The cambridge companion to british roman 249

Rethinking Romantic poetry and history I speak not – I trace not – I breathe not thy name, There is grief in the sound – there were guilt in the fame; But the tear which now burns on my cheek may impart The deep thought that dwells in that silence of heart (ll 1–4) “Thou hast asked me for a song,” Byron wrote in sending these “Stanzas” to Moore, “and I enclose you an experiment, which has cost me something more than trouble.”15 The “trouble” in question is usually assumed to refer to Byron’s sexual intimacy with his half-sister Augusta Leigh, the addressee of “Stanzas.” But it may also refer to the kind of lyric “experiment” that Byron is engaging in here A year after the first two cantos of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage had made him unprecedentedly famous, Byron enacts an unspeakably private lyric defiance through a characteristic rhetoric of expressive resistance that reveals as it conceals – and also through the anapestic cadences of Moore’s elegiac tribute to Robert Emmet from Irish Melodies: Oh! Breathe not his name, let it sleep in the shade, Where cold and unhonor’d his relics are laid (ll 1–2) In contrast to Moore’s deferential gesture of refusing to name, Byron’s is at once imperious and self-exposing The speaker/singer’s passionate connection with and commitment to the “thou” of the poem is at the same time an act of public defiance Lyric subjectivity here becomes a function of the ways in which this public defiance gets turned back into wished-for, denied, and impossible intimacy At the end of the poem the heartless may wonder at all we resign, Thy lip shall reply not to them – but to mine (ll 19–20) This lyric was not published until five years after Byron’s death, so we have to read its construction of fraught private intensity out of conflicted celebrity by projecting beyond the immediate circumstances of Byron’s actual relations in 1814 with his newly conquered readership In this respect the poem is a lyric “experiment” with a delayed public reception Yet the implications of these “Stanzas” for an exploration of lyric resistance and seduction are all the more suggestive for the poem’s being withheld from publication Among other things, they put under revealing critical pressure John Stuart Mill’s classic pronouncement that “eloquence is heard; poetry is overheard.” What Byron’s readers both hear and overhear in this poem is a seductive challenge to their own right to listen And what 227 Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008