Marginalized Knowledge: An Agenda for Indigenous Knowledge Development and Integration with Other Forms of Knowledge

Childe Harold IV and “Beppo”

Catherine Addison², [e-mail] ,

Department of English,

University of Zululand,

South Africa

Positioning himself dramatically in the heart of the city of Venice at the beginning of Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage Canto IV, the narrator declares:
I stood in Venice, on the Bridge of Sighs;

A palace and a prison on each hand:

I saw from out the wave her structures rise

As from the stroke of an enchanter’s wand:

A thousand years their cloudy wings expand

Around me, and a dying Glory smiles

O’er the far times, when many a subject land

Look’d to the winged Lion’s marble piles,

Where Venice sat in state, throned on her hundred isles! (CH 4.1)
This speaker is very conscious of himself as the prophetic bard who, though recounting an event anchored in the material world, in a specific, famous place, is nevertheless able to command a pageant of past years imaginatively transformed and compressed into winged beings accompanied by a personified Glory and presided over by the equally winged Lion of St Mark’s. In the next few stanzas he extends his vision to include fictional as well as historical worlds when he mentions “Shylock,” “the Moor” and “Pierre” (4.4) in addition to “Suabian” and “Austrian” emperors, the poet Tasso and Dandolo, twelfth-century Doge of Venice (4.4-12).

The reader who has progressed through Cantos I, II and III of Childe Harold is not especially surprised at the narrator’s assumption of this vatic posture here, since she has already witnessed his growth into a transcendental presence, dominating all other identities in the poem. The putative hero, Childe Harold, apart from a brief reference to his longing for a specific “soft breast” (3.53-55), has shrunk by Canto III to a cardboard cutout, toted about and set up now and then in the foreground of a scene over which the narrator is preparing to fulminate. And, in fact, in the later parts of Canto III, Harold has not been mentioned for over sixty stanzas, so his absence here is not noteworthy. The narrator, having dropped the mask of ironic moralist assumed in the first few stanzas of Canto I, mostly and increasingly speaks in the voice of an elegiac visionary who, meditating in the high style upon the ruined but real things of this world, is flooded by images of other, lost, worlds, which cascade into his discourse with a fluency that often appears to carry all before it in its passionate intensity. He is perceptive, bitter, caring, occasionally ironical, but hardly ever comic.

In striking contrast, the narrator of “Beppo” is a very amused—and amusing—subjectivity, a listener to gossip and travellers’ tales, a frequenter of the Ridotto—at least when he is feeling “hippish” (see stanza 64 on the sheet)— full of a rueful self-knowledge which allows him to describe himself as “but a nameless sort of person / (A broken Dandy lately on [his] travels)” (52), to make veiled references to his recent separation from his bluestocking wife (79) and to claim that his poetic art is far from accomplished , taking “for rhyme, to hook [his] rambling verse on / The first that Walker’s Lexicon unravels” (52). In his discourse on Venice, he eschews prophetic vision in favour of close observation of the present and material; the spectacle of the Carnival, Venetian women’s beauty and flirtatiousness, local painting, gondolas, the Ridotto. Though recognizing the City’s—and his own—fallen state, he is continually aware of pleasurable present compensations for grief and loss. As in Childe Harold, he positions Venice’s “glory” in the “days of yore” (10), describes Italy’s present as her “Eve” and sees the painter “Raphael” as being a tragic lover of her past beauty (46). But adverbs such as “still” and “yet” keep cropping up as he reminds himself—and us—of continuing wonders: “They’ve pretty faces still, those same Venetians” (11) “the land which still is Paradise” (46) and “While yet Canova can create below” (46). And although, as in the past, Italian women may nowadays still be “suspect in fame,” things have actually improved since Othello’s day, because
since those times was never known a

Husband whom mere suspicion could inflame

To suffocate a wife no more than twenty,

Because she had a “cavalier servente.” (42)

Of course, this is exactly the point of “Beppo”: just as an appreciation of what is left us in the mundane present can lead to a realization of the present’s decided advantages over the past, so commonsense and camaraderie are disclosed as preferable to tragic vendetta, even if less “poetic,” because they are life-affirming.

The virtuoso narrator of this trove of bathetic delights is not a transcendental subject but a specific personality speaking directly to a friend—probably of the same class and gender as himself (8)—back in England. Consequently, instead of starting his disquisition on gondolas in the self-observing posture of “I stood in Venice on the Bridge of Sighs,” he begins with a question, as if his discourse were in fact dialogue:

Didst ever see a Gondola? For fear

You should not, I’ll describe it you exactly:

’Tis a long cover’d boat that’s common here,

Carved at the prow, built lightly, but compactly,

Row’d by two rowers, each called “Gondolier,”

It glides along the water looking blackly.

Just like a coffin clapt in a canoe,

Where none can make out what you say or do. (20)

The “coffin” simile is one of the poem’s many mementi mori, but its reminder is deliberately overwritten by the insinuations of the last line. And, for any reader too innocent or obtuse to get the point here, the narrator repeats it more explicitly in the closing couplet of the next stanza, still on the topic of gondolas:
And up and down the long canals they go,

And under the Rialto shoot along,

By night or day, all paces, swift or slow,

And round the theatres, a sable throng,

They wait in their dusk livery of woe,—

But not to them do woeful things belong,

For sometimes they contain a deal of fun,

Like mourning coaches when the funeral’s done. (21)

The contrast between these two poems’ personae is very dramatic, and it is highlighted not only by the fact that that they deal at length with the same subject—Venice—but also by their proximity of composition. Childe Harold IV and “Beppo” were both written in Venice between 1817 and 1818. The story of how Byron was becoming weary of the whole poetic endeavour as he approached the end of Childe Harold in late 1817 and how his encounter with Frere’s ottava rima poem, Whistlecraft, re-envigorated his poetic creativity and led directly to “Beppo” is well known (Letters and Journals 5:264-268). What is less well-known is that it was not just authorial intention or poetic tradition that gave rise to the differences between the narrative identities in Byron’s two poems.

On the one hand, authorial intention is that problematic desire, projected on the raw material of his or her art by the creator, to make it say exactly what she or he has in mind to say. Of course Byron had—or developed in reading Frere—a desire to write a comic poem in a lower style than Childe Harold, whose composition had dragged on for years, outliving its original purposes. But authorial intention is tempered not only by the author’s own unconscious but also by the material with which she or he chooses to work. David Lodge remarks that most people find “vaguely shameful” the propensity of a particular verse form to make a poet “say something that he would not otherwise have thought of saying” (89). Authors do not like to confront the possibility that intention can be undermined, or at least modified, by the intrinsic nature of their linguistic and poetic material. Letting the form say its own, unexpected, things seems like a failure by the poet to master his or her art, but perhaps abandoning oneself to the curve and texture of the material and allowing it to “speak through” one is art itself?

Poetic tradition, or convention, on the other hand, is a habit of association, passed on from poet to poet, between a particular type of subject-matter and a particular stylistic feature such as verse form. Byron inherited a Spenserian stanza that had never been used for comic purposes and an ottava rima stanza that had been thus used many times before. But these habits of usage were, like many other poetic conventions, not entirely arbitrary. Spenserian stanzas lend themselves to an elevated and serious discourse: comedy in this medium is difficult to sustain. (Anthony Burgess is the only author whom I know to have tried this.) Ottava rima, while lending itself to the comic and romantic, may not be the perfect medium for epic. (Tasso was haunted for much of his life by the suspicion that his Gerusalemme liberata was not a true epic; he rewrote it once and at the end of his life composed his last epic—Il Creato del mondo—in the Italian version of blank verse.)

What I mainly want to demonstrate in the rest of this paper is the kind of contribution that the stanza form in each of these poems makes towards the identity of its speaker. In Childe Harold, for example, Byron had attempted at the beginning a different kind of narrator, with a more conventional, moralistic identity, which he clearly intended to be contrasted and opposed to the identity of the protagonist, a young but mournful ex-debauchee, resembling his young self in a number of ways. (This kind of dynamic opposition between narrator and protagonist Byron achieved successfully only later in Don Juan.) But the long stanzas, 92 syllables on average, encourage similarly long sentences and these, in Byron’s hands, whether they favour structures of hypotaxis or parataxis, inevitably thicken description into reflection and personal expression as they progress towards their climactic final line. The extremely integrated rhyme scheme also conspires to pull together the stanza’s discourse into a grand single utterance. Those dualities and ironies necessary for a dramatic disjunction between speaker and hero proved unsustainable once Byron got into his stride with the stanza. The narrator and hero in a sense became too similar. As speaker and protagonist collapsed together, both ending up in Matthew Arnold’s unkind phrase “trailing the spectacle of [their] bleeding heart[s] around Europe,” one of them, by Occam’s razor, had to go. Towards the end of Childe Harold IV, the narrator simply announces that Harold “is no more” (4.164) and the discourse flows on without him, the narrator transcendent.

Let us look again at the opening stanza of Childe Harold IV, quoted at the beginning of this paper. To fill in members of this audience unfamiliar with Edmund Spenser’s long Faerie Queene stanza, I should tell you that it consists of eight lines of iambic pentameter, or five-beat verse, followed by one longer, six-beat hexameter line. The rhyme pattern is ABABBCBCC, made up of two alternating sections ending with couplets—and both the couplets rhyme with one element of the alternating structure preceding it. In Spenser’s hands the alternating sections often narrate, while the couplets often comment, but without overt irony, since the two types of rhyme are so integrated into each other, allowing no sharp disjunction.

The Romantic poets who borrowed his stanza held much less reverence for poetic lines and tended to “enjamb” them—in other words to force a reader not to pause at line ending by using strategies of syntactic incompletness. Thus, despite line endings being marked by rhymes, they were often unnoticeable to a listener—though of course a reader would be able to see them on the page. Byron and Shelley in particular liked to pour their discourse into this stanza at a great rate of flow, stopping only at the end—or even beyond the end as in stanzas 8, 9 and 10 on your handouts. They seem to have delighted in the extra-long line 9 that gave to their great periods a resounding climax.

In Stanza 1, the first two lines are end-stopped, giving a reader a chance to “hear” the iambic pentameter and take note of the two end syllables, “Sighs” and “hand”. Line 4 is enjambed (run on), but the syntactically important verb “rise” does mark the first true rhyme quite noticeably. Then, line 4 is end-stopped—there is even a comma to help stem the flow of discourse—and “wand” offers a fairly if not wholly satisfactory completion for “hand.” But after this opening quatrain, the integrity of the lines becomes a much more subtle thing altogether. All the rest of the lines run on, to varying degrees, with the main syntactic pauses (after the first two words of line 6, for example) occurring in he middles of lines, not at the ends. The sentence builds up an urgency that requires a reader to increase her speed dramatically, so that the structure of the stanza becomes all but imperceptible until that resonant last line, pivoting on its middle so much more symmetrically than the five-beat structures preceding it, that completes and steadies the whole stanza.

This is typical of Byron’s tendency in the later cantos of Childe Harold. Though the stanzas—which are most often one sentence each—start relatively slowly, the speed builds up and by the second line of the first couplet they have taken off in this kind of wild flight whose great aim is not reached until the last syllable of that last, longer line. Stanza 4.15 is also a fine example, in which only lines 2 and 4 are end-stopped by any sensitive reader and the syntax totally fractured by line-endings from lines 5 to 9.

Within his structure it would be really difficult to be ironic or comic—especially towards the end of the stanza—because the climactic tendency does not encourage those little emphatic pauses and changes of tone that much poetic comedy requires. A reader finds herself caught up in a great visionary utterance that may require from her a dreamy or emphatic or even chant-like articulation. Always, as in reading Milton, she is reading with that forward-projecting expectation of the long, long sentence, building cumulatively rather than through discontinuity or disjunction towards its period.

With “Beppo,” matters are for the reader very different. Ottava rima, its stanza, belongs to an extremely ancient Italian tradition; it was invented some time in the Middle Ages by singers of early Romance languages, the cantastorie. From earliest times it was used for comedy as well as romance, and this is understandable, since it rhymes ABABABCC, having an alternating sestet followed by a couplet that is totally disjunct from the sestet (it shares no rhyme with it). Thus the first six lines are often used for narrative and the couplet for ironic comment. Many Italian writers had followed a tradition of using a syntactic break at the end of line 4 in addition to the one that the stanza itself asks for at the end of line 6, and so it had always been used for divided discourse, occurring in short contrasting bursts.

Thus, although the stanza of “Beppo” is only one line shorter than that of Childe Harold, it is a much more disjunct structure, allowing for briefer utterances more directly resembling the contingencies of speech and verbal thought. The undercutting of the developed section of the stanza by its shorter, pithier ending encourages humour, scepticism and dialogism. In this poem’s narrator is found the first poetic representation of that “other” Byronic identity evident in so many of his letters: the tolerant, amused, cynical but good-tempered man of the world.

If we look again at the two stanzas on gondolas quoted earlier, we find all sorts of pauses at ends and middles of lines, many of them signalling changes in tone. Stanza 19 calls for perhaps five separate utterances, all slightly different in pitch and projected attitude. As in nearly all the stanzas, the last two lines make a unit, here a humorous and ironic comment. My favourite stanza of the whole poem, number 80 (the last on the handout) is typical. It opens with what sounds potentially like a Romantic invocation, “Oh, Mirth and innocence!”. But this short unit is at once undercut by another, the scoffing echo, “Oh milk and water!”, which the reader must articulate in a different tone, suggesting its different narrative attitude. The next three-and-three-quarter lines offer a sad and worldly explanation for the rejection of “innocence”: “In these sad centuries of sin and slaughter, / Abominable Man no more allays / His thirst with such pure beverage.” And then there is yet another change of tone in the tolerant, accepting affirmation, “No matter, / I love you both, and both shall have my praise,” though of course the reader does by now see the narrator’s tongue in his cheek at the same time as she registers his compassion. Finally, the last two lines, folded neatly into that quotable little couplet unity, summarise and render ridiculous the stanza’s two opposing moods, using the obvious and yet conflicting rhyme between “candy” and “brandy” to cap the joke. “Candy” may be the chosen reward of “innocence” but the narrator, as a true denizen of a fallen world, patently prefers “brandy” to so sweet and juvenile a taste.

The ottava rima stanza throughout this poem encourages a change of tone and attitude in the last two lines because the rhyme pattern is so different from what went before in the sestet. And this one disjunction encourages others, allowing that Byronic “mobility” or constant change of temperament to find a poetic recreation, moving from serious to flippant, earnest to ironic, even within a single line. In “Beppo” Byron hardly ever uses long monologic verse paragraphs as he does in Childe Harold, and so the transcendental mode hardly appears at all. Later, in Don Juan, when he had learned to use more stops on his best poetic instrument, he found out how to do even the high style in ottava rima, but this is always different thing from the Spenserian high style, because the reader always knows in that in ottava one style or tone will not be sustained, and so she is ever on the alert for an undercutting or a sudden shift of mood and topic. The identity of the narrators of both poems are highly dependent on these intrinsic stanzaic features, which are much more dissimilar than a superficial inspection might suggest.