“I would like to live in the mountains again...” (based on the poetry of George Byron) - Lord George Gordon Byron

Essays on literary works - 2023

“I would like to live in the mountains again...” (based on the poetry of George Byron)
Lord George Gordon Byron

So wrote the great English poet George Byron. An aristocrat by birth, he inherited the title of lord. He graduated from the aristocratic school, Cambridge University. He was a great worker of the spirit, knew many languages, left a great literary heritage. It is interesting that the poet's homeland was Scotland, a country with the same romantic and heroic history as Ukraine. And indeed, in the 19th century, when the poet lived, these countries — distant Scotland and our Ukraine — were really enveloped in romantic glory. It is no coincidence that both the genius of Russian literature OS Pushkin and the Englishman Byron refer to the image of Mazepa, the glorious Ukrainian hetman.

Byron, who inherited the rebellious spirit of his Scottish ancestors, exchanged a secure and peaceful life for the liberation struggle of the Greek people against Turkish enslavement. According to legend, Byron ordered his heart to be buried in Greece.

His poetry "I would like to live in the mountains again..." is full of the same rebellious spirit. The poet was a romantic, so "dark cliffs and ridges", "wild and gloomy wasteland", "stormy sky" beckoned him. It is the wild, untouched nature, formidable and majestic in its originality, that beckons the lyrical hero. He is ready to change the higher world, where a person cannot remain himself, but is forced to deceive, lie, adapt, for a life alone with nature, where the best features of a person are revealed, there is a test for strength. The very "stormy sky", which is always the background of rebellious, restless natures, beckons him. And his ideal is an eagle - he is not afraid of the sun and flies higher than all birds. For the poet, this is the height of the spirit, unencumbered by earthly concerns and endowed with a "non-malicious heart."