Lord Byron Poetry

Now All Roads Lead to France

On the publication in March 1812 of his long narrative poem “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage”, Lord Byron, heady with self-celebration, wrote: “I woke one morning and found myself famous.”

Edward Thomas, the Anglo-Welsh poet and essayist who was killed, aged 39, on the western front in the spring of 1917, had no such sense of instant and ecstatic recognition. For most of his adult life he laboured fretfully as a book reviewer and hack writer, hustling for commissions to support his free-thinking wife Helen and their three children. Sometimes suicidal and often stricken by depression – he was diagnosed as a “neurasthenic” in the opaque psycho-pathological terminology of the day – he longed to be liberated from the drudgery of a life spent writing about writing. He felt caged by domesticity and would, at various times, choose to spend long periods apart from his wife and children, whom he loved but neglected and mistreated. “What I really ought to do is live alone,” he confessed to a friend. “It is really the kind H [Helen] and the children who make life almost impossible.”

At such times Thomas’s melancholy can feel unearned, the self-pity of a man of letters who married and became a father too young, as an undergraduate at Oxford, and who was obliged to work. “For I hate my work,” he wrote, “my reviewing: my best I feel is negligible: I have no vitality, no originality, no love. I do harm. Love is dead and lust almost dead.”

In spite of his sense of failure and exaggerated self-reproach, Thomas was an influential and strenuous critic of poetry, the literary form he revered above all others, and a friend of many other writers, including Rupert Brooke and Joseph Conrad. He was tall and attractive, liked and admired by many. His life was interesting and varied as he moved between the family cottage in rural Hampshire and literary London.

None of this was enough for him, however, because he yearned to write not criticism, travel guides or biography, but his own “original writing”, as he called it. What he wanted above all else was to write poetry. It was not until he met and became friends with the American poet Robert Frost at a gathering in London that he began tentatively to believe it would be possible for him to write poetry rather than merely to review it.

Frost was four years older than Thomas and moved to England, on a whim, in 1912.

Lord Byron's poem From Anacreon…………? | MySpace Women

Please analyse.

I first came across this poem years ago in a book of Byron’s poems, I love the poem, but have not read it for about 10 years. I have recently re read it and I am not sure I understood it correctly the first time around.

I always took quite a simplisitc view that a man took in a child who had been involved in a car accident in which his mother was killed. It was also my belief that the child then turned on his saviour and killed him.

I think I missed the real theme, what do others make of it.

http://readytogoebooks.com/LB-Ode3.htm

Most of the terrorism and war seems to be based around some sort of “holy war” (there’s an oxymoron for you) between Islam (or variations thereon) and Christianity (or variations on Judo-Christian themes). Plenty of patriotic men and women, who believe in their country, friends and family first have lost their lives. Is it time for the atheists and agnostics to step in, forcefully (even savagely) and rid the world of the militant religious psychopaths for the sake of the human race? If so – what is the price – exactly how aggressive should this “Godless-but-good” army be when fighting this “holy-yet-cruel” adversary? [Alternatively: when did WE decide what was holy? Thought that was God's decision... Who decided humans could slit throats and lay explosives?? Thought God got to decide who lived and who died...] Someone, somewhere’s gotta be right… Is a God that wants people slaughtered or damned worth believing in? Is that God real? Do you want to go to their heaven?

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