This was among the first of his poems which he chose to continue, penning the opening stanzas of the third canto on the short voyage from Dover to Ostend. His affinity with the outcast Harold emerges within the first twenty lines:
In my youth’s summer I did sing of One,
The wandering outlaw of his own dark mind;
Again I seize the theme, then but begun,
And bear it with me, as the rushing wind
Bears the cloud onwards: in that Tale I find
The furrows of long thought, and dried-up tears,
Which, ebbing, leave a sterile track behind,
O’er which all heavily the journeying years
Plod the last sands of life,—where not a flower appears.
(Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage III.19-27)
The autobiographical Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage had begun as a private travelogue while Byron was on his somewhat elaborate ‘gap yah’ in the Levant (he had been prevented from pursuing the Grand Tour by the Napoleonic Wars). It is too fanciful to read much into the fact that Harold never returns to his native shore, not least because it is clear from Byron’s initial correspondence that he regards his removal as temporary. Rather, to consider Byron’s own journeyings as a pilgrimage – a practice where more emphasis is placed on removal than return – helps us to appreciate the spirit in which his early years of exile were conducted. He wasted no time in pursuing the kind of high adventure which we might now identify as characteristically Byronic. His half-sister Augusta (she of the unutterable affair) reports on his first weeks as follows:
I have again to-day heard from dearest B., his date Coblentz (May 11), with which he appeared “dans 1’enchantement”; he sends me some beautiful lines, and some lilies-of-the-valley—written, and gathered on the banks of the Rhine. You shall have a copy of the former, if you like; but don’t say they are to me, or I should be accused of all sorts of vanity, and God knows what! He had seen some monuments of Moreau and Hoche, which pleased him much; and in the other letter I had a most interesting description of Waterloo—the plains of which he had galloped over on a Cossack horse!
Contrasting Byron’s evident delight in the German landscape, where flowers are readily found, with the bleak confessional outpourings of the early stanzas of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage III suggests that the latter is rhetorical performance rather than spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling; in other words, his mode is (unsurprisingly) Byronic rather than Wordsworthian (Wordsworth had already written of Byron’s verses as being ‘disgusting in sentiment, and in execution contemptible’ precisely because of perceived disingenuousness). It is entirely likely that although Byron felt deeply conflicted about his departure from England, he anticipated an eventual return – after all, hadn’t Napoleon just escaped exile on Elba?
Byron does not refer to himself explicitly as an exile until the winter of 1819. Occasional oblique references are made to other exiles, with whom he evidently feels an affinity (the parliamentarian Edmund Ludlow who died in Switzerland is mentioned in Byron’s Alpine journal in September 1816), but the first explicit reference to himself as such is in a letter to his estranged wife:
This time five years (…) I was on my way to our funeral marriage. I hardly thought then that your bridegroom as an exile would one day address you as a stranger, and that Lady and Lord Byron would become byewords of division. This time four years I suspected it as little. I speak to you from another country, and as it were from another world, for this city of Italy is out of the track of armies and travellers, and is more of the old time
Even here, Byron’s status as an exile is distanced from any sense of reality: it is an imagined, poeticised state rather than an authentic one.
When one contemplates Byron’s poetic methods, this feigned state of exile begins to read as rhetorical strategy rather than anything more meaningful. His greatest work, Don Juan, finds its narrative impetus and lyrical force in the dialectic between digression and return.
Even the ottava rima rhyme scheme embarks upon an outward voyage from which it would appear impossible for the poet to make a return. Consider, for instance, the following end-rhymes, which take the reader’s eye (and ear) away from dry land and out into uncharted waters:
I can’t but say it is an awkward Sight
To see one’s native land receding through
The growing waters; it unmans one quite,
Especially when Life is rather new;
I recollect Great Britain’s Coast looks white,
But almost every other Country’s blue,
When gazing on them, mystified by distance,
We enter on our nautical Existence.—
(Don Juan II.88-96)
The closing couplet does not provide us with a terminus but rather a starting point for new adventure. Here departure is depicted as a dislocating, existentially baffling experience but, ultimately, an exciting one. Perhaps unsurprisingly for what is a comic poem, Juan’s separation from Spain is not a morose or morbid one: uncertain, for sure, but not hopeless.
To consider Byron’s departure in comparison to Juan’s rather than Harold’s offers the scholar a way of reading the poet’s exile as an accidental one. This is not to downplay the significance of his decision to leave; what transpired to be his final meeting with his sister was seen by him as such: ‘we shall not meet again for some time, at all events—if ever’. He is similarly adamant as to the finality of his separation from his wife, to whom he writes ‘You and I can never meet again in this world, nor in the next’. Despite these bleak pronouncements, when considering Byron’s own exile we should resist the critical temptation to take advantage of hindsight. That we know he made his eventual return to England in a casket (and even then, not intact, with some bodily organs including his lungs remaining in Greece), and that he suffered one final exile from Westminster Abbey to a parish church in Hucknall, Nottinghamshire offers a convenient and compelling critical narrative. Yet it is by dwelling in uncertainties rather than certainties which offer more intriguing—and adventurous—critical possibilities than the inevitability of historical fact.
Anna Camilleri