Page 11 - GALIET EMPATHY and Byron´s Hero IV

with clipped wings.’9 Manfred and Childe Harold are Byronic heroes whose complexity and dizziness of character encompass heaven and abyss, sunrise and sunset, rose and shroud, aether and Hades, at times as tender as a glittering girasol or as striking as thunder, at times infinitely sympathetic or apathetic, noble or villain, saint or Satan. Heroes who share Zeno’s paradox, that infinite universe existing between polarities of being, infinitely manifold, at times whole in nature, yet always socially fragmented: intriguing Hero whose volcanic spirit becomes a dreadful and dizzying cosmos. In the words of Octavio Paz, “modernity, after Milton’s Satan, begins with the discovery of the double infinite:”10 an infinite universe where the Byronic Hero relentlessly falls into an endless abyss: black vortex of existence where a nascent humanity having lost every mound and ground grapples with a newfound vertigo.
Who is this solitary, crepuscular spirit, this Archetype of Satan, this fabled angel of freedom, untamable, truest to self, self and only self? Who is this dizzying, ill-starred Hero cursed by a magic voice and verse,11 what ‘blighted trunk upon cursed
9 Byron. Childe Harold. Canto III. Stanza 12. Heath, William. Major British Poets of the Romantic Period. New York: McMillan Publishing Co., 1973.
Heath,William. MajorBritishPoetsoftheRomanticPeriod. NewYork:McMillanPublishingCo., 1973.10 Paz, Octavio. La Otra Voz y Poesía y Fin de Siglo. Madrid: Seix Barral, 1990.
11 Manfred, I.1.223-224. Heath, William. Major British Poets of the Romantic Period. New York: McMillan Publishing Co., 1973.
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