Rethinking Romantic poetry and history to ‘With a magic like to thee’),” Byron’s poem “may be said to achieve [its] own kind of decorum, a decorum not deriving from any impersonal convention or established mode.”16 This quirky notion of a “decorum” peculiar to a specific lyric event – a “decorum” established through departure from and therefore resistance to conventions that negatively define the rhetorical occasion – strikes me as a valuable way of understanding how Byron’s lyrics work to determine the terms on which they enter Regency literary culture Different as it is from the 1814 “Stanzas for Music,” “There be none of Beauty’s daughters” is linked to the earlier lyric through one of Byron’s signature figures, the “chain.” The pent-up violence of “We repent – we abjure – we will break from our chain” (1814, l 7) is transmuted rather than dissolved at the beginning of the later poem’s second stanza: And the midnight moon is weaving Her bright chain o’er the deep; (ll 9–10) Byron extends a sense of powerful agitated desire held in momentary affective suspension in the images of a “breast gently heaving” (l 11), of “a full but soft emotion, / Like the swell of Summer’s ocean” (ll 15–16) Historically this poem may be about John Edelston, Byron’s young Cambridge lover whose singing he adored and who died tragically in 1811, or about Claire Clairmont, Mary Shelley’s half-sister and Byron’s lover during the spring and summer of 1816 Or it may be about both of them: a lyric of transferred reference to two relationships in which singing produced and came to stand for the modulation of tumultuous desire and attachment The range of referential possibilities in this poem needs to be grasped in terms of a stylistic performance that seduces its readers by inviting but also resisting complete identification with the lyric moment, and that achieves a self-determining aura through what it makes of the determinations of poetic tradition What the dialectic of resistance and seduction in Byron’s lyrics cannot is prevent their acquiring the status of literary commodities as they become part of cultural history In stark contrast to the overtly commercial ambitions of Robinson and Moore, Byron refused to accept payment generated by the sale of his poetry until near the end of his career Yet the poems were sold nonetheless – and made huge profits for his publisher (For later publishers as well: the 1816 “Stanzas for Music” was included in Book Fourth of Palgrave’s Golden Treasury, positioned between lyrics by Scott and Shelley entitled, respectively, “Outlaw” and “Lines to an Indian Air.”) A consequence of this process, as Jerome Christensen has argued, was that “Lord Byron” inevitably became a commodified cultural identity, notwithstanding Byron’s own efforts inside and outside his writing to use his aristocratic privilege as a resource 229 Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008