Childe Harold's Pilgrimage Poem by Lord Byron

A poem in Spenserian stanzas by Lord Byron and is written during a period of war across Europe. This is set and written in the time of all things Napoleon. Childe Harold was originally to be called ‘Childe Burun’, an archaic form of the Byron family name. The poem tells of a disillusioned young man, a melancholy, solitary, cynical ‘Byronic hero’, who tires of his sinful, pleasure-seeking lifestyle and decides to travel. The poet drew on his own experiences as he did a grand tour that swept around Europe but evading was torn areas to find truth and beauty on the path less travelled. The poem takes us through Portugal, Spain, Malta, Albania, Greece, and Turkey, whose Ottoman Empire extended over Greece, and Byron would die championing the cause of Greek independence, the loss of which he laments in Childe Harold. In the poem, what he sees everywhere he goes is emptiness and loss. In Greece the loss is that of the glorious past and the great writers who belong to that past; in Albania it is the sublime emptiness of the wilderness. Everywhere it is the indifference of time and fate and nature to human ambition, and it really helps to read it out loud and to have a solid sense of both art and history. Byron is well educated and he wants it to show here. In the end, the poem is about the meaning of freedom in all its forms—personal, political, poetic, and reflects some of the tragedy that is Byron's in his short but exuberantly lived life.