The Byron Journal

Abstract

This essay explores Byron's poetry of departure in the first two cantos of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. It examines these cantos' treatment of history and genre, their use of rhyme and phrasal repetition, their negotiation of the relationship between narrator and character, and their themes of elegy and endurance. It argues that much which is dramatic and affecting in the opening cantos derives from an exilic rhetoric that is self-subverting and self-correcting.