THE LAST VERSES OF 

CHILDE HAROLD'S PILGRIMAGE

By Lord Byron

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   The armaments which thunderstrike the walls

   Of rock-built cities, bidding nations quake,

   And monarchs tremble in their capitals.

   The oak leviathans, whose huge ribs make

   Their clay creator the vain title take

   Of lord of thee, and arbiter of war;

   These are thy toys, and, as the snowy flake,

   They melt into thy yeast of waves, which mar

Alike the Armada's pride, or spoils of Trafalgar.

CLXXXII.

   Thy shores are empires, changed in all save thee—

   Assyria, Greece, Rome, Carthage, what are they?

   Thy waters washed them power while they were free

   And many a tyrant since:  their shores obey

   The stranger, slave, or savage; their decay

   Has dried up realms to deserts:  not so thou,

   Unchangeable save to thy wild waves' play—

   Time writes no wrinkle on thine azure brow—

Such as creation's dawn beheld, thou rollest now.

CLXXXIII.

   Thou glorious mirror, where the Almighty's form

   Glasses itself in tempests; in all time,

   Calm or convulsed—in breeze, or gale, or storm,

   Icing the pole, or in the torrid clime

   Dark-heaving;—boundless, endless, and sublime—

   The image of Eternity—the throne

   Of the Invisible; even from out thy slime

   The monsters of the deep are made; each zone

Obeys thee:  thou goest forth, dread, fathomless, alone.

CLXXXIV.

   And I have loved thee, Ocean! and my joy

   Of youthful sports was on thy breast to be

   Borne like thy bubbles, onward:  from a boy

   I wantoned with thy breakers—they to me

   Were a delight; and if the freshening sea

   Made them a terror—'twas a pleasing fear,

   For I was as it were a child of thee,

   And trusted to thy billows far and near,

And laid my hand upon thy mane—as I do here.

CLXXXV.

   My task is done—my song hath ceased—my theme

   Has died into an echo; it is fit

   The spell should break of this protracted dream.

   The torch shall be extinguished which hath lit

   My midnight lamp—and what is writ, is writ—

   Would it were worthier! but I am not now

   That which I have been—and my visions flit

   Less palpably before me—and the glow

Which in my spirit dwelt is fluttering, faint, and low.

CLXXXVI.

   Farewell! a word that must be, and hath been—

   A sound which makes us linger; yet, farewell!

   Ye, who have traced the Pilgrim to the scene

   Which is his last, if in your memories dwell

   A thought which once was his, if on ye swell

   A single recollection, not in vain

   He wore his sandal-shoon and scallop shell;

   Farewell! with HIM alone may rest the pain,

If such there were—with YOU, the moral of his strain.

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/5131/5131-h/5131-h.htm

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George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron (22 January 1788 – 19 April 1824), was a British poet.[1][2] He was one of the major figures of the Romantic movement,[3][4][5] and is regarded as being among the greatest British poets.[6] Among his best-known works are the lengthy narratives Don Juan and Childe Harold's Pilgrimage; many of his shorter lyrics in Hebrew Melodies also became popular.

Byron was educated at Trinity College at the University of Cambridge. Following graduation, he travelled extensively in Europe, living for seven years in Italy, in Venice, Ravenna, Pisa, and Genoa, and then was forced to flee to England after receiving threats of lynching.[7] During his stay in Italy, he would frequently visit his friend and fellow poet Percy Bysshe Shelley.[8] Later in life, Byron joined the Greek War of Independence to fight the Ottoman Empire, for which Greeks revere him as a folk hero.[9] He died leading a campaign in 1824, at the age of 36, from a fever contracted after the first and second sieges of Missolonghi.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lord_Byron

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In the summer of 1831, the French composer Hector Berlioz was in Rome. The city was sweltering, and to escape the heat he would regularly take himself to St Peter's, sit in an empty confessional and read Byron. "I sat drinking in that burning poetry," he wrote in his memoirs. "I adored that inexorable yet tender nature - pitiless yet generous."

What Berlioz was doing was itself Byronic. Reading Byron in church - entering the world of the poet's outlawed, outcast, criminal heroes - was transgressive, an act deliberately chosen to generate private thrills in a place where no secrets should be kept from God.

Transgression is central to the work of Byron. The poet was to the literature of the past two centuries what Wagner was to music - a defining force that had to be assimilated or rejected if progress was to be made. His "burning poetry" burned everyone. Byron's influence pervaded every art form, and Berlioz was only one of countless composers affected. Not that the results were always successful. Isolated Byronic hauteur sits uneasily, for instance, with the democratic complexity of Italian opera: Verdi's versions of The Corsaire and The Two Foscari do not rank among his masterpieces.

READ MORE: https://www.theguardian.com/music/2003/aug/01/classicalmusicandopera.proms2003

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[GUSNOTE: IN "HAROLD IN ITALY" BERLIOZ USED SOME OF THE SYMPHONIE FANTASTIQUE MUSICAL LINES...]