selenak

So here I was, reading something looking back on the Bush years, when a quote from Byron about George III. nagged in my mind, which I always thought to be the best summary of W. I looked up The Vision of Judgment, and there indeed it was. It also reminded me of something else, namely, how immensely readable much of Byron's work is still today, and what a shame it is most people, if they think of him at all, think "brooding, woe is me poet" (meaning they think of what's usually described as the Byronic hero), without having read much of him. Not that he couldn't also write "woe is me" stuff, but the majority of his work is quite different.

So: some reasons why Byron is still worth reading, by ways of quote to prove my point. I'll start with The Vision of Judgment, which is one of those few political satires that survive their immediate application. (The problem with contemporary political satires being that if you read them a hundred, two hundred, or even only fifty years later, you often go "huh? Who? What?" and don't get the jokes because you're lacking the context.) In this case, the context was that George III (he of "The madness of", he of the American Revolution) finally died in his old age, after having lost reason and power years ago, and the Prince Regent became George IV. The Poet Laureate of the time, Robert Southey, did the Laureate thing and wrote a poem called "The Vision of Judgment" in which good old George is rushed to heaven and his virtues are praised to the extreme. This proved a welcome opportunity for Byron, who despised a) Southey and b) the monarchy, to let rip, and write a poem bearing the same title and the same plot - old George dies, shows up in front of the pearly gates, etc. - and use it for some acidly funny verses. Which, as mentioned before, can be applied to certain contemporary presidents very well indeed. Which brings me to the reasons for reading Byron, as demonstrated by one particular work of his.

I. He's sharp and to the point without being cheap when dealing with politics

This is from Lucifer making his case, and as I said, might as well serve as the epitaph of a current day George:

"'Tis true, he was a tool from first to last
(I have the workmen safe); but as a tool
So let him be consumed. (...)

Whose
History was ever stained as his will be
With national and individual woes?
I grant his household abstinence; I grant
His neutral virtues, which most monarchs want

I know he was a constant consort; own
He was a decent sire, and middling lord.
All this is much, and most upon a throne;
As temperance, if at Apicius' board,
Is more than at an anchorite's supper shown.
I grant him all the kindest can accord;
And this was well for him, but not for those
Millions who found him what Oppression chose.

The New World shook him off; the Old yet groans
Beneath what he and his prepared, if not
Completed (...)

II. He's witty when he's mean

Satan's not the only one voicing Byron's dislike for the monarchy. So does St. Peter, remembering the last king who showed up, the beheaded Louis XVI.

"No," quoth the Cherub: "George the Third is dead."
"And who is George the Third?" replied the apostle:
"What George? what Third?" "The King of England," said
The angel. "Well! he won't find kings to jostle
Him on his way; but does he wear his head?
Because the last we saw here had a tustle,
And ne'er would have got into Heaven's good graces,
Had he not flung his head in all our faces.

"He was — if I remember — King of France;
That head of his, which could not keep a crown
On earth, yet ventured in my face to advance
A claim to those of martyrs — like my own:
If I had had my sword, as I had once
When I cut ears off, I had cut him down;
But having but my keys, and not my brand,
I only knocked his head from out his hand.

"And then he set up such a headless howl,
That all the Saints came out and took him in;
And there he sits by Saint Paul, cheek by jowl;
That fellow Paul — the parven—! The skin
Of Saint Bartholomew, which makes his cowl
In heaven, and upon earth redeemed his sin,
So as to make a martyr, never sped
Better than did this weak and wooden head.

III. He's subversive with relationships and expectations

My favourite example of this is actually Don Juan, wherein the titular hero isn't a manly man and macho seducer but an androgynous-looking 18 years old who becomes everyone's boy toy. When this Juan ends up in a harem - that old heterosexual fantasy - it's because he's in disguise as a woman and gets fancied as a woman not just by the Sultan but by several of the harem girls. But The Vision of Judgment also has a great example, because Byron ships Michael/Lucifer as if he was Mike Carey and instead of letting them be enemies emphasizes their mutual affection and regret about their current political differences all over the place. Also he's witty about it:

And therefore Michael and the other wore
A civil aspect: though they did not kiss,
Yet still between his Darkness and his Brightness
There passed a mutual glance of great politeness.

IV. He has a genuine dislike against jingoism and war

Mind you, Byron wasn't immune to the occasional heroic posturing. But during the Napoleonic Wars, he had the deeply unfashionable view that it was a senseless butchery from both sides. And for all his fondness for satire, those verses are deeply serious, underlining something that continues to appeal about Byron, as opposed to the clichés about him - for all his egocentricity, he had a deep respect for human life:

So many Conquerors' cars were daily driven,
So many kingdoms fitted up anew;
Each day, too, slew its thousands six or seven,
Till at the crowning carnage, Waterloo,
They threw their pens down in divine disgust—
The page was so besmeared with blood and dust.

This by the way; 'tis not mine to record
What Angels shrink from: even the very Devil
On this occasion his own work abhorred,
So surfeited with the infernal revel:
Though he himself had sharpened every sword,
It almost quenched his innate thirst of evil.
(Here Satan's sole good work deserves insertion—
'Tis, that he has both Generals in reversion.)

V. He's immensely entertaining when being bitchy about the competition.

Robert Southey was in his time as famous as the other two of the early romantics, Wordsworth and Coleridge, but today is remembered for mainly two things - writing a patronizing letter to the young Charlotte Bronte that poetry wasn't really for women, and being mercilessly skewered by Byron in The Vision of Judgment. Which ends with Southey himself ending up as a witness, trying to read his poetry to everyone and causing such boredom and abhorrence in the listeners that George III manages to slip into heaven in everyone's hasty departure unnoticed. So here's Byron describing the reading:

Now the bard, glad to get an audience, which
By no means often was his case below,
Began to cough, and hawk, and hem, and pitch
His voice into that awful note of woe
To all unhappy hearers within reach
Of poets when the tide of rhyme's in flow;
But stuck fast with his first hexameter,
Not one of all whose gouty feet would stir.

But ere the spavined dactyls could be spurred
Into recitative, in great dismay
Both Cherubim and Seraphim were heard
To murmur loudly through their long array;
And Michael rose ere he could get a word
Of all his foundered verses under way,
And cried, "For God's sake stop, my friend! 'twere best—
'Non Di, non homines' — you know the rest."