ABSTRACT
This chapter is concerned with how Lord Byron pulls away from the ‘tragic’ Byronic hero in Childe Harold IV. It focuses on the fact that Childe Harold IV ‘helps to bridge the amazing gulf between Manfred and Beppo’. Childe Harold IV returns to, recovers, holds on to a mood of joyful celebration despite objects, like the Palatine, that draw Byron into melancholy despondency. Consciousness is never still in Childe Harold IV, but constantly moving from desolation to beauty, being drawn from despondency to enthusiasm, and slipping from delight to dismay. Childe Harold lyrically dramatizes moments of both near despair and moments of intense joy, and presents us with a speaker who is desolated, at times, by his fate, and at other times ‘dazzled and drunk’ with ‘what Mind can make’. Childe Harold effects a radical change in Byron’s practice as a poet.
