Last Things: Essays on Ends and Endings

Abstract

This chapter is concerned with the function of laughter and irony in Byron's verse. Typically, the poet's levity is read as a "terminal" or "annihilating" gesture; this essay, by contrast, tests the cogency of more constructive, hopeful and hospitable readings. It has become customary to assume that Byron's poetry delights in terminations, and in particular willed or staged terminations. Perhaps the most elegant formulation of this view is Hoxie Fairchild's, who claimed that Byron was "too idealistic to refrain from blowing bubbles, and too realistic to refrain from pricking them." 2 Jerome McGann's favoured image, which he uses three times in Byron and Romanticism, is Samson in the temple: "Byron's is a poetry of spoliation where, like Samson among the Philistines, he pulls the temple down upon himself and everyone who comes to witness his prisoned strength." 3 Typically, the process of poetic demolition is described as a "debunking technique," 4 though a number of more or less synonymous alternatives have been proposed. According to Hazlitt, Byron hallows in order to desecrate, takes a pleasure in defacing the images of beauty his hands have wrought, and raises our hopes and our belief in goodness to Heaven only to dash them to the earth again, and break them in pieces the more effectually from the very height they have fallen. 5