ABSTRACT
Childe Harold III demands to be read as a record of ‘the “immediate, visible responses” of a human being’; as ‘an expression of self’. The whole stanza has a prayer-like quality, which climaxes in Lord Byron’s claim to feel ‘a sense’ of something which he is prepared to believe is a sense of ‘that which is of all Creator and defence’. Byron also lyrically dramatizes the discovery of an unlooked-for sense of divine presence which leaves him with a new and tentative ‘faith’. Byron’s second, and complementary, tactic is to put aside himself and the present pain that recalls the past, and turn instead to Harold. The poem’s advance is temporarily checked. Byron implies that in his own case a fertile and vital future is possible. His strategy for moving forward to that future is to recover ‘a sense of his own vitality’ and a sense of self.
