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    The Bride of Abydos: A Turkish Tale: “If I do not write to empty my mind, I go mad.”
    The Bride of Abydos: A Turkish Tale: “If I do not write to empty my mind, I go mad.”
    The Bride of Abydos: A Turkish Tale: “If I do not write to empty my mind, I go mad.”
    Ebook88 pages55 minutes

    The Bride of Abydos: A Turkish Tale: “If I do not write to empty my mind, I go mad.”

    By Lord Byron

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    George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron, but more commonly known as just Byron was a leading English poet in the Romantic Movement along with Keats and Shelley. Byron was born on January 22nd, 1788. He was a great traveller across Europe, spending many years in Italy and much time in Greece. With his aristocratic indulgences, flamboyant style along with his debts, and a string of lovers he was the constant talk of society. In 1823 he joined the Greeks in their war of Independence against the Ottoman Empire, both helping to fund and advise on the war’s conduct. It was an extraordinary adventure, even by his own standards. But, for us, it is his poetry for which he is mainly remembered even though it is difficult to see where he had time to write his works of immense beauty. But write them he did. He died on April 19th 1824 after having contracted a cold which, on the advice of his doctors, was treated with blood-letting. This cause complications and a violent fever set in. Byron died like his fellow romantics, tragically young and on some foreign field.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCopyright Group
    Release dateAug 17, 2015
    ISBN9781785434280
    The Bride of Abydos: A Turkish Tale: “If I do not write to empty my mind, I go mad.”
    Author

    Lord Byron

    Lord Byron was an English poet and the most infamous of the English Romantics, glorified for his immoderate ways in both love and money. Benefitting from a privileged upbringing, Byron published the first two cantos of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage upon his return from his Grand Tour in 1811, and the poem was received with such acclaim that he became the focus of a public mania. Following the dissolution of his short-lived marriage in 1816, Byron left England amid rumours of infidelity, sodomy, and incest. In self-imposed exile in Italy Byron completed Childe Harold and Don Juan. He also took a great interest in Armenian culture, writing of the oppression of the Armenian people under Ottoman rule; and in 1823, he aided Greece in its quest for independence from Turkey by fitting out the Greek navy at his own expense. Two centuries of references to, and depictions of Byron in literature, music, and film began even before his death in 1824.

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      Book preview

      The Bride of Abydos - Lord Byron

      The Bride of Abydos by Lord Byron

      A TURKISH TALE

      George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron, but more commonly known as just Byron was a leading English poet in the Romantic Movement along with Keats and Shelley.

      Byron was born on January 22nd, 1788.  He was a great traveller across Europe, spending many years in Italy and much time in Greece.  With his aristocratic indulgences, flamboyant style along with his debts, and a string of lovers he was the constant talk of society.

      In 1823 he joined the Greeks in their war of Independence against the Ottoman Empire, both helping to fund and advise on the war’s conduct.

      It was an extraordinary adventure, even by his own standards. But, for us, it is his poetry for which he is mainly remembered even though it is difficult to see where he had time to write his works of immense beauty. But write them he did.

      He died on April 19th 1824 after having contracted a cold which, on the advice of his doctors, was treated with blood-letting.  This cause complications and a violent fever set in.  Byron died like his fellow romantics, tragically young and on some foreign field.

      "Had we never loved sae kindly,

      Had we never loved sae blindly,

      Never met—or never parted,

      We had ne'er been broken-hearted."—

      Burns - Farewell to Nancy.

      Index of Contents

      INTRODUCTION TO THE BRIDE OF ABYDOS

      DEDICATION

      CANTO THE FIRST

      CANTO THE SECOND

      NOTE TO THE MSS. OF THE BRIDE OF ABYDOS

      REVISES

      LORD BYRON – A SHORT BIOGRAPHY

      LORD BYRON – A CONCISE BIBLIOGRAPHY

      INTRODUCTION TO THE BRIDE OF ABYDOS

      Many poets—Wordsworth, for instance—have been conscious in their old age that an interest attaches to the circumstances of the composition of their poems, and have furnished their friends and admirers with explanatory notes. Byron recorded the motif and occasion of the Bride of Abydos while the poem was still in the press. It was written, he says, to divert his mind, to wring his thoughts from reality to imagination—from selfish regrets to vivid recollections (Diary, December 5, 1813, Letters, ii. 361), to distract his dreams from ... (Diary, November 16) for the sake of employment (Letter to Moore, November 30, 1813). He had been staying during part of October and November at Aston Hall, Rotherham, with his friend James Wedderburn Webster, and had fallen in love with his friend's wife, Lady Frances. From a brief note to his sister, dated November 5, we learn that he was in a scrape, but in no immediate peril, and from the lines, Remember him, whom Passion's power (vide ante, p. 67), we may infer that he had sought safety in flight. The Bride of Abydos, or Zuleika, as it was first entitled, was written early in November, in four nights (Diary, November 16), or in a week (Letter to Gifford, November 12)—the reckoning goes for little—as a counter-irritant to the pain and distress of amour interrompu.

      The confession or apology is eminently characteristic. Whilst the Giaour was still in process of evolution, still lengthening its rattles, another Turkish poem is offered to the public, and the natural explanation, that the author is in vein, and can score another trick, is felt to be inadequate and dishonouring—To withdraw myself from myself, he confides to his Diary (November 27), has ever been my sole, my entire, my sincere motive for scribbling at all.

      It is more than probable that in his twenty-sixth year Byron had not attained to perfect self-knowledge, but there is no reason to question his sincerity. That Byron loved to surround himself with mystery, and to dissociate himself from the general, is true enough; but it does not follow that at all times and under all circumstances he was insincere. Once a poseur always a poseur is a rough-and-ready formula not invariably applicable even to a poet.

      But the Bride of Abydos was a tonic as well as a styptic. Like the Giaour, it embodied a personal experience, and recalled a country replete with the darkest and brightest, but always the most lively colours of my memory (Diary, December 5, 1813).

      In a letter to Galt (December 11, 1813, Letters, 1898, ii. 304, reprinted from Life of Byron, pp. 181, 182) Byron maintains that the first part of the Bride was drawn from observations of his own, from existence. He had, it would appear, intended to make the story turn on the guilty love of a brother for a sister, a tragic incident of life in a Harem, which had come under his notice during his travels in the East, but on second thoughts had reflected that he lived two centuries at least too late for the subject, and that not even the authority of the finest works of the Greeks, or

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