'Accomplished verse' and 'awakened hearts': Byron's 'Thyrza' Poems

Abstract

Leslie Marchand commented that someone should write extensively about the Thyrza poems but no one has yet done so. This essay is not a full tilt at them but a foray into their territory, especially that of 'And thou art dead', under two decayed but still serviceable banners which now fly 'against the wind': form and content. To begin with form is not to begin where most accounts of these poems begin, that is to say in biography and in feeling. Manifestly, without Byron's feelings for a real exchoirboy, John Edleston, and his real death, these poems would not have been written but they originate too in a certain sort of idiom which is as much designed to keep feelings and biography at a distance as it is to express them. This is one reason why they are properly known as 'Thyrza poems'. The 'certain sort of idiom' is what makes them what they are, what we first notice about them, what binds them together as a group and is expressive in itself. How do we know, for instance, that such and such a poem is a 'Thyrza poem'? It cannot be simply the reference to Edleston for in that case the two stanzas (95 and 96) on Edleston's death at the end of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage II would count as Thyrza poems. They do not do so because they are too impassioned and yet sapiential, and thus too far from song: Oh! Ever loving, lovely, and beloved! How selfish Sorrow ponders on the past, (II, 95) and they reveal too much about the speaker: All thou could'st have of mine, stern Death! thou hast; The parent, friend, and now the more than friend. (II, 96) There is no attempt at a Thyrza mystery here.1 More striking still, the turn, in the next stanza, away from this sentiment of pondering the past is the exact opposite of the Thyrza poems: Then must I plunge again into the crowd, And follow all that Peace disdains to seek? (II, 97) It is put as a question to which the answer is given in almost the last lines of the canto - 'Roll on vain days'. Such a movement away from memory ('selfish Sorrow') is the antithesis of the Latin motto to 'And thou art dead'. What Byron quotes there is this phrase: 'Heu, quanto minus est cum reliquis versari quam tui meminisse'.2 The verse can be translated more or less literally as 'Alas! How much less a thing it is to engage with those remaining than to remember thee'. It is part of a longer inscription which was composed by Shenstone and created for an ornamental urn to commemorate the death of Mary Dollman, a relative of Shenstone's, who died aged twenty-one (the same age as Edleston). The short form of the quotation was well known but Byron may well have come across it through reading Rogers's Pleasures of Memory which quotes it in a footnote to these lines:3 Thus, with the manly glow of honest pride O'er his dead son the gallant ORMOND sighed, Thus, thro' the gloom of Shenstone's fairy grove, MARIA's urn still breathes the voice of love.4 The reference to Ormond here is of course to the figure whom Dryden wonderfully salutes as Barzillai in Absalom and Achitophel (817-45) and whose grief for his son's early death sounds the Vergilian note that accomplishes such a profound change of mood in that poem.5 By naming eighteenth-century Shenstone's graceful, bookish epitaph to a dead girl, Dryden's elegiac lines based on a father's lament for his dead son, which echoes Aeneas's memory of his dead father, and the Latin language in which both are couched, we will come closer to the Thyrza poems than by a discussion of the plight of homosexuals in Regency England. Even the issue of Thyrza's gender is best approached this way. The wonderful opening phrase - 'And thou art dead as young and fair' - has an English song rhythm but a Latin cadence. There is for instance in one of Gray's Latin poems a line that begins 'Tuque Oh!' ('O and thou'),6 which suggests that there is a simultaneous element of exclamation and apostrophe in Byron's 'And thou art dead'. …