Childe Harold's Pilgrimage

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Childe Harold's Pilgrimage by J.M.W. Turner, 1823.

Childe Harold's Pilgrimage is a lengthy narrative poem by the English poet George Gordon, Lord Byron, published between 1812 and 1818. The poem describes the travels and reflections of a world-weary young man who, disillusioned with a life of pleasure and revelry, looks for distraction in foreign lands; in a wider sense, it is an expression of the melancholy and disillusionment felt by a generation weary of the wars of the post-Revolutionary and Napoleonic eras. The title comes from the term childe, a medieval title for a young man who was a candidate for knighthood.

The poem is quite autobiographical, as Byron freely admitted, and is based upon his travels through the Mediterranean and Aegean Sea between 1809 and 1811. Despite the fact that Byron did not think the poem was all that good, feeling it revealed too much of himself, it was an instant sensation when published by John Murray, and made Byron famous in England practically overnight. Women, especially, swooned over the poem, fascinated by the character of Childe Harold, his foreboding, and his nameless vices. Lord Byron quickly became the darling of the influential female aristocrats of the day; they recognized bits of Childe Harold in him, and he felt compelled to live up to this reputation.

The work introduced the concept of the Byronic hero, which is still somewhat popular today and shows up in novels, films and plays on a regular basis. The Byronic hero is usually described as an outsider, and with a contradictory nature; sometimes cruel, sometimes kind, devoted but unfaithful, and never contented, but eternally seeking out new sensations.

It has four cantos written in Spenserian stanzas, which consists of eight iambic pentameter lines followed by one alexandrine (a twelve syllable iambic line), and rhyme pattern ABABBCBCC.

Childe Harold became a vehicle for Byron's own beliefs and ideas; indeed in the preface to book three Byron acknowledges the fact that his hero is just an extension of himself. By masking himself behind a literary artifice, Byron was able to achieve what critic Jerome McGann depicts as "man's greatest tragedy is that he can conceive of a perfection which he cannot attain".

Though the original poem contained a number of risqué passages, such as mentions of pederasty among the Albanians, these were mostly suppressed, either by his own hand or at the time of publication.^[1]