‘Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage’ 

is divided into four cantos, or the poetic version of chapters, that are

written in Spenserian stanzas. This means that in each stanza (including those below), readers can find
eight lines written in iambic pentameter and a final line that’s structured as an Alexandrine. This means
that the ninth line of every stanza has twelve iambic syllables. The poet also chose to use a pattern of
ABABBCDCC throughout this poem. 
Byron famously woke up to find himself famous after the publication of cantos I and II of Childe Harold
when he was 24. Those cantos are more or less the poetic journal of a trip Byron took with friends (in
particular his close confidant John Cam Hobhouse) through the regions of Europe not occupied by
Napoleon Bonaparte’s French forces; the areas held by Napoleon were enemy territory for an Englishman.
Accordingly, Byron traveled through Portugal, Spain, Malta, Albania, Greece, and Turkey, whose Ottoman
Empire extended over Greece, and Byron would die championing the cause of Greek independence, the
loss of which he laments in Childe Harold.
Indeed, the poem is about the meaning of freedom in all its forms - personal, political, poetic. In canto I,
Byron joins with William Wordsworth and with a host of others to heap scorn on the Convention of Cintra,
the terms by which the British bureaucracy agreed to allow the French forces Admiral Arthur Wellesley
had soundly defeated in Portugal in 1808 (a major incident in the Peninsular War against Napoleon) to
leave Portugal and Spain with their loot intact. For Byron, Britain was on the right side of the Peninsular
War, since Napoleon had come to represent conquest and tyranny. He accordingly celebrates Iberian
resistance to Napoleon’s superior forces, and throughout Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage he takes the side of
the conquered over their conquerors.
In particular, this takes the form of commitment to Greek independence, a cause for which Byron would
later fight and die. In the poem, what he sees everywhere he goes is emptiness and loss. In Greece the
loss is that of the glorious past and the great writers who belong to that past; in Albania it is the sublime
emptiness of the wilderness. Everywhere it is the indifference of time and fate and nature to human
ambition. Byron’s predilection for battlefields (which he explicitly mentions in a footnote to canto III) is for
them as a place in which the most intense passion and pain display their ultimate pointlessness.
It is this sense of pointlessness—to be found in the ultimate insignificance of poetry as well as of political
power—that Byron finds everywhere. The work of the poem is to transmute that feeling into one of
freedom. Harold, who barely exists in the poem (he was originally to be called Burun, the old spelling of
the Byron family name), is attempting to escape his own past by leaving England for the wastes of ocean
and of a fabulous elsewhereness. He is Byron reduced to his own poetic perception, judgment, and
feeling, “The wandering outlaw of his own dark mind” (III, l. 20). Indeed, Byron sees him as a kind of
avatar by whose creation he can transform his nothingness into “A being more intense,” by an
apprehension of that very nothingness, “feeling still with thee”—his fictional avatar Harold—“in my crush’d
feelings’ dearth” (III, ll. 47–54).
All experience testifies to the nothingness that affords Byron the intensity of its own apprehension: “There
is a very life in our despair” (III, l. 298). The final defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo, the battlefield Byron
visits in canto III (and describes in a passage that will incite William Makepeace Thackeray’s great
Waterloo scene in Vanity Fair), the later autobiographical projection he undertakes in his praise of “the
selftorturing sophist, wild Rousseau” (III, l. 725; cantos III and IV are significant influences on Percy
Bysshe Shelley’s The Triumph of Life, which also contains a memorable account of the French philosopher
JeanJacques Rousseau, perhaps the first romantic) all lead to the placement of nature above any human
significance. As Byron explains in one of his many footnotes, which are essential to the poem’s integrity,
when describing the scenery of the Alps where Rousseau set his novel Julie: “If Rousseau had never
written, nor lived, the same associations would not less have belonged to such scenes. He has added to
the interest of his works by their adoption; he has shown his sense of their beauty by the selection; but
they have done that for him which no human being could do for them” (note to III, l. 940).
This is a telling claim. When canto III of Childe Harold came out, Wordsworth complained about Byron
(who, like Shelley, is often talking about the still-living Wordsworth when he refers to Rousseau) that his
hymn to nature was derived from Tintern Abbey. There is much justice in this claim. Byron had described
himself in canto II as the child of nature, as “Her neverwean’d, though not her favour’d child” (II, l. 328).
If we take Wordsworth to be her favorite child (as he himself often claimed), then we can see that Byron’s
relationship to nature is not quite Wordsworthian. For Wordsworth, it is nature that instills within him his
vocation as a poet, even if in the end he can transcend nature and plumb the depths of his own soul.
Indeed, it is that exploration of selfhood that makes poetic vocation greater and deeper than the
experience of nature that catalyzes it. But for Byron, nature is greater than the poet who celebrates her.
Poetry is our trivial human way of recording our experience of nature. However, nature is all in all.
(Shelley’s “Mont Blanc,” written during the summer he and Byron both visited the mountain and the
surrounding regions, is a kind of rebuttal of this conclusion.)

The odd and paradoxical effect of Childe Harold is that it testifies to the most important fact about Byron
as a poet: Unlike any of the other romantics, he did not imagine being a poet as a transcendent fact. His
refusal of such a claim is part of his greatness, but it is a refusal nonetheless. In comparing himself with
Napoleon and with Rousseau, he is acknowledging the ultimate triviality of what he is doing, even while
using the language of overweening pride. His poetry is more fully about nature than that of any other
romantic poet, because it is least about the depths of selfhood. Of course, Byron’s overwhelming and
intoxicating personality can be felt in every page he writes. But he refuses to go deep, and this refusal
returns us to the nature and freedom from self that he found in nature. Poetry is for Byron a means, and
not an end: a means to finding freedom finally in the nature it celebrates. It is this fact—most palpable
in Childe Harold—that displays both Byron’s greatness and his limitations. Those limitations are the very
subject of his poetry; they are what make it great, and they are also where he finds the freedom to be
overwhelming and intoxicating, a freedom he preferred to the implacable demands of the uncompromising
poetic vocation of the other romantics.
The first lines of this section of ‘Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage’ are some of the poet’s best-known. He writes
of the “pathless woods,” “lonely shore,” and his love for nature. The celebration of nature’s beauty and
power is a theme found throughout Byron’s work (and the work of others from this period). 
The poet opens this section by speaking of all the pleasures that can be taken from nature and how his
love for the natural world does not decrease his love of humankind. The two things exist at the same
time. The poet’s speaker emphasizes the fact that when he spends time in nature, he feels as though he’s
mingled with the Universe or merged with the world and all its complex pieces. He’s hoping to convey this
connection to the reader and inspire them to consider nature in the same way. It’s hard for him to
express the way that these experiences make him feel, he continues on to say, but he also has a hard
time “conceal[ing]” or hiding his feelings. These two facts of his experience are what drive the following
lines. 
In the section entitled “Apostrophe to the Ocean” Byron does his best to explain the overwhelming power
and justice of the ocean. While he acknowledges his inability to fully describe these characteristics, he
also proclaims the truth of his statements. He writes, “ . . . I steal / From all I may be, or have been
before, / To mingle with the Universe, and feel / What I can ne’er express, yet can not all conceal” (lines
1599-1602). He describes leaving behind his previous self—somewhat like shedding a skin—and looking
with honesty at the truth of things or the things which cannot be concealed. He writes of facts that cannot
be hidden either through intentional disguises or through a lack of appropriate words. Byron appears to be
rejecting the falseness of men, the claims of human dominance, and the façade of civilization. Byron looks
at the works of men that were designed to conquer lesser things and sees failure and pretence. He writes,
“Ten thousand fleets sweep over thee in vain; / Man marks the earth with ruin—his control / Stops with
the shore” (lines 1604-1606).