Lord Byron's Death Day

Saturday is the 184th anniversary of the death of Lord Byron. At the age of 36 he was way too young to die - from my elderly perspective, just a child - but any age is too young, isn’t it? Each year I think of him and what he might have contributed to the world had he just managed to live a few years longer. He might have finished his mammoth poem “Don Juan” - he might have led the Greek resistance against Turkish occupation. He might have traveled to America or helped liberate the Irish from the English. He had so many aspirations unfulfilled. Ah well . . .

On this occasion I thought I would post an excerpt from my own mammoth parody of “Don Juan” inspired by the International Byron Society 200th Birthday Tour of England and Scotland (111 pages. Yikes!):


"You will have heard of our journeys
and escapes, and so forth, perhaps
with some exaggeration; but it is all
very well now."
Lord Byron
(Missolonghi, 23 February 1824
Two months prior to death)


THE GHOST OF LORD BYRON PONDERS A TOAST OFFERED ON THE ANNIVERSARY OF HIS BIRTH

The candles snuffed, a still-life left
of rumpled serviettes and lipsticked goblets,
smeary serving plates and cutlery in disarray
waiting for a waiter's tray. Low voices
dwindled out the door - yet I lingered more.

Implications flooded from the words
the woman said - "To the next two hundred".
Spoken, irretrievable, unsettling -
was there to be no end then
to my restless wandering?
No denouement, no illumination -
down the eons chained a victim
of my early fame, my mortal life
the grist of sick imaginations -
accused behind my back of incest,
seen by some a satanist,
male chauvinist, egoist, sensualist?
A ridiculous collection of damnations
and irrefutable in my deceased
condition, my impossible situation.

Yet with that flash of revelation
I vowed to leave my prior, breathing life,
behind and concentrate on this ... whatever
it may be. Perhaps it is not worth my time,
thought I, to pine for what is gone.
And I have centuries ahead of me,
people to observe, places to Be.

I lingered days that week in Nottingham.
And I've been back since then --
once to watch the Byron Society plant a tree
upon the Abbey lawn (replacing an oak
I planted in the nineteenth century -
a dead stump now buried under ivy).
For I've learned that for a Pilgrim of Eternity
the goal and purpose of this life -
or any other form of sentience - is the journey.
And from all that I have seen and all I've been
I know I am nowhere near the end.

The End