Essays on literary works - 2023

Lyrical hero of George Byron
Lord George Gordon Byron

George Gordon Byron was a romantic both in his work and in his life. Byron was handsome but lame from birth. His family was very old, had family ties with the English and Scottish kings, but the estate and title of Byron were received only in the 16th century, and in the 17th century, the English bourgeois revolution led the family to decline. All this shaped the personality of the poet and the themes of his work.

Byron was criticized that his poems were like many others when his first collection of poems appeared. But the brave, proud and sincere Byron gave a worthy answer to the critics. His hero in the poem "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage" is endowed with the same character traits.

The poem has the form of a diary written by two people: the author himself and his hero. The hero of the poem after the first lines of an autobiographical character becomes only a name, he is displaced by the author, the distance between them almost disappears.

The desire to get to know people, dissatisfaction with reality, trying to test one's spiritual capabilities and strength are the goals of Childe Harold's pilgrimage, which were close to Byron himself.

Harold's disappointment and sadness do not depend on his wounded ego, family conflicts, unhappy love and other personal motives that play a significant role in his predecessors in literature. Byron's hero does not start a fight with society, but his inaction and contemplation is not a position of passivity. The main feature of Childe Harold as an artistic image is his incompleteness, the hero is meant to reflect the moment of the awakening of the self-awareness of a man of the new age, who begins to feel the consequences of historical changes on himself and in the world around him and to be aware of the tragic contradictions that were a characteristic feature of modernity.

Byron asks questions about the causes of social defects, national decline, ponders the contradictions and mysteries of the historical process, but expresses deep dissatisfaction with himself and reflects on the meaning of his work.

Byron's hero feels "World Sorrow" because the thirst for life, the powerful forces hidden in man, have no fruitful use. Harold passionately and sincerely perceives reality, but it is it that oppresses him. And he stands against the whole world, defending the right to inner individual freedom, primarily freedom of feelings. The poem "My soul is gloomy" is imbued with such a mood. The feeling of "world sorrow" is the main motive of the poem. The lyrical hero turns to the singer with a strange request: to sing such a song that the soul bursts into tears. "I want tears!" becomes a kind of refrain in which a challenge sounds. And only the end of the poem explains why such a strange request arises. "I want tears, because my heart breaks with suffering." The lyrical hero thinks like this: he will not be able to get away from life's suffering, and tears may bring relief at least for a while.

Such a romantic hero was close to many poets. Therefore, Byron's works were translated into different languages, and even a type of human behavior arose, which was called "Byronism."

Byron's lyrical hero arose under certain historical conditions and reflected the main problems of that time, the awakening of a person's sense of his uniqueness, his right to his own thoughts and feelings. Such a hero knows neither the causes of "world sorrow" nor how to get rid of it. 1 he reserves the right not to hide from her, but to suffer her.