ABSTRACT
The temptation to carry forward the name ‘Bonnivard’ is as strong as the temptation to read the ‘Promethean defiance’ into The Prisoner of Chillon. Torture bursts forth and momentarily carries the youth out of the world of romance altogether. Lord Byron’s instinct is to have the youth repress this outburst, calming him back into a public role. The Prisoner of Chillon begins at very much the same point as Childe Harold III does. And the correspondence gets stronger as the poem progresses. If The Prisoner of Chillon replicates, to some degree, the structure of Childe Harold III and describes a similar consciousness, and if Childe Harold III dramatizes the movement of one of these consciousnesses away from its initial condition to another, then The Prisoner of Chillon may do the same. Like Childe Harold III, The Prisoner of Chillon explores the psychological territory marked out in verse by William Wordsworth.
