preview

Lord Byron's Manfred Essay

Better Essays

Lord Byron's Manfred

George Gordon, otherwise known as Lord Byron, was the most controversial poet of his

time. As one of the “second-generation” romantics, Byron fused together high romance with

a love of nature and tragic loss. He virtually invented the idea of romantic irony, or the idea of

the hero as a tragic figure who is born to “desire a transcendence that can never be achieved”

(Hogle, March 21 Lecture). Byron perfected this technique through the creation of what is now

called the Byronic hero. In his dramatic poem, Manfred, Byron makes ample use of the “Byronic

hero” in the figure of Manfred, a nobleman who aspires to create an identity for himself through

an almost divine sense of nature and …show more content…

Byron throws the flawed hero in the reader's face right away as the

very beginning finds Manfred conjuring spirits, ‘as great as he’ to help him forget the wrongs he

has committed on earth and which are now torturing him. In a soliloquy Manfred says, “Sorrow

is knowledge: they who know the most Must mourn the deepest o'er the fatal truth, The Tree of

Knowledge is not that of Life” (L2A Act I, Sc. I, ll. 10-12). As Manfred believes himself to be

above other mortals, he seeks an answer among the divine, feeling that only they “who know the

most” will understand and help him. Even from the beginning of the poem, Byron slips clues in:

“sorrow is knowledge”. He wishes: “Oh, that I were The viewless spirit of a lovely sound, A living voice, a breathing harmony, A bodiless enjoyment-born and dying With the blest tone

which made me!” (ll. 52-56). He wishes not just to observe nature as humans were meant to but

to take his quest for knowledge farther than any man before him: into the realm of its creator, to

be at one with nature in a way that is only possible for a non-human. The knowledge that the

empiricists so highly regard has not made him happy. In fact, it has caused and heightened his

misery, especially as it is impossible for him to achieve the transcendence with nature that he

desires.

Get Access