Poetry of Lord Byron Series

This volume of The Poetry of Lord Byron is focused on work in which Byron dealt with certain themes that recurred throughout his career, especially personal integrity in the search for freedom and for love, and the suffering that can go with that search. The Prisoner of Chillon, the keynote piece of this volume, is one of Byron’s most riveting pieces. Based on the true story of Francois Bonivard, it tells its story of political repression and human endurance in the voice of the last of three brothers imprisoned in the bowels of the castle at Chillon and left to rot. The Age of Bronze is Byron's sardonic look at the great-power maneuverings of his day. Beppo is a comic look at the eternal triangle and how Italian mores of his day found it actually rather convenient. The Island is Byron's re-imagining of the fate of the mutineers from the H. M. S. Bounty. His real interest seems to lie in unrolling a romantic adventure, and he manages it quite well. Mazeppa is equally romantic. A tale of war and love, it is told as reminiscence from the youth of an old general, who went through combat, torture, and near death when he found himself in love with a warlord's wife. The Ode on Venice is an elegy for Venice as Byron saw it: a city fallen on hard times from former greatness. The degradation of the Venetian Republic is contrasted with the rise of the United States as a home of freedom for mankind. Parisina tells the tale of the revenge of an Italian prince on his unfaithful wife and illegitimate son. Power conquers love through brutality: an outcome that does not cause Byron to flinch. A section of poems from 1816 includes poems of deep mystery, such as The Dream and Darkness alongside poems of regret, such as A Fragment and Churchill's Grave. Finally, Byron left us a series of poems about Napoleon Bonaparte, in which we can trace, over the span of some years, Byron's shifting feelings about the emperor, sometimes seen as a bulwark of freedom, other time seen as a victim of his own pride and power.

George Gordon, later Lord Byron, published Fugitive Pieces in 1806 when he was only 18 years old. It was printed, but Byron's friends - particularly Reverend Thomas Beecher - advised him that it contained poems that were scandalously amorous, particularly the poem To Mary. Byron suppressed it by having all the copies destroyed - or so he thought. As it happened, Thomas Beecher himself kept his copy, and there were three other copies that were not destroyed. Reverend Beecher's opinion was certainly correct, though his advice was inexcusable. The amorous poetry in this volume, particularly To Mary, is some of the most erotic serious poetry in English up to that time. Byron was an intensely emotional, intensely sexual young man, and his poetry shows it very clearly. It also shows the work of a young man with the makings of not only a serious poet, but a skillful satirist and humorist as well. While many of the poems are deeply romantic, indeed rather melodramatic effusions of the sort one would expect from the young man who would become a founder of the Romantic movement, others read more like Ogden Nash—witty, lively and skillfully done in happy, bouncing rhymes and meters, not at all what one might expect. This recording of the volume Fugitive Pieces is based on the original volume as later published in limited-edition form. For that reason, the reader who knows Byron’s poetry well will notice that some of the texts used here differ, sometimes markedly, from the versions more commonly found. Byron revised and republished these early poems several times under several titles, most notably Pieces on Various Occasions and Hours of Idleness. Later titles in this series, which aims to present the whole of Byron’s poetry, will use the later versions of these same poems. In some cases the two versions are nearly identical. A Freshwater Seas production.

For those who love Byron’s poetry, the value of this work is not so much the poetry itself as the promise of what is to come. It is fascinating to see how his power as a poet is constantly growing and to see how his enormously romantic heart and soul goes about fashioning itself. Though a young man, he often writes as if he were old, musing on days gone by, especially his schoolboy life at Harrow. He tries his hand at several genres: classical translation, narrative poetry, love poetry, philosophical musings. George Gordon, Lord Byron, published his first book of poetry in 1806 when he was only 18 years old. However, Byron suppressed it by having all the copies destroyed - or so he thought. There were four copies that were not destroyed. However, Byron later republished almost all of those poems, and added more, in January 1807, under the title Poems on Various Occasions. Then, in the early summer of 1807, he republished most of those poems and added still more, under the title of Hours of Idleness. And finally, in 1808, he went through the process again, selecting some of the poems he had already published and adding a few more; this time, the title was Poems Original and Translated. As if that isn’t complicated enough, he also changed the texts of most of the poems each time around, sometimes only slightly, other times quite significantly. It would be unfair to ask the listener to buy multiple copies of the same poem. Furthermore, within the confines of an audio-book, it is just not possible to trace all the changes Byron made in the poems. Therefore, this recording is a collection of the poems included in the 1807 and 1808 publications, and does not include the poems published in 1806, and it uses the last version of each poem as Byron finally left it after any and all revisions. A Freshwater Seas production.

The best way to appreciate this long and fascinating poem, really a novel in verse, is to just let it wash over you. Don't try to get caught up in the story, for Byron won't let you do that; don't try to figure it out, for Byron doesn't want you to do that either. Just listen to the man converse with you and enjoy his playful talk - that's why he wrote it, and that's what it's for. For those who are otherwise unfamiliar with the work: Don Juan is a young Spanish nobleman who falls into a love affair at 16 with a married woman. To avoid being killed by her husband, he flees the country. Traveling by ship, he is shipwrecked and rescued by the beautiful daughter of a pirate. Her father finds out about their affair and sells Juan into slavery at Constantinople. Purchased by the Sultan's wife, he is expected to serve as her boy-toy, but again escapes. He is then caught up in war, and then makes his way to England, where he finds himself amid high society with three different women interested in him. At the point where Byron's incomplete text ends, he has yet again fallen into another love affair. Where would Byron have taken him after that? Who knows? All we can be sure of is that there would have been many affairs with many lovely women yet to come. This is, of course, the end of the journey through the poetry of Lord Byron offered in these eleven volumes of his work. In it, we see him grow, mature, come into his full powers, use his art to express himself and his life, and finally leave us with this incomplete but fascinating masterpiece. A Freshwater Seas production.

This volume of Lord Byron’s poetry contains four sets of his poems, starting with his famous book of poetry, Hebrew Melodies, and continuing with the Poems of the Separation, poetry he wrote in the period 1816-1823, his Jeux d’Esprit, and a group of poems written in homage to the great poets of Italy. Hebrew Melodies is a collection of lyrics Byron wrote to be set to music, as indeed they were, by a composer named Isaac Nathan. Byron wrote that the set was inspired by Jewish sacred music, but he does not seem to have taken that altogether seriously, as three of the set are simply love songs with no sacred aspect to them whatsoever. One of those, She Walks in Beauty, is very justly one of Byron's most famous poems. A Freshwater Seas production.

As in the first two volumes of this series, our interest in these poems is not so much the poetry itself as the promise of what is to come. In these poems, mostly written in the years just before Byron left England to tour in Europe, it is fascinating to see how his power as a poet is constantly growing and to see how his enormously romantic heart and soul goes about fashioning itself. He is on the brink of the experiences that will lead to his major breakthrough with Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (volume five of this series.) He is also leading up to his joyous joust with the literary establishment that will be voiced in English Bards and Scotch Reviewers. What sort of poems are these? They are the work of an enormously talented young man, whose skills as a poet are starting to bear significant fruit. He has all the preoccupations common to young men, particularly the charms of the opposite sex. He is clumsy from time to time, sometimes rather in love with his own voice. Though a young man, he often writes as if he were old, musing on days gone by, especially his schoolboy life at Harrow. He tries his hand at several genres: classical translation, narrative poetry, love poetry, philosophical musings. He is beginning to show the bitterness that will frequently appear in his later poems, particularly in emotional outbursts such as his Inscription on the Monument of a Newfoundland Dog. He is showing constantly growing technical skill, as in the clever rhythms of his Fill The Goblet Again. Most importantly, he is beginning to express ideas that are truly his own. Above all, here we have the romantic heart of the young man rapidly growing up to be the Lord Byron that we know from his later work. Enjoy! A Freshwater Seas production.

This is the book that made Lord Byron (George Gordon) famous. He was a published and a known poet, but until this book took the English-speaking world by storm in 1812, he was not a famous poet. Byron was, however, a celebrity. As an aristocrat whose personal life was considered shockingly scandalous - and even today would be good stuff for celebrity gossip magazines - his name was known. His previous work was received out of a mixture of literary merit and personal notoriety. This book directly capitalizes on that. Childe Harold narrates the experiences of a young nobleman, sated with the wine, women, and song of his native England, who goes forth in search of the wine, women, song, and adventure of Spain, Greece, and the Ottoman Empire. The book is literally an armchair travelogue in rhyming couplets, quite unlike anything before or since. He expresses himself in vivid, forceful and emotional language on the landscapes, people, customs, and cultures he encounters, and shapes his experience into a deep study of that subject so favored by all the Romantic poets - himself. This performance of the work is underscored at intervals with excerpts from the music of Byron's contemporary, John Field, often regarded as the inventor of the nocturne - a form of Romantic music very well suited to the romanticism of the poet and his work. Public Domain (P)2010 Robert Bethune A Freshwater Seas production.

With Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, cantos III and IV, Byron comes to the high point of his work and to clear and definite mastery of his art as a poet. Though he himself doubts his powers - he says his visions no longer swim so palpably before his eyes as once they did - his visions are far more palpable to us, expressed as they are with the full depth of his romantic and passionate feelings. He continues the device of the journey of the fictional Harold, but Harold is almost a ghost; the thin disguise and facade that separates him from the poet essentially vanishes. Even the concept of his pilgrimage fades; Byron is not concerned nearly as much with places and people in this canto as he is with art and ideas. The place that means the most to him is no longer a human habitation, but the world of Nature, in which the inmost depths of his heart is reflected. He writes, "There is a pleasure in the pathless woods, There is a rapture on the lonely shore, There is society, where none intrudes, By the deep sea, and music in its roar: I love not man the less, but Nature more, From these our interviews, in which I steal From all I may be, or have been before, To mingle with the Universe, and feel What I can ne'er express, yet cannot all conceal." Byron spends this last portion of his pilgrimage in that special place, that realm of the spirit and the soul, where what matters is the highest achievements of art. Out of that place is his poem made. Public Domain (P)2010 Robert Bethune A Freshwater Seas production.

This volume of the Freshwater Seas Lord Byron set consists of 54 poems written during the years 1809-1816. Many were included in various editions of longer works, particularly the 1812 and later editions of Childe Harold; others were published in various newspapers and periodicals, especially the Morning Chronicle; a few were not published until after the author's death, sometimes long after. The mood is as varied as were the occasions of the compositions. Quite a few echo the tone of his satires; some are merely witty bon-mots, others are more or less deeply felt expressions of emotion, ranging from perfunctory to sincere. Some show the puckish humor that makes one think that Byron and Ogden Nash were somehow cousins under the skin. Of the Romantics, it's really only Byron who shows such a comic and satiric side. In short, here is part of the byroads-and-backwaters side of Lord Byron - poems you probably won't hear elsewhere, poems he wrote casually and sometimes never published, but poems that offer a side of him not seen elsewhere. Public Domain (P)2010 Robert Bethune A Freshwater Seas production.

We hope you will enjoy these fine, old-fashioned stories that Lord Byron wrote in an old-fashioned way. He tells these tales in rhyming verse and heroic couplets, and he makes them dashing, romantic, and even melodramatic in a way that has become foreign to us with the passing of time. These are tales of the Ottoman Empire, the Turkish empire that, in Lord Byron's day, encompassed what we now know as the Middle East from Iran to Morocco, the modern nation of Turkey, and the Balkans as well--modern Greece, Albania, Bulgaria, Romania and the other Balkan nations. Byron traveled extensively in the Empire and learned about its history and customs. He then passed what he learned through his own romantic temperament and imagination, and through his fascination with men with darkly troubled souls and the women they love and who love them. In these five stories we find love and honor lost and won, hearts and cities conquered and broken, and a constant struggle to find something higher, deeper and finer in life than what comes to the common lot of humanity. The first story, The Giaour, is about a Christian knight living in Ottoman Greece. The word "giaour" was the Ottoman term for any Christian. He falls in love with a woman from the Pacha's harem--a love unlikely to succeed. The second story, The Bride of Abydos, is about the love of a man with a secret past for the daughter of a powerful local ruler. He reveals his secret to her, but only at the moment when war erupts between him and her father. The Corsair, the third story, picks up on an idea that appears in The Bride of Abydos--the theme of pirates and piracy, an age-old reality of the Mediterranean Sea. An Ottoman ruler decides to destroy a famous corsair, who strikes first. The corsair loses the battle, but gains the love of the ruler's daughter, who frees him--only to encounter a great tragedy. The fourth story, Lara, both is and is not a sequel to The Corsair. Characters and themes are carried over, but with many changes, and the feeling of the story is remarkably different. Lara is a nobleman who returns to his home after many years of mysterious absence, attended only by an equally mysterious person who acts as his page. He runs afoul of another mysterious knight who seems to know too much about Lara's past. The matter comes to a trial--but the knight disappears. Was murder done? The affair breaks out in war between Lara and the local ruler, and in the end, some of the mystery is lifted--and much of it remains. The last story, The Siege of Corinth, is about a Christian knight who turns traitor to his people and his faith when the father of the woman he loves refuses to give him her hand. A mysterious midnight encounter leads to a final confrontation between the knight and the father--a confrontation that ends in a spectacular blow for honor. As you listen, let Lord Byron guide your mind back into an old and rich kind of storytelling and an old and rich form of poetry. Let yourself get used to what happens when a long story is told in verse--an experience not to be found in today's literature. A Freshwater Seas production.