'A magic voice and verse': Byron's Approaches to the Ode, 1814–16

Abstract

The Romantic ode steeps itself in the turbulent waters of the mind's and heart's debates with themselves. These debates can take many forms, as Paul H. Fry indicates when contrasting Keats's odes with Wordsworth's and Coleridge's: Keats's odes, writes Fry, are 'not secretly ambivalent but candidly two-faced, or even many-faced'.1 Byron, too, thrives on the 'candidly two-faced', or even the manipulatively dissembling, and some of his finest shorter poems deserve to be associated with Romantic odes more commonly than is usually allowed by critics: in part, perhaps, because of Byron's jeer in English Bards and Scotch Reviewers at Coleridge's fondness for 'turgid ode, and tumid stanza' (196). The poems by Byron discussed in the present essay often wish to give themselves freedom from, even as they draw on, conventions associated with the ode, and thus form intriguing examples of an individual talent's creative way with tradition. 1816 was an annus mirabilis in Byron's career, the year he met Shelley, and, as significantly, learned, via Shelley, to admire Wordsworth's poetic power. It is also a year when a blend of artistic control with difficult and goading feeling issues, for Byron, in poems that have something of the force of the ode. Wordsworth wrote in a note to 'Tintern Abbey' in the 1800 edition of Lyrical Ballads: 'I have not ventured to call this Poem an Ode; but it was written with a hope that in the transitions, and in the impassioned music of the versification would be found the principal requisites of that species of composition'.2 The comment intrigues; it shows a leading Romantic poet framing a poem in loose but intense relationship with a traditional form. In a comparable way, Byron derives imaginative nourishment from the example of the ode. If odes invoke, summon, plead, exhort and put us under a spell, so too does the Incantation from the first act of Manfred. The Incantation, first published as a separate piece in Byron's 1816 collection, The Prisoner of Chillon and Other Poems, contains 'impassioned music' and 'transitions', transitions possessing the quality of 'defensive paradox' of which Byron speaks in '[Epistle to Augusta]' (3). 'Defensive paradox' implies a fightback, organised under the standard of deftly sinuous language, against the slings and arrows of misfortune, and it nerves the poems discussed in this essay. On the first publication of the Incantation, Byron claimed that it was 'a Chorus in an unfinished Witch drama, which was begun some years ago',3 a claim that suggests the Incantation's genesis in the genre of choral ode. In the context of Manfred, it is spoken to Manfred by an unknown voice, but it also can be read as a poem spoken by Byron to his wife. The Incantation, like the work as a whole, thrives on a sense that the fictive cloaks the real. A two-way discharge of emotional poison is appropriate for a poem that is full of doublings. So, in the fourth stanza, Byron writes: And a magic voice and verse Hath baptized thee with a curse; And a spirit of the air Hath begirt thee with a snare; In the wind there is a voice Shall forbid thee to rejoice; And to thee shall Night deny All the quiet of her sky; And the day shall have a sun Which shall make thee wish it done. (I, i, 222-31) Here, the words are joined asunder; associations are married and divorced in the same breath. The 'magic voice and verse' may belong to the past tense: they have 'baptized thee with a curse'. But they are also reawakened by or even summoned up during the Incantation until they materialise as the 'voice and verse' which we are now hearing and reading.4 The mesmeric rhythm ensures that the reader will concede the potency of Byron's art. Yet the 'verse' turns immediately into the 'curse' to which it cedes supremacy in the embrace of rhyme. Any sacrament of the word is interfused with the diabolic. Intimacy and loathing writhe round one another; love and hate fuse. …