1、1英国文学史及选读第三周Lesson 3 George Gordon Byron1. 一般识记 His LifeEnglish poet, born George Gordon Byron, in London, England, Jan. 22, 1788, and died in Missolonghi, Greece, April 19, 1824.Lord Byron was perhaps the most fascinating the language is colloquial, conversational, and slangy. THE DON JUAN CHARACTE
2、R. Certain incidents and characters are drawn from Byrons life, but he is not Don Juan. He names his hero after the most notorious lover and seducer of women in European literature. Originally a villain in a Spanish story, Don Juan had become the archetype of the heartless, remorseless seducer. The
3、Don Juan character represents a merely physical desire divorced from any spiritual or even humane feelings. Ironically, Byron gives the name of this cold and callous stock character to his own, more modest hero. Byrons young lover is, at first, simple and naive. Every woman who meets him finds him c
4、harming; thus he has not need for force, treachery, or the seductive arts. Byron projects his own, more worldly personality as the narrator. CANTO I. Canto I presents the birth, childhood, and education of Don Juan up through his first seduction and affair. Don Juan is the son of an aristocratic fat
5、her and an intellectual mother. After the fathers early death, little Juan is educated according to his mothers plan. She has him tutored in arts and sciences, but she forbids him to learn anything “that hints continuation of the species.“ Further, in his study of classical literature he cannot read
6、 any of the “looser“ or suggestive poems; he must read only expurgated versions of these. In stanzas 52 and 53 the narrator protests such a distorted education. The narration moves forward to Juans sixteenth year, when his mothers friend, Donna Julia, begins to find him attractive. She is a pretty,
7、young woman married to an elderly husband, and she deceives herself into believing that she can subdue her attraction to Juan. She vows not to see him but then goes the next day to visit his mother. Donna Julia imagines that she can maintain a platonic love for Juan, but all her resolve fails when s
8、he finds herself alone with him. Naive Juan, meanwhile, does not know the cause of his own discontent. He seeks 3answers in nature and in philosophy. Stanza 115 pictures Juan and Julia in a garden, half-embracing. The poet undercuts this romantic scene with a mocking tirade against Plato for spreadi
9、ng false ideas about love. In stanza 116 the temptation has become too great, and she “whispering I will neer consent - consented.“ Byron shows the folly of self-deception that would deny the physical basis of love. After a digression the poet returns to Julia and Juan six months later. Their affair
10、 has intensified, and Julias husband, Don Alphonso, has become suspicious. He breaks into her bedroom one night with a posse of friends and servants, makes a comic search, but finds nothing. Sending the others away, he apologizes to his wife for his foolish jealousy. As he lingers by her bed, he see
11、s Juans shoes. Young and slim, Juan has been hiding in the bed clothes all the time. There is a confrontation between lover and husband, but luckily neither has a sword. Juan escapes, but scandal follows. Julias husband sends her to a convent, and Juans mother sends him away on a grand tour to, iron
12、ically, perfect his morals. Canto I ends with an address by the poet to the reader in which he claims the story is true and gives as proof the many similar stories that appear in newspapers, plays, and operas. Then Byron as narrator sets out some poetical commandments by which he claims his writing
13、is governed. Generally, he follows the principles of classical and English poetry and rejects the taste of his romantic contemporaries. He claims also that his poem is moral and promises a very moral conclusion in the final canto. Finally he comments on his own situation. Finding himself used up and
14、 burnt out at the age of thirty, he say, “I have squandered my whole summer while twas May“ (stanza 213). He laments the loss of freshness and creative power but believes he has gained in judgment. He resolves to live more tamely from now on. Finally, he dismisses fame as a delusion and as a false m
15、otive for writing poetry. SUBSEQUENT CANTOS. The next cantos of this poem describe young Juans many and varied adventures. He loses his tutor when their ship becomes wrecked. The lovely and innocent Haidee discovers him washed ashore on a Greek island. Their ideal love is opposed by Haidees father,
16、the pirate Lambro. Juan loses a fight with Lambro and is put into chains. Haidees heart is broken, and she fades away and dies. Meanwhile, Juan is sold as a slave to a sultana in Constantinople. She also loves him, but when she becomes jealous, Juan fears for his life. He escapes and joins the Russi
17、an army, eventually finding himself at the court of Catherine the Great, who, of course, also loves him. She sends him on a diplomatic mission to England. The final cantos show Juan moving about in English society, providing an opportunity for Byron to satirize contemporary social behaviors of his 4
18、compatriots. He attacks the hypocrisy of the English, their false morality and their bad taste. In Don Juan Byron found a form suited to his tastes and abilities. Unconfined by a set narrative line, he allows himself as narrator the freedom to comment ironically on the action and characters, to digr
19、ess into personal allusion, and to instruct the reader about how to read and judge the poem. having a seemingly endless supply of incidents and comments, Byron might have gone on forever. But the poem was cut short by Byrons heroic and fatal attempt to help liberate the Greeks. 4. 领会 Characteristics
20、 of Byrons Poems Byrons poetry, though much criticized by some critics on moral grounds, was immensely popular at home, while on the Continent, he was hailed as the champion of liberty, poet of the people. Byrons poetry has great influence on the literature of the whole world. Across Europe, patriot
21、s here Shelleys rhapsodic Asia, his bride Prometheus is unbound. The play is an exultant work in praise of humankinds potential, generally each line contains 4 accented syllables. The rhyme scheme for each stanza is uniformly aabb. The last two stanzas of the poem are ironically addressed to those w
22、orkers who submit passively to capitalist exploitation. They serve as a warning to the working people, that if the latter should give up their struggle th7ey would be digging graves for themselves with their own hands compared to the preceding stanzas, these lines appear weak generally called Lord B
23、yron. Merriam Websters Encylopedia of Literature, remarks that his “poetry, personality, and many love affairs captured the imagination of Europe.“ as his title would indicate, was born into an aristocratic English family His father was the handsome and profligate Captain John “Mad Jack“ Byron, and
24、his mother was his fathers second wife, Catherine Gordon, a Scottish heiress, who came from a noble family (the Gordons) in which a significant fraction of her ancestors had been hanged. After her husband had squandered most of her fortune, had been hiding in France from their creditors,Catherine to
25、ok her infant son to Aberdeen, Scotland, where they lived in lodgings on a meager income. Mad Jack died in France in 1791.Byron had been born with a club foot(golf club used to drive a ball), and he was extremely sensitive to his lameness, and especially to the mincing gait which it forced upon him.
26、 suffered from a malformation of the right foot, causing a slight lameness, which was a cause of lifelong misery to him, aggravated by the knowledge that with proper care it might have been cured. and his sensitivity to it haunted his life and his works. Overhearing a girl he was infatuated with ref
27、er to him as “that lame boy“ certainly must have deepened his disappointment at being born with this deformity. A fragile self-esteem made Byron extremely sensitive to criticism, of himself or of his poetry, and he tended to make enemies rather quickly. His poetry, along with his lifestyle, was cons
28、idered controversial in his time and often deemed “perverted“ or even “satanic“. The fact that he was often discontent and unhappy, combined with a constant desire 8for change meant that he created an unstable world for himself, though he never gave up his individual freedom to choose his own path a
29、nd his own destiny.In 1798, at the age of ten, the younger Byron unexpectedly inherited the title of Lord Byron,became the 6th baron byron(British nobleman of the lowest rank.)and estates of his great-uncle William, 5th Baron Byron, the older brother of Foulweather Jack. He and his mother returned f
30、rom Scotland to the ghostly halls and spacious ruins of Newstead Abbey, which had been presented to the Byrons by Henry VIII. (be given a rank in society, and a bit of wealth to go along with it.)He was sent to a preparatory school in London, and then went to Harrow in 1801. In 1805 he entered Trini
31、ty College, Cambridge, and “piled up debts at an alarming rate.“ But by the time he was in college, Byron began to build up large debts due to an extravagant lifestyle. It is said that, at one point, he kept a pet bear in his rooms at Trinity College in Cambridge. Also while at Cambridge, he develop
32、ed a great fondness for a choirboy named John Edleston. He also met John Cam Hobhouse, with whom he formed a close, and lifelong, friendship. In 1806 he had his early poems privately published in a volume entitled Fugitive Pieces. His first published collection appeared in 1807, entitled Hours of Id
33、leness, and It received bad reviews. it was immediately panned(Severe criticism, especially a negative review)in The Edinburgh Review. He responded, as you might expect, with a scathing response, English Bards and Scotch Reviewers. Byrons first successful work, is a satire in the neoclassical tradit
34、ion of Alexander Pope.Next year After he reached the age of twenty-one,he took his seat in the House of Lords, and he and Hobhouse (embarked on)set out on his grand tour through the Mediterranean,visiting Spain, Malta, Albania, Greece, and the Aegean, Constantinople: this was a general practice for
35、the aristocracy at that age. (From 1809 to 1811, Byron went on the Grand Tour then customary for a young nobleman. Because of the Napoleonic Wars, he was forced to avoid most of Europe and instead turned to the Orient, which had fascinated him from a young age anyway. Correspondence between his circ
36、le of Cambridge friends also makes clear that a key motive was the hope of homosexual experience.) the experience was to influence him greatly. On the way, they were becalmed, and Byron determined to swim the Hellespont, from the Asian coast (Sestos) to the European coast (Abydos). Legend has it tha
37、t Leander, who loved Hero, made this swim every night to visit her, until one night he drowned in a storm. With his club foot, Byron had never been able to participate in sports, but he had always prided himself on his swimming. The first time he tried it, it didnt work out, because although the lin
38、ear distance isnt all that great (a mile or so) the current is very strong. The second time, a week later on May 3rd, 1810, he made it. To say he was proud of himself is putting it mildly. He immediately wrote a letter to his friend Henry Drury: 9“This morning I swam from Sestos to Abydos. The immed
39、iate distance is not above a mile, but the current renders it hazardous - so much so that I doubt whether Leanders conjugal affection must not have been a little chilled in his passage to Paradise.“ During their trip, Byron had begun to write a long poem based on his experiences, called Childe Harol
40、ds Pigrimage. In this, Childe does not mean an infant: the word was used in medieval times to mean a young man who had not yet achieved the status of knighthood.( A child of noble birth.)Byron arrived back in London on July 14th, 1811, and his mother died on August 1st before he could reach her. On
41、February 27th, 1812, he made his first speech in the House of Lords, which was very well received, and then at the beginning of March Childe Harolds Pilgrimage was published by John Murray, and was an immediate public success. which allegedly caused Byron to remark later that “I awoke and found myse
42、lf famous.“ The long poems that followed Childe Harold sold well and enhanced his reputation for being daring and dashing.Around this time he engaged in a tempestuous affair with Lady Caroline Lamb, who characterized Byron as “madbadand dangerous to know.“ Throughout his life Byron conducted numerou
43、s affairs and fathered several illegitimate children. One of his most notorious liaisons was with his half-sister Augusta.Byron was a liberal Whig, a position he maintained throughout his life. He particularly disliked a few of his contemporaries who, having also begun life as liberals moved towards
44、 what we would now call Establishment Conservatism. Among these were William Wordsworth (1770-1850), Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834), and Robert Southey (1774-1843), all of whom lived in the English Lake District; Byron referred to them as The Lakers. In 1813, Southey became Poet Laureate, and w
45、rote what can only be regarded as a series of sycophantic poems about George III, a King despised by the majority of his subjects, and his successor George IV. George III died in 1820, and Southey published a poem called A Vision of Judgement, a celebration of the King which verged on idolatry, desc
46、ribing his triumphal entry into heaven and the presence of God himself. (This quote is from Byrons Poetry, selected and edited by Frank D. McConnell). Byron published a long poem with the same title in 1822, a satirical attack on both Southey and the late King. Southey immediately attacked Byron and
47、 his close friend Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) as Satanist poets. He had one very brief marriage, to Anne Isabella Milbanke; they were married on January 2nd, 1815, and Lady Byron gave birth to a daughter, Augusta Ada (1816-1852), on December 12th. In January, Lady Byron left with Ada to vist wi
48、th her parents, and sent notice that she would not be returning. He never saw his wife and daughter again. The separation caused something of a scandal.Shortly after, Byron left England under the cloud of scandal, and never returned. He went to Europe. In Geneva, Switzerland, he met Percy Bysshe She
49、lley and his wife Mary Godwin Shelley,with whom he became close friends. The three stayed in a villa 10rented by Byron. During this time Mary Shelley wrote her famous novel Frankenstein, and Byron worked on Canto III of Childe Harold, which was published in 1816. The most notorious Romantic poet and satirist. Byron was famous in his lifetime for his love affairs with women and Mediterranean boys. He created his own cult of personality, the concept of the Byronic hero - a defiant, melancholy young man, brooding on some mysterious, unforgivable
