Edleston: Lord Byron's Boy Poems
By Keith Hale
()
About this ebook
A collection of romantic poems Byron wrote for John Edleston, Lord Clare, Earl Delawarr, Lucas Chalandrutsanos, and other boys. The collection spans Byron's life. Some poems for Edleston, Clare, and Delawarr were among the earliest verse he wrote; the poems to Chalandrutsanos were his very last. Selected and introduced by Keith Hale.
.......... Watersgreen House is an independent international book publisher with editorial staff in the UK and USA. One of our aims at Watersgreen House is to showcase same-sex affection in works by important gay and bisexual authors in ways which were not possible at the time the books were originally published. We also publish nonfiction, including textbooks, as well as contemporary fiction that is literary, unusual, and provocative. watersgreen.wix.com/watersgreenhouse
Keith Hale
Keith Hale grew up in central Arkansas and Waco, Texas. He received his bachelor’s degree from the University of Texas at Austin. Following a five-year career as a journalist in Austin, Amsterdam, and Little Rock, Hale earned a Ph.D. in literature from Purdue and took a position teaching British and Philippine literature at the University of Guam. Hale writes both fiction and scholarly works including his groundbreaking novel Clicking Beat on the Brink of Nada (Cody), first published in the Netherlands, and Friends and Apostles, his edition of Rupert Brooke's letters published by Yale University Press, London.
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Edleston - Keith Hale
Edleston
Lord Byron’s Boy Poems
By Lord Byron
Edited and with an Introduction
By Keith Hale
© 2021 by Keith Hale
Watersgreen House
All rights reserved.
BISAC: Biography & Autobiography / LGBT
BISAC: Poetry / LGBT
Cover photo © Olga Kvach, Melitopol, Ukraine.
Licensed in Bucharest.
No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without prior written permission of both the copyright holder and the publisher. The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or any other means without permission is punishable by law.
Watersgreen House, Publishers.
Typeset in Sylfaen and Georgia.
International copyright secured.
Contents
5 Introduction by Keith Hale
Poems:
25 To E—
26 To D—
27 Epitaph on a Beloved Friend
29 Harrow, 1803
31 On a Distant View of the Village and School of Harrow on the Hill, 1806
34 Imitated from Catullus
35 The Cornelian
37 Hours of Idleness
40 To the Earl of Clair
46 Lines Written Beneath an Elm in the Churchyard of Harrow
48 L’Amitie, est l’amour sans ailes
53 Pignus Amoris
55 Stanzas to Jessy
57 The Adieu
63 Egotism
67 Farewell to the Muse
70 On Revisiting Harrow
71 There Was a Time, I Need Not Name
73 Remind Me Not, Remind Me Not
75 To a Youthful Friend
80 Childish Recollections
96 I Would I Were a Careless Child
99 From Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Canto II
100 To Thyrza
103 Away, Away, Ye Notes of Woe!
105 One Struggle More, and I am Free
108 And Thou Art Dead, as Young and Fair
112 If Something in the Haunts of Men
114 On a Cornelian Heart which was Broken
115 The Chain I Gave
117 Line Written on a Blank Leaf of The Pleasures of Memory
118 On the Quotation, And my true faith can alter never, though thou art gone perhaps for ever.
120 Remember Him, Whom Passion’s Power
123 Oh! Snatched Away in Beauty’s Bloom
124 When We Two Parted
126 Love and Death
128 Last Words on Greece
129 On This Day I Complete My 36th Year
132 Works Cited
Lord Byron
(1788-1824)
Byron's bisexuality had an influence on virtually everything he wrote. The alienation from English society produced by his feelings for fellow males might even account for the development of the Byronic hero. When, for example, in Manfred, Byron asks for forgetfulness Of that which is within me
(1.137), one suspects that what he would most like to forget is his love for boys--something he would never achieve.
Louis Crompton points out the unprecedented number of executions of homosexuals in England in the statistical reports of [Byron's] day
(1) and asks the question: Does Byron's bisexuality explain the psychology of the so-called Byronic hero? When we consider the extreme animus felt toward homosexuals in Byron's England, with its hangings, pilloryings, ostracism, and exiles, this is a tempting theory
(8).
Byron's early poems show he loved his school friends at Harrow dearly. Witness his descriptions of friends in such poems as To a Youthful Friend,
Epitaph on a Friend,
Childish Recollections,
and Stanzas to Jessy.
Indeed, To a Youthful Friend
contains the almost prophetic lines:
And when we bid adieu to youth,
Slaves to the specious world's control,
We sigh a long farewell to truth;
That world corrupts the noblest soul.
Having made his friendships a cult, Byron was ill-prepared to face the years of separation from them that inevitably came after leaving Cambridge. It is no wonder he was early jaded and forlorn.
Although Byron's friendships were a favorite subject for his early poems, because of the hostility towards same-sex affairs in England, he felt the need for discretion and therefore rarely mentioned the name of the friend in his poems unless the poem was an innocuous tribute. His romantic school friend Lord Clare, for instance, became Lycus
in Childhood Reflections.
In Detached Thoughts,
Byron wrote, My School friendships were with me passions (for I was always violent) . . . that with Lord Clare began one of the earliest and lasted longest . . . I never hear the word
Clare without a beating of the heart--even now
(Byron's Letters and Journals [hereafter cited BLJ] 9.44). A few pages later, Byron mentions having recently met Clare on the road between Imola and Bologna: It was a new and inexplicable feeling like rising from the grave to me. -- Clare too was much agitated -- more--in appearance -- than even myself--for I could feel his heart beat to the fingers' ends-- unless indeed -- it was the pulse of my own which made me think so
(9.49).
Another friend, George, Earl Delawarr, was called Euryalus
(i.e., one of the pair of lovers from Virgil's The Aeneid) in Childish Recollections
(Byron also published a paraphrase of the Euryalus and Nisus story in Hours of Idleness, but he seems to have written that for his friend John Edleston, not Delawarr). Of Delawarr, Byron wrote: That name is yet embalm'd, within my heart; / Yet, at the mention, does my heart rebound, / And palpitate, responsive to the sound.
However, following a quarrel