Page 12 - GALIET EMPATHY and Byron´s Hero IV

root,’12 tormented, ensnared, forbidden to rejoice, to whom night will deny its starry quietude and sun its glimmering nude, and who, in his end of ends, defiantly, yet foolishly13 claims to be ‘his own destroyer and hereafter?” Refusing to be ‘a living lie’ and disdaining ‘to mingle with/A herd,’ his lionesque spirit leads wild wolves and not tamed men.14 Wanting to be his very self, he struggles. “He is a dialogue between mutability and identity, change and continuity,”15 says Paz. As such, he is one yet many: Prometheus, Phaeton and Icarus; Centaur and Minotaur; Dionysus and Apollo; Nietzsche’s Ubermensch and Camus’ metaphysical rebel. An ever-changing Hero and a radical individualist whose ennui and unique identity, torn and tossed amidst humanity’s sympathy ideal and the apathy of the real, is isolated in this urgent desert which only knows how to scorch his own-most nature:
“Because my nature was averse from life;
And yet not cruel; for I would not make,
But find a desolation. Like the Wind,
The red-hot breath of the most lone Simoorn, Which dwells but in the desert, and sweeps o’er The barren sands which bear no shrubs to blast, And revels o’ver their wild and arid waves,
And seeketh not, so that it is not sought,
12 Manfred, I.2.68. Heath, William. Major British Poets of the Romantic Period. New York: McMillan Publishing Co., 1973.
13 In truth, Astarte, like the Fates, controls his destiny. She determines and prophesizes his death.
14 Manfred III, 117-123. Heath, William. Major British Poets of the Romantic Period. New York: McMillan Publishing Co., 1973.
15 Paz, Octavio. La Otra Voz y Poesía y Fin de Siglo. Madrid: Seix Barral, 1990.
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