Childe Harold's Pilgrimage is written in the Spenserian stanza, a nine line stanza made up of 8 lines of iambic pentameter ending with an Alexandrine (iambic hexameter). Its rhyme scheme is ababbcbcc. This stanza was common to travel literature at the time, and the poem is unified by the travel motif.
It is an encyclopedia of Romantic concerns and posturings, ranging from silliness to sensitivity. The first two cantos are generally only dealt with in passing, for they are often overly sentimental. In them, we find descriptions of physical locations, but Byron is more interested in cultural patterns and the attitudes of the people.
In Canto 3, Byron drops the pose of writing as Childe Harold and speaks in his own voice. He offers a defense of himself based on the hope that time will be the great vindicator. Throughout this Canto and Canto 4, we see Byron's outline of the tragic nature of the universe: man's greatest tragedy is that he can conceive of a perfection which he cannot attain.
Stanzas 113 and 114 from Canto 3 offer a particularly powerful statement of Byron's position.
About the title
A childe was a young person in training to become a knight, and this points to one of the basic movements of this pensive, introspective work. It suggests the theme of initiation, and we can follow Byron's spiritual initiation into reality and his attempts to cope with it.
Harold was not part of the original title: Childe Biroun's (a variant of Byron) was the original.
The concept of the pilgrimage is obvious, suggesting a journey toward some sort of discovery.
The Byronic hero
Your introduction covers the concept of the Byronic hero, and in our selections from the poem we can clearly see his emergence. Make a note of specific references in the poem that reveal this arch-Romantic figure.
© Scott Foll 2000. All rights reserved.