Page 22 - GALIET EMPATHY and Byron´s Hero IV

wilderness, castle tower or self, to forget objectivity’s grim prison, its meaningless existence of worshipping echoes, precisely to overcome it so as to be pierced by freedom, even if only once, only once, while their beings, shrouded, wither away and away they wither, dejected and misunderstood, unsympathetic and alone, unloved and unloving, paradoxically being by not being:38
“I have not loved the World, nor the World me;
I have not flattered its rank breath, nor bowed
To its idolatries a patient knee,
Nor coined my cheek to smiles, -- nor cried aloud In worship of an echo: in the crowd
They could not deem me one of such – I stood Among them, but not of them – in a shroud...”
(Childe Harold, III, 113)
“...From my youth upwards
My Spirit walked not with the souls of men,
Nor looked upon the earth with human eyes;
The thirst of their ambition was not mine,
The aim of their existence was not mine;
My joys – my griefs – my passions – and my powers,
Made me a stranger; though I wore the form,
I had no sympathy with breathing flesh,
Nor midst the Creatures of Clay that girded me Was there but One who – but of her anon.
I said with men, and with the thoughts of men, I held but slight communion; but instead,
My joy was in the wilderness...”
(Manfred II. 2. 50-96)
38 Childe Harold. III.112. Heath, William. Major British Poets of the Romantic Period. New York: McMillan Publishing Co., 1973.
•22•