Page 19 - GALIET EMPATHY and Byron´s Hero IV

Manfred’s heart-rending agonies are sympathetic with humanism’s thousand-year-old tensions between paganism and Judeo-Christianity, myth and logos, fertility and death, matriarchy and patriarchy, and between that owl of Minerva, whose spanning wings traverse the crepuscule of philosophy and poetry: poesy that is heaven’s sublime breath. It is Manfred’s very idealism that compels him to be his desolation, poison and proper hell.25 Amidst his terrible ordeal, tossed between eternity and mutability, heaven and abyss 3⁄4 immortal sufferings 3⁄4 he resents rejection, cruelty and abhors the pouring of the vial that cursed his existence with a nature half- dust and half-divine, endowing him with low wants and a lofty will, neither capable to soar nor fully drown. He learns too, from an incantation, that out of man’s body parts man’s own bestiality is born: from tears, heart, smile and lips, the essence to kill, deceive and poison is distilled.26 Bleak reality torments Manfred’s utopian humanism at the gate of being and becoming. The others, the masses 3⁄4 Heidegger’s ‘they’ 3⁄4 he finds them to be artificial and decadent:27 cold breasted, deceitful and guileful hypocrites who delight in other’s pains,
25 Manfred, I.1.250. Heath, William. Major British Poets of the Romantic Period. New York: McMillan Publishing Co., 1973.
26 Manfred, I.1.251. Heath, William. Major British Poets of the Romantic Period. New York: McMillan Publishing Co., 1973.
27 As decadent as Don Juan’s journeys with English Aristocracy where Adeline and Lord Henry are queen and King of Artifice, so removed from the natural beauty of Haydee. Byron indeed shares Rousseau’s sentiment expressed in Heloise. Decadence is highly criticized by Byron in most of his works, particularly English Bards, Childe Harold and Manfred. Heath, William. Major British Poets of the Romantic Period. New York: McMillan Publishing Co., 1973.
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