The hopeless past, the hasting future driven
Too quickly on to guess if hell or heaven;

Deeds, thoughts, and words, perhaps remember'd not
So keenly till that hour, but ne'er forgot;
Things light or lovely in their acted time,
But now to stern reflection each a crime;
The withering sense of evil unreveal'd,

Not cankering less because the more conceal'd-
All, in a word, from which all eyes must start,
That opening sepulchre-the naked heart
Bares with its buried woes, till Pride awake,

To snatch the mirror from the soul--and break.” Certain mannerisms and tricks of style in Byron everybody will notice. There is his excessive use of the dash indicating ellipsis and the appositional phrase. There is the omission of connectives. There is the

66

frequent use of such words as 'away, away!" or "on, on." Verbs and other words indicating motion swarm in certain poems, the Giaour" and " Mazeppa" for example. The painting of emotion and of moods, the narration of action, the setting in of a background by description,-these are almost the only elements in Byron's verse-romances. There is no redundancy. With admirable effect he plunges in medias res. In transitions he is usually skilful, though abrupt. An excellent example are the opening stanzas of Canto III of "Childe Harold." And although sometimes cacophonous and logically incoherent, there is generally sufficient consistency in the larger units of composition, and the poet seldom misses the emotional effect at which he aims.

His style, however, is manifold. There is the style of his early satires, couplets in imitation of Pope. There is the style of "Childe Harold," stately, im

petuous, resonant, and often nobly rhetorical. There is the style of the verse-romances, mostly written in free octosyllabic verse or pentameter couplets, more mannered than his other compositions, but maturing to admirable finish in parts of "Mazeppa," "The Prisoner of Chillon," and "The Island." There is the style of his lyrics, often singularly impressive, but imperfect and unfinished. There is his dramatic and blank-verse style, an instrument forced to effective utterance in "Manfred" and "Cain," but imperfectly commanded and in itself unpleasing. And finally there is the style of " Beppo" and "Don Juan," a style of astonishing ease, audacity, variety, and power, something supreme in its kind in the whole range of literature, of which Byron remains the undisputed master.

Byron excels in the broadly picturesque, and his imagery is concrete and vivid, although elemental and dynamic rather than clear-cut, cameo-like, or elaborated. Not the picture so much as the emotional connotation of the picture is what he aims for. There is little of the idyllic. His imagery is the imagery of pathos and passion and power rather than of vision. All his characteristic similes are energetic and suggestive of movement and force. Nature in her extremest manifestations, nature in her elements, supplies most of his comparisons. So he cries in "Childe Harold": "Could I embody and unbosom now

That which is most within me ;-could I wreak
My thoughts upon expression, and thus throw
Soul, heart, mind, passions, feelings, strong or weak,
All that I would have sought, and all I seek,
Bear, know, feel, and yet breathe-into one word,
And that one word were Lightning, I would speak."

This may stand for us as the emblem of Byron's poetic ideal. The "lightning of the mind" is his. Here and there, it is true, images of pure beauty are exhibited.

Or again:

"She walks in beauty, like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies."

"As the sweet moon on the horizon's verge,
The maid was on the eve of womanhood."

Or similarly, in "Mazeppa":

"She had the Asiatic eye,

Dark as above us is the sky;

But through it stole a tender light,

Like the first moonrise of midnight."

Or Haidée's beauty, in "Don Juan," is compared to the break of day over the mountain-tops. But even in these examples it is always the beauty of elemental nature that is brought into the comparison. The more characteristic images are as where the poet proclaims that his hero's mind is as a seaweed torn from the rock and swept by the surge1; or rushing onward as the wind which bears the cloud before it 2; or drooping as the wild-born falcon with clipt wing 3; or impatient of calm and pining like a flame unfed, or a sword rusting ingloriously; or dreading the leafless desert of the mind, or to drop by dull decay on life

1 "Childe Harold,” III, 2.
? Id. III, 3.

3 Id. III, 15.

♦ Id. III, 44.

3.

less waves1; or growing through adversity and enduring storms like the fir on the barren Alpine rocks.2 The guilty mind is like the scorpion girt by fire seeking death from its own sting 3; the shock of battle is compared to the meeting of opposing tide and torrent 3; deeds appear fierce as the gloomy vulture's ; it is as if a serpent were wreathed around the heart and stung it to strife; the hero's eye flashes like the white torrent, or the lightning bursting from the black cloud; the hero battling alone is like a glutted tiger mangling in his lair; warriors assaulting the ramparts are like a pack of wolves tossed by a buffalo; the opposing force gives way and falls like a cliff undermined by the tides 7; wrath is like the rattlesnake's in act to strike; scorn affects one as the wind the rock, another as the whirlwind on the waters 9; the hero's locks rise like startled vipers o'er his brow 10; he faces his enemies dark as a sullen cloud before the sun 11; a_woman's revenge is as the tiger's spring, deadly, and quick, and crushing. 12 As we review these images we touch, if we do not analyze, the psychology of Byron's temperament; and the partial similarity of his imagination to that of some of the Elizabethans, like Marlowe and Webster, becomes once more apparent.

Rhetorical dexterity marks Byron's handling of simile and metaphor; as when in the following lines.

he welds together a series of similes into a picturesque emotional climax :

"The tree will wither long before it fall;

The hull drives on, though mast and sail be torn;

The roof-tree sinks, but moulders on the hall

In massy hoariness; the ruin'd wall

Stands when its wind-worn battlements are gone;

The bars survive the captive they enthral;

The day drags through though storms keep out the sun; And thus the heart will break, yet brokenly live on."1

Or in these lines:

"Tell him what thou dost behold:

The wither'd frame, the ruin'd mind,
The wrack by passion left behind,
A shrivell'd scroll, a scatter'd leaf,
Sear'd by the autumn blast of grief."

So, as an example of terse congruity, the familiar lines:

"Like the leaves of the forest when Summer is green,
That host with their banners at sunset were seen :
Like the leaves of the forest when Autumn hath blown,
That host on the morrow lay wither'd and strown."

For effects of humor and satire, naturally, Byron uses imagery in quite a different manner. Here the rhetorical effect usually desired is that of anti-climax. This is especially seen in "Don Juan."

"And she bent over him, and he lay beneath,
Hush'd as the babe upon its mother's breast,
Droop'd as the willow when no winds can breathe,
Lull'd like the depth of ocean when at rest,

1 "Childe Harold," III, 32. Cf. the following stanza.