The best poems past Byron selected by Dr Oliver Tearle

George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788-1824) wrote a nifty bargain of poetry before his early death, in his mid-thirties, while fighting in Greece. Merely what are Byron's best poems? Here we've selected some of his best-known and best-loved poems, spanning narrative verse, love verse, unproblematic lyrics, and longer comic works. If you lot would like to read more of his work, we highly recommend Lord Byron – The Major Works (Oxford Globe'south Classics) .

ane. Don Juan .

Despite the Spanish name of Byron's hero (or antihero?), many readers and critics Anglicise the title of this, perhaps Byron's almost representative work and his greatest accomplishment, equally 'Don Joo-an':

I want a hero: an uncommon want,
When every year and month sends forth a new one,
Till, after cloying the gazettes with deceit,
The historic period discovers he is non the true 1;
Of such as these I should not care to vaunt,
I'll therefore have our ancient friend Don Juan—
We all have seen him, in the pantomime,
Sent to the devil somewhat ere his time.

A vast comic poem that is almost novelistic in its length and range, it follows the protagonist, a lothario, as he has affairs and adventures – Don Juan is partly a portrait of Byron himself (with his eventful individual life), simply is also a mod have on the figure who appears elsewhere in literature and culture, peradventure well-nigh famously in Mozart'due south opera Don Giovanni. Byron wrote of the poem in 1819, 'information technology may exist profligate – merely is information technology non life, and is it not the thing? Could any human being have written it – who has not lived in the globe?'

2. 'Childe Harold'south Pilgrimage'.

Byron once said that he awoke 1 morning time to notice himself famous, and it was the success of this long narrative poem which made his name:

Childe Harold was he hight:—merely whence his name
And lineage long, information technology suits me not to say;
Suffice information technology, that perchance they were of fame,
And had been glorious in another day:
But one sorry losel soils a proper name for yep,
Notwithstanding mighty in the olden fourth dimension;
Nor all that heralds rake from coffined clay,
Nor florid prose, nor honeyed lines of rhyme,
Can blazon evil deeds, or consecrate a offense.

Equally with Don Juan, this verse form has autobiographical elements: the protagonist is a immature nobleman who, disillusioned with the world around him, takes off to exotic parts of the globe in search of take a chance. This poem is the origin of the 'Byronic hero': a dashing, charming, attractive, and heart-searching protagonist who would become a staple of nineteenth-century poetry and fiction.

3. 'When We Two Parted'.

How might two lovers office? In silence and tears, every bit this popular Byron poem has it. Possibly written nearly a real-life thing between the poet and Lady Frances Webster – who was besides involved with the Duke of Wellington – this is a classic Romantic (and romantic) expression of departing equally not-so-sugariness sorrow:

When we two parted
In silence and tears,
Half broken-hearted
To sever for years,
Pale grew thy cheek and cold,
Colder thy kiss;
Truly that 60 minutes foretold
Sorrow to this …

'When We Two Parted' is a typical Romantic poem, reflecting the personal emotions and thoughts of the poet himself and focusing on his own feelings most the end of the matter. It's a dissimilar kind of Romantic poet from Wordsworth frolicking amongst the daffodils, but it is feature of Byron's themes and discipline matter.

four. 'She Walks in Beauty'.

Mayhap Byron'southward best-loved and most widely anthologised lyric poem, 'She Walks in Beauty' is quoted in Expressionless Poets Club equally an try to seduce a young woman, and it epitomises the Romantic verse form idolising (and idealising) a adult female'due south dazzler, every bit the first line makes clear:

She walks in beauty, like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies;
And all that's best of night and vivid
Encounter in her aspect and her optics;
Thus mellowed to that tender light
Which sky to gaudy day denies …

5. 'So, we'll get no more a-roving'.

Byron sent this verse form to his friend Thomas Moore in a alphabetic character of 1817:

So, we'll go no more a roving
So late into the night,
Though the centre be still equally loving,
And the moon be notwithstanding every bit bright …

Byron prefaced the verse form with a few words: 'At present, I am on the invalid regimen myself. The Carnival – that is, the latter part of it, and sitting up late o' nights – had knocked me up a little. Just it is over – and it is now Lent, with all its abstinence and sacred music… Though I did not misemploy much upon the whole, yet I find "the sword wearing out the scabbard," though I have but simply turned the corner of xx nine.'

Like 'Childe Harold's Pilgrimage', it is a poem well-nigh world-weariness and disillusionment: a quintessential theme of Byron'due south poetry, and something which arguably sets him apart from much of the work of his contemporaries John Keats and Percy Shelley.

half dozen. 'The Destruction of Sennacherib'.

The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold,
And his cohorts were gleaming in majestic and gold;
And the sheen of their spears was like stars on the body of water,
When the blue wave rolls nightly on deep Galilee.

Like the leaves of the forest when Summer is green,
That host with their banners at sunset were seen:
Similar the leaves of the wood when Fall hath blown,
That host on the morrow lay withered and strown …

This poem centres on the biblical story of the Assyrian king Sennacherib, who – nosotros are told in the 2d Volume of Kings – tried to capture Jerusalem, merely was destroyed past God'southward Angel of Expiry, forth with his Assyrian regular army.

In 1878, when the Australian cricket team toured England for the start time, Punch magazine published a poem mocking W. M. Grace and the English squad when they were roundly defeated past the Australian side: 'The Australians came downward like a wolf on the fold, / The Marylebone cracks for a trifle were bowled; / Our Grace earlier dinner was very presently done, / And Grace after dinner did not go a run.'

7. 'Darkness'.

I had a dream, which was not all a dream.

The bright dominicus was extinguish'd, and the stars

Did wander darkling in the eternal space,

Rayless, and pathless, and the icy world

Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air;

Morning time came and went—and came, and brought no day …

This poem was inspired by a curious incident: the eruption of Mountain Tambora in Indonesia, which drastically altered the weather conditions across the earth and led to 1816 being branded 'the Twelvemonth without a Summer'. The same effect too led to Byron'southward trip to Lake Geneva and his ghost-story writing contest, which produced Mary Shelley's masterpiece Frankenstein. For Byron, the extermination of the sunday seemed like a dream, yet it was 'no dream' simply a strange and almost sublimely terrifying reality.

eight. 'Beppo'.

'Tis known, at least it should be, that throughout
All countries of the Cosmic persuasion,
Some weeks before Shrove Tuesday comes about,
The people accept their fill of recreation,

And buy repentance, ere they grow devout,
However high their rank, or low their station,
With little, feasting, dancing, drinking, masking,
And other things which may be had for asking …

This poem from 1817 was a sort of dry run for the more famous Don Juan: it uses the same Italian metre (ottava rima) and focuses on a human, Giuseppe ('Beppo'), who has been lost at body of water, taken captive and enslaved, and and then freed past some pirates, and returns to repossess his wife from the Cavalier Servente with whom she has get involved. Byron uses the verse form to criticise the hypocrisy of English moral attitudes to adultery.

9. 'The Isles of Greece'.

The isles of Greece! the isles of Greece

Where burning Sappho loved and sung,
Where grew the arts of war and peace,
Where Delos rose, and Phoebus sprung!
Eternal summer gilds them yet,
Merely all, except their sun, is set …

Byron famously died of a fever in 1824, while fighting alongside the Greeks in their struggle for independence. This poem shows Byron's love-affair with the country, and although it's technically part of Don Juan, that poem is and then long that it earns the correct to be included here as a dissever poem-within-a-verse form. Harking back to Sappho from the island of Lesbos and the progenitor of all lyric poetry, Byron praises the land of 'Samian wine'.

10. 'Stanzas for Music'.

There exist none of Dazzler's daughters
With a magic like thee;
And like music on the waters
Is thy sweet vocalism to me:
When, as if its audio were causing
The overjoyed ocean's pausing,
The waves lie still and gleaming,
And the lull'd winds seem dreaming …

Another curt lyric, as the championship suggests, this poem is slight compared with others on this listing, but it shows Byron'southward talent for lyric verse and love poetry.

Near Lord Byron

George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788-1824) was ane of the most famous English poets of second-generation Romanticism, and thanks to his colourful private life, he was certainly the most controversial. He attained considerable fame in 1812 while a young man in his twenties with his poem 'Childe Harold's Pilgrimage': Byron famously commented that he 'awoke one morning and found I was famous'.

He had been educated at Cambridge (where he is rumoured to have kept a pet bear in his higher rooms, on the grounds that keeping pet dogs was banned), and after he graduated he travelled widely, wrote poems, and ramped up eye-watering amounts of debt, thanks to his extravagant lifestyle. He courted controversy through his diverse diplomacy, the breakup of his marriage, and rumours that he was involved with his own one-half-sister.

He fled to the Continent in 1816, and it was at Byron'south villa that the famous ghost-story competition took place which resulted in Mary Shelley'south Frankenstein. Byron could control vast sums of money for new instalments to his long comic picaresque narrative verse form Don Juan (whose title grapheme, a lothario and adventurer, is a thinly bearded version of Byron himself), and this helped him out of debt, just eventually his dissolute lifestyle caught up with him. Seeking to make up for a life of scandal and profligacy, Byron travelled to Greece to fight for Greek independence, just he contracted a fever and died, aged xxx-half-dozen, in 1824.

Discover more than classic poetry with our pick of the best nature poems and these great comic poems. For a expert edition of Byron's poetry, nosotros recommend Lord Byron – The Major Works (Oxford Earth'southward Classics) .

The author of this commodity, Dr Oliver Tearle, is a literary critic and lecturer in English at Loughborough University. He is the author of, among others, The Cloak-and-dagger Library: A Book-Lovers' Journey Through Curiosities of History and The Cracking State of war, The Waste Land and the Modernist Long Poem.