Things to Consider:

• Byronic Hero
• History and Politics
• Narrator / Persona
• The Sublime
• Horatian satire
• Spenserian Stanza
  

• Whom is the speaker addressing in the first stanza?

641:

• Explain stanza 6 ("'Tis to create, and in creating live...").

642:

• Explain: "Life's enchanted cup but sparkles near the brim" (3.72).

644:

• Explain stanza 17 ("Stop!--for thy tread is on an Empire's dust!").

645:

• Describe the speaker's attitude toward Napoleon. In what ways is he, as the footnote suggests, portrayed as a Byronic hero?

650:

• Explain stanza 72 ("I live not in myself, but I become/Portion of that around me").  Does it express a Wordsworthian view? Explain.

652-53:

• Describe the speaker's attitude to Nature during the thunderstorm depicted in stanzas 92-96.

654:

• How does the speaker present himself as a poet in stanza 97 ("Could I embody and unbosom now/That which is most within me")?
• Describe the speaker's attitude to the world in stanzas 113-114.

• Explain the simile at the end of the second stanza.

641:

• How, according to the speaker, has he changed since his youth? See also stanza 7.
  

642:

• Explain how Harold has changed in stanza 10.

643:

• Why does Harold consider himself unfit "to herd with Man" in stanza 12?
  
• Describe Harold's relationship with Nature in stanzas 13-14.

644:

• Explain: "He wears the shatter'd links of the world's broken chain" (3.162).

646:

• Explain: "[M]en's thoughts were the steps that paved thy throne" (3.364).

647:

• Explain: "[Q]uiet to quick bosoms is a hell" (3.370).
• Explain: "One breast laid open were a school/Which would unteach mankind the lust to shine or rule" (3.386-87).
• Explain stanza 45 ("He who ascends to mountain-tops ...").

649:

• Explain: "There is too much of man here, to look through/With a fit mind the might which I behold" (3.648-9). Is this a Wordsworthian view of Nature? Explain.

• Describe the speaker's final address to his daughter.