Things to Consider:

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

• What are the characteristics of the Byronic Hero?

• Whom is the speaker addressing in the first stanza?

619:

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

620:

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

622:

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

623:

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

628:

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

630-31:

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

632:

• 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.

• Why, according to the editors, did Byron's position within the canon of English Romantic poetry become insecure during the Victorian period?

609:

• Explain: "Byron cultivated a skepticism about established systems of belief that, in its restlessness and defiance, expressed the intellectual and social ferment of his era" (609).
• Explain: "Although Byronism was largely a fiction, ... the fiction was historically more important than the actual person" (609).

611:

• Describe the circumstances surrounding Byron's final departure from England.
• Describe Byron's relationship with Teresa Guiccioli.
  
• Describe the Pisan circle.

618:

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

619:

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

620:

• Explain how Harold has changed in stanza 10.

621:

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

622:

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

624:

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

625:

• 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 ...").

627:

• 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.