The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters - August 15, 2026


PREVIEW： Chronicles #59 ｜ Childe Harold's Pilgrimage with Rory： Part III


Episode Stats


Length

17 minutes

Words per minute

142.34

Word count

2,424

Sentence count

117

Harmful content

Toxicity

3

sentences flagged


Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
00:00:00.000 Hello and welcome back to Chronicles where today we're going to be carrying on talking all about
00:00:18.120 Childe Harold's pilgrimage by Lord Byron. I'm once again pleased to be joined by Rory.
00:00:23.220 Hello.
00:00:23.620 And we're going to be talking about the final two cantos hopefully in this final recording.
00:00:30.000 It makes sense to split these two cantos off from the first two
00:00:33.540 because, as we mentioned previously,
00:00:35.200 those first two cantos were actually written back-to-back
00:00:38.840 as a result of one European continental adventure
00:00:43.520 after Byron's uni years to go off and have the Grand Tour.
00:00:47.800 And, of course, you had the grand backdrop of the Peninsular War.
00:00:51.740 You, of course, had the brooding menace of the Ottoman Turks
00:00:57.320 bearing down on beloved Greece.
00:01:00.000 You know, Byron, obviously, absolutely besotted by Greece.
00:01:03.860 And now we find these two cantos written in very, very different circumstances.
00:01:08.760 Yeah, different times as well.
00:01:10.100 Yeah.
00:01:10.720 So the first one, Canto III, was written in 1816, and Canto IV was written in 1818,
00:01:18.300 or at least that's when they were published.
00:01:20.060 They were obviously written over several months before they came out.
00:01:24.320 But it's really important to ground these two cantos in the context of when they were written, because you can't fully appreciate them without appreciating the personal troubles that Byron was experiencing in his life at this point.
00:01:39.840 Now, obviously, Trouble and Byron were never too far afield from one another
00:01:45.460 throughout all of his life, but this was really paradigm-changing for him
00:01:51.000 because what we found was after writing the first two cantos
00:01:56.000 of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Byron comes back and finds himself
00:02:01.140 the most celebrated poet of his age.
00:02:04.560 All of the women want to meet him.
00:02:06.460 All of the women adore him, some of the men as well.
00:02:09.840 And ultimately, we find the man who was invited to all of the dinner parties of high society as well.
00:02:18.160 He is Lord Byron.
00:02:19.960 So that means he does actually have a seat in the House of Lords as well.
00:02:24.300 He's involved in politics and he's involved in all of the institutions of power and surrounds himself by all the noblest.
00:02:34.140 who he has spent a lot of time kind of criticising a lot of the Canton hypocrisy within society.
00:02:41.820 He made a speech in the Lords about Ireland supporting Irish emancipation and whatnot.
00:02:47.300 Not popular for the time.
00:02:48.260 It wasn't particularly popular.
00:02:49.300 No.
00:02:50.220 But all of this was nothing compared to the fact that, of course, as his fame grew
00:02:55.620 and as the celebrity of who Byron was grew,
00:02:59.940 so too grew of course naturally the attention upon his personal life the myth the myth of who
00:03:08.100 he was of the bad boy of this this great byronic rogue that he had started out with and also as
00:03:15.080 well i mean if they were if the public were going to be looking into byron's personal life well
00:03:22.900 they were never going to be short on material to find uh because of how scandalous and how
00:03:29.060 adventurous and um uh licentious it was yes and uh yeah maybe even incestuous so um all of this
00:03:38.300 came to a head come the time of 1815 byron has finally married yeah uh he's married to um
00:03:46.200 annabella milbank who is the daughter of uh two parents of noble background uh and it's quite
00:03:53.660 interesting as well, because originally, so it often is, Anna originally began as one of the
00:04:00.140 girls who was actually trying to keep him at an arm's length, was saying, no, no, no, I know what
00:04:05.400 you are, Mr. Byron, and that won't work on me. She was actually a very, very devout, very pious
00:04:11.240 woman, very religiously minded. And eventually, there's no illusions about the man that she was
00:04:20.400 marrying she but she did eventually fall in love with him she knew all of the wonderful glories
00:04:26.900 of what it meant to be byron and she also understood very well the dark pits of what
00:04:33.780 that would mean as well and she decided that she was going to make a go of it she was going to try
00:04:40.360 to start a life with this man that she dearly loved and um obviously it wasn't too long before
00:04:46.800 quite quickly fell apart complications arose yeah but wow the two real products there was
00:04:54.800 the child ada lovelace yes and then the other product from their marriage was basically
00:05:01.980 her turning around and essentially ruining his reputation by spreading not only rumors with his
00:05:09.140 affairs and promiscuity but also the fact that he was engaging in not only incestuous acts but 0.67
00:05:18.100 homosexual acts which at that time could be i think he could be executed at the time yes she 0.83
00:05:25.140 was accusing him they were talking about the fact that he had tried to sodomize her yeah which
00:05:31.020 obviously man or woman just legally absolutely a no-no uh to put it mildly uh and so all of these
00:05:40.260 stories i mean they are just the house of lords are talking about them the polite society is
00:05:47.620 talking about the gentleman's clubs just everyone yeah everyone's talking about the papers you know
00:05:53.480 how it is even people are the same in every age they gossip and they they love to make grand
00:06:00.360 embellishments out of people but of course byron did of course bring it all on himself as well
00:06:05.320 and i'm not going to sit here and be an arch byron defender he was a volatile man he was an
00:06:13.420 unfaithful man he was a man who was one of the most imaginative and creative poets that i've
00:06:20.280 ever read and he's also the sort of man that being the right company would have been utterly
00:06:26.340 exhausting to have been around i mean it accepts that like yeah there's a stanza in cante fore
00:06:31.780 it talks about thorns you know yes yeah which we'll definitely get to and because it's those
00:06:36.820 sorts of passages that do still give me a a soft endearment to him because he knew what he was
00:06:46.500 and he he was always tortured by who he was who what he wanted to be better but at least unlike
00:06:56.100 the rest of society, he wasn't going around pretending to be better than he was either.
00:07:02.660 He wasn't a hypocrite. 0.54
00:07:03.620 No. Ada has just been born. His only legitimate daughter, Byron, being a man of his time,
00:07:11.300 was very disappointed that he'd had a daughter and not a son. Eventually it's decided, as all
00:07:18.660 of this legal action is circling around him, that between all of the scandal between him,
00:07:23.860 his wife, his half-sister Augusta Lee, who Ada was named after as well, Augusta Ada,
00:07:32.100 later on marrying into the Lovelace family to give her surname. But all of this is swirling
00:07:39.060 about him and eventually Byron is blindsided by the papers for actual formal separation
00:07:46.740 from his wife, Annabella.
00:07:50.420 And after this and after...
00:07:52.260 He doesn't try to pursue custody of Ada as well,
00:07:57.280 even though it was his paternal right to do so.
00:08:00.900 Instead, what he does is just realises
00:08:02.920 that the life that he'd had in London
00:08:05.280 is destroyed for all time on the social level.
00:08:09.240 People mean him harm.
00:08:10.900 People wish violence about him.
00:08:12.420 He's got to go.
00:08:13.040 Yeah, he's got to go.
00:08:13.880 And so he does.
00:08:14.740 And so perhaps within that context, it's not surprising to us to find him returning to that poem, to that wayward spirit, out shunned from the rest of society, meditating around a bleak and distant landscape, and returning to that poem and that character that had originally made him famous, and returning to child Harold.
00:08:40.620 And so we find Harold now at the beginning of Canto III, once again, stepping through many of the places that Byron himself would visit.
00:08:54.080 He stands upon, Harold and Byron stand upon the very ground where Waterloo was fought just the year before in 1815.
00:09:03.160 We also have Byron going down the Rhine across the confederation of...
00:09:09.700 Lake Geneva as well.
00:09:10.700 Lake Geneva, where, of course, he met Percy Shelley and Mary Shelley.
00:09:15.940 In the summer without...
00:09:16.860 Sorry, the winter of the year without a summer.
00:09:19.180 Yes.
00:09:19.780 Yeah, there was some sort of...
00:09:20.900 What was it?
00:09:21.380 Volcanic eruption.
00:09:22.260 Over in Indonesia.
00:09:23.600 I don't know if it's...
00:09:24.100 It might have been Krakatoa.
00:09:25.540 Right.
00:09:25.980 It might all have been Krakatoa.
00:09:26.760 Yeah.
00:09:27.300 Don't hold me to that.
00:09:28.080 But it caused basically a mini ice age for a year.
00:09:31.640 Right.
00:09:31.920 and starved a lot of the population of Europe, or Eastern Europe at least.
00:09:36.000 That's what the inspiration for Frankenstein came from.
00:09:38.960 They were at this chalet on Lake Geneva and they saw the starving peasants walking through, emaciated.
00:09:45.120 Right.
00:09:45.520 And that's where Mary Shelley got there.
00:09:47.200 Very grim.
00:09:48.080 Powerful story there.
00:09:49.120 Love Frankenstein.
00:09:50.400 Yeah.
00:09:50.880 We end up with the beginning of a story.
00:09:54.080 And I want to just read the first stanza.
00:09:57.200 And it's so important to do so because it immediately invites us into the mental state of Byron as he begins writing this.
00:10:07.320 He says,
00:10:27.200 And he circles back to this entire canto, really being dedicated to Ava as well, towards the end.
00:10:44.180 And so within this, Byron understands that he may never live to actually have a personal relationship with his daughter,
00:10:53.340 who is merely weeks old at this point.
00:10:57.200 And on the one hand, yes, whatever disappointment he might have felt
00:11:00.900 about her being a girl to begin with, he obviously,
00:11:06.120 something snaps in his head and he realises that this is possibly,
00:11:11.820 this was one of the few people who knew into my life
00:11:16.480 who could have been someone that I could have actually put a lot of hope into.
00:11:22.200 And it could have perhaps helped me to become a better man,
00:11:26.500 to become a more dutiful man, to become a more honourable man.
00:11:30.440 And we find Byron, obviously, as I say,
00:11:33.100 eventually finding that outlet in the Greek War of Independence.
00:11:36.700 But in his exile, he's unmauled from England, politically at least.
00:11:40.700 He's not got anything there holding him or affecting him
00:11:44.520 other than his daughter who's left behind.
00:11:46.740 Yeah, absolutely.
00:11:48.780 Everything else can be discarded.
00:11:51.600 And so then we come to, I've bookmarked to just begin
00:11:54.540 talking about stanza five where he says he who grown old in the world of woe in deeds not years
00:12:01.220 piercing the depths of life so that no wonder waits him nor below can love or sorrow fame ambition
00:12:08.300 strife cut to his heart again with a keen knife of silent sharp endurance he can tell why thoughts
00:12:15.360 seek refuge in lone caves yet rife with airy images and shapes which dwell still unimpaired
00:12:21.880 though old, in the soul's haunted cell. Tis to create, and in creating live, a being more intense
00:12:29.500 than we endow, with form or fancy, gaining as we give, the life we image, even as I do now.
00:12:36.540 What am I? Nothing, but not so art thou, soul of my thought, with whom I traverse earth,
00:12:43.080 invisible but gazing as I glow, mixed with thy spirit, blended with thy birth, and feeling still
00:12:50.380 with thee in my crush feelings dearth within these two stances he's already in stanza four he's
00:12:56.460 already brought harold back into the story and so this is from harold's mindset yeah and one of the
00:13:03.040 things that you can obviously tell where there is so much overlap between the two of them is the
00:13:09.220 fact that what byron byron's just incredible creativity his remarkable imagination and his
00:13:18.020 I suppose the word I'm looking for is his wanderlust about the world,
00:13:22.600 the natural world, and about everything that he meditates on.
00:13:26.200 It's an escape mechanism to get away from all of the hurt and suffering,
00:13:32.740 all of the things that I lay out there, love, sorrow, fame, ambition, strife,
00:13:37.560 just allows you to get away from the human element
00:13:41.560 that these things are so important to,
00:13:44.880 and to actually surround yourself by nature, by the natural world.
00:13:51.420 And so obviously he goes out and we find him standing upon the field of Waterloo.
00:13:56.800 And I'm not going to read extensively from it, but they are some wonderful passages.
00:14:03.140 And there are so many just little lines from it.
00:14:06.060 There's one, for example, of a major Howard who Byron is lamenting
00:14:11.480 And he laments on the fact that Howard dies against this tree.
00:14:18.180 Yes.
00:14:18.500 You know, he dies against this tree and that his life gives out as the tree's life continues to thrive.
00:14:25.000 And not just as the tree continues to thrive, but the life of nature continues to persevere.
00:14:30.060 There's also a line in there, I forget exactly what it says, but he's expressing profound guilt over Howard as well.
00:14:38.360 because Byron himself had criticised the Howard family in a pamphlet.
00:14:45.260 So, yeah, there's this profound melancholy throughout both Cantos 3 and 4.
00:14:51.340 And seeking to make amends.
00:14:53.680 Yeah.
00:14:54.340 Because this is...
00:14:55.200 There's a maturation in his...
00:14:58.080 Even in the prose itself, it's a lot more grounded and earthy.
00:15:02.880 I agree.
00:15:04.500 And I think it comes back to one of the other things
00:15:07.320 which is prominent throughout the entirety of Childe Harold but really comes to the fore here,
00:15:15.320 and particularly in Canto IV when it comes to Rome and their empire,
00:15:23.320 is the fact that what Byron is invoking is the fact that, look, you can be Napoleon,
00:15:29.320 you can conquer your way across Europe, you can have these grand sweeping victories,
00:15:34.320 But what it's actually come to is millions dead on every side, the wastage of an entire generation of people for political interests that were actually quite far removed from those that were designed to alleviate the plight of the common man and actually is supposed to go about seeking martial prowess.
00:15:59.780 So he obviously, as we've touched on before, Byron is romantic about war when it is fought for the cause of freedom, for independence from foreign hosts and for a people to regain their own vitality and dignity.
00:16:18.260 That's fair.
00:16:19.280 What is not fair is a bunch of absolute monarchies throwing their people into the meat grinder.
00:16:25.400 Yeah.
00:16:25.740 Obviously, we spoke before, he admired Napoleon.
00:16:29.060 Yes.
00:16:29.780 at least the ideal of Napoleon.
00:16:33.460 He's happy that Napoleon's despotism has been,
00:16:37.980 you know, 1815 ended, you know, ended Napoleon.
00:16:42.240 However, he laments the fact that what followed
00:16:45.180 was just the restoration of the monarchies.
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