Page 15 - GALIET EMPATHY and Byron´s Hero IV

what harmonies ever present, soul-stirring in what eternal springs near the ‘mountain reeds,’19 singing:
“My soul would drink those echoes. Oh, that I were The viewless spirit of a lovely sound,
A living voice, a breathing harmony,
A bodiless enjoyment – born and dying
With the blest tone which made me!”
(Manfred, I.2.52-56)
And in his secret yearnings for the unified garden, amidst thorns of despair and the reverse of certainty 3⁄4 this ambiguity, this in-betweenness of being: a twilight, an infinite horizon 3⁄4 amidst noble aspirations and dreams that cannot become the slightest reality, incapable of crossing Lethe’s river while still breathing; there, amongst guilt and Hades and a pitiless Astarte who denies every forgiveness and love, if she felt any, by uttering a questionably merciful death-prophecy and farewells, Manfred, dejected, whirls and whirls into Paz’s twice infinite, that relentless vortex and cosmic black hole that pierces his being with a suicidal grief for having remembered not his years, but every ploughing moment, and a piercing remorse for having either acted or not acted.
If sympathy is to weep, grieve, suffer, mourn, commiserate, and to weep again, Manfred’s invisible tears weep and weep.
19 Manfred. I.2.48. Heath, William. Major British Poets of the Romantic Period. New York: McMillan Publishing Co., 1973.
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