DOCSLIB.ORG

Darkness Lord George Gordon Byron

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text

Load more

Background Information . George Noel Gordon was born in 1788 with a disability such as clubfoot. He was very sensitive about his handicap, so he was home schooled. When George was ten, he inherited his great uncle’s title and estates. He was now known as Lord George Gordon Byron. At the age of fifteen, he fell in love with his distant cousin Mary Chaworth. However she left him and was devastated, so he started to write poetry. Byron became recognized for his poetry and Mary was his inspiration. Byron was a womanizer it was said he had an affair with his half sister. In 1814, Byron married Anne Isabella, but cheated on her with his sister when she came to visit. Later on his wife and he had a child he was not allowed to see his daughter though. He is reunited with her later in the years but dies in Ravenna while attending school in 1821. Byron became buried in debt, and sold his home Newstead Abbey which covered his debt. Byron became fat and undesirable over time, but that changed when he met the Countess Teresa Guicciolo. She was already married but Byron became her gentleman-in-waiting. Being with Teresa was one of the happiest and most productive periods of his life. Byron continued to write poetry until he grew very sick in the spring of 1824. He slipped into a coma that lead to his death. He died a hero to the Greeks. Romanticism Period The Romanticism Period is a dark period of time. It is a time of personal and political liberty, and of nature. Writers of this era liked to write about their emotions and imagination. Some writers such as Jean Jacques Rousseau and William Godwin were inspired by the French Revolution. Others, such as Lord Byron and John Keats were inspired by their love lives to write in an emotional and sensible way. The Romanticism period was a time of rebellion and doing things on their own instead of living up to someone else’s standards. I had a dream, which was not all a dream. The bright sun was Extinguished with a crash -and all was extinguished, and the stars did black. wander darkling in the eternal The brows of men by the despairing space, rayless, and pathless, and the light Wore an unearthly aspect, as by icy earth Swung blind and fits The flashes fell upon them: some blackening in the moonless air; lay down And hid their eyes and wept; Morn came and went -and came, and some did rest and brought no day, And men Their chins upon their clenched hands, forgot their passions in the dread and smiled; And others hurried to and Of this their desolation; and all fro, and fed Their funeral piles with fuel, hearts Were chilled into a selfish and looked up With mad disquietude prayer for light; And they did live on the dull sky, The pall of a past world; by watchfires -and the thrones, The and then again With curses cast them palaces of crowned kings -the huts, down upon the dust, And gnash'd their The habitations of all things which teeth and howl'd: the wild birds shriek'd dwell,Were burnt for beacons; And, terrified, did flutter on the ground, cities were consumed, And men And flap their useless wings; the were gathered round their blazing wildest brutes Came tame and homes To look once more into each tremulous; and vipers crawl'd And other's face; Happy were those twin'd themselves among the multitude, which dwelt within the eye Of the Hissing, but stingless--they were slain volcanoes, and their mountain- for food. And War, which for a moment torch; was no more, Did glut himself again: a A fearful hope was all the world meal was bought With blood, and each contained; Forests were set on fire - sate sullenly apart Gorging himself in but hour by hour They fell and gloom: no love was left; faded -and the crackling trunks all save one, And he was The crowd was famish'd by degrees; but two faithful to a corse, and kept Of an enormous city did survive, The birds and beasts and And they were enemies: they met beside famish'd men at bay, Till The dying embers of an altar-place hunger clung them, or the Where had been heap'd a mass of holy things For an unholy usage; they rak'd up, dropping dead And shivering scrap'd with their cold skeleton hands Lur'd their lank jaws; himself The feeble ashes, and their feeble breath sought out no food, All earth Blew for a little life, and made a flame was but one thought--and that Which was a mockery; then they lifted up Their eyes as it grew lighter, and beheld was death Immediate and Each other's aspects--saw, and shriek'd, and died-- inglorious; and the pang Of Even of their mutual hideousness they died, famine fed upon all entrails— Unknowing who he was upon whose brow men Died, and their bones Famine had written Fiend. The world was void, The populous and the powerful was a lump, were tombless as their flesh; Seasonless, herbless, treeless, manless, lifeless-- The meagre by the meagre A lump of death--a chaos of hard clay. were devour'd, Even dogs The rivers, lakes and ocean all stood still, assail'd their masters, But with And nothing stirr'd within their silent depths; Ships sailorless lay rotting on the sea, a piteous and perpetual moan, And their masts fell down piecemeal: as they dropp'd And a quick desolate cry, licking They slept on the abyss without a surge-- the hand The waves were dead; the tides were in their grave, Which answer'd not with a The moon, their mistress, had expir'd before; The winds were wither'd in the stagnant air, caress--he died. And the clouds perish'd; Darkness had no need Of aid from them--She was the Universe. Not to touch the earth Not to see the sun To the East to meet the Czar Nothing left to do, Run with me , Run with me, Run with But Run, run, run Let's me Let's run run Let's run. House upon the hill Whoa! Moon is lying still Some outlaws lived by the side of a Shadows of the trees lake Witnessing the wild breeze The minister's daughter's in love with C'mon baby run with me the snake Let's run Who lives in a well by the side of the Run with me, Run with me, Run with me, Let's road run Wake up, girl, we're almost home The mansion is warm, at the top of the hill Rich are Ya, c'mon! the rooms and the We should see the gates by mornin' comforts there We should be inside the evenin„ Red are the arms of luxuriant chairs And you Sun, sun, sun Burn, burn, burn Soon, won't know a thing till soon, soon Moon, moon, moon I will you get inside Dead president's corpse in get you Soon! Soon! Soon! the driver's car I am the Lizard King The engine runs on glue I can do anything and tar Come on along, not goin' very far SYNOPSIS A very vivid description of the eventual end of the earth and of man kind. The beginning of the poem is a mixture of reality and illusion. Byron speaks of a dream that he believes will become reality. The sun becomes extinguished which brings complete darkness. This darkness brings corruption and degradation of humanity because of its possible end. As a result of the absence of light, humans draw back to their roots as beasts. The evil is brought out in everyone which leads to total destruction. The only words people had to each other were of negativity, death, depression, desperation, and darkness. Because humans became corrupted, they lose all sense of right and wrong which brings an enormous amount of internal conflict in one’s mind. The world breaks into complete chaos, causing external conflicts between one another. The suspense is brought by the uncertainty of what humanity is going to do next. God doesn’t exist in the darkness because darkness brings evil. Evil, which is darkness, overtakes the earth, planting thoughts of chaos in the human mind. The rein of all life has now come to its eventual end. Tone Sound Device The over all tone of this Alliteration with his S‟ in poem is depressing and “Seasonless, herbless, treeless, catastrophic. It is dark, manless, lifeless” is used to lonely, icy, and evil. The enhance the mood of growing beginning is calm, but the silence and death on earth. tone quickly changes to chaos and destruction. Coming toward the end of Imagery is used to describe the the poem, the tone becomes end of times as if the reader was tranquil again. The tone is a watching a movie. mirror reflection of the events taking place in the Metaphor is used to compare poem. When destruction is men to animals from rational complete, the time stops and creatures to beasts. darkness illuminates everything. The end of the poem brings the end of times. Synopsis of Song Lyrics On the brink of death, one has to run for their life then it is almost over if they love their life they must fight for it. The song is saying to join man in the journey for your life.
Recommended publications
  • Revolutions in the Arts

    Revolutions in the Arts

    4 Revolutions in the Arts MAIN IDEA WHY IT MATTERS NOW TERMS & NAMES CULTURAL INTERACTION Romanticism and realism are •romanticism •impressionism Artistic and intellectual still found in novels, dramas, • realism movements both reflected and and films produced today. fueled changes in Europe during the 1800s. SETTING THE STAGE During the first half of the 1800s, artists focused on ideas of freedom, the rights of individuals, and an idealistic view of history. After the great revolutions of 1848, political focus shifted to leaders who practiced realpolitik. Similarly, intellectuals and artists expressed a “realistic” view of the world. In this view, the rich pursued their selfish interests while ordinary people struggled and suffered. Newly invented photography became both a way to detail this struggle and a tool for scientific investigation. TAKING NOTES The Romantic Movement Outlining Organize ideas and details about At the end of the 18th century, the Enlightenment idea of reason gradually gave movements in the arts. way to another major movement in art and ideas: romanticism. This movement reflected deep interest both in nature and in the thoughts and feelings of the indi- 1. The Romantic vidual. In many ways, romantic thinkers and writers reacted against the ideals of Movement the Enlightenment. They turned from reason to emotion, from society to nature. A. B. Romantics rejected the rigidly ordered world of the middle class. Nationalism II. The Shift to also fired the romantic imagination. For example, George Gordon, Lord Byron, ▼ Romantic Realism in the Arts one of the leading romantic poets of the time, fought for Greece’s freedom.
  • BYRON COURTS ANNABELLA MILBANKE, AUGUST 1813-DECEMBER 1814 Edited by Peter Cochran

    BYRON COURTS ANNABELLA MILBANKE, AUGUST 1813-DECEMBER 1814 Edited by Peter Cochran

    BYRON COURTS ANNABELLA MILBANKE, AUGUST 1813-DECEMBER 1814 Edited by Peter Cochran If anyone doubts that some people, at least, have a programmed-in tendency to self-destruction, this correspondence should convince them. ———————— Few things are more disturbing (or funnier) than hearing someone being ironical, while pretending to themselves that they aren’t being ironical. The best or worst example is Macbeth, speaking of the witches: Infected be the air whereon they ride, And damned all those that trust them! … seeming unconscious of the fact that he trusts them, and is about to embark, encouraged by their words, on a further career of murder that will end in his death. “When I find ambiguities in your expression,” writes Annabella to Byron on August 6th 1814, “I am certain that they are created by myself, since you evidently desire at all times to be simple and perspicuous”. Annabella (born 1792) is vain, naïve, inexperienced, and “romantic”, but she’s also highly intelligent, and it’s impossible not to suspect that she knows his “ambiguities” are not “created by” herself, and that she recognizes in him someone who is the least “perspicuous” and most given to “ambiguities” who ever lived. The frequency with which both she and she quote Macbeth casually to one another (as well as, in Byron’s letters to Lady Melbourne, Richard III ) seems a subconscious way of signalling that they both know that nothing they’re about will come to good. “ … never yet was such extraordinary behaviour as her’s” is Lady Melbourne’s way of describing Annabella on April 30th 1814: I imagine she’d say the same about Byron.
  • Network Map of Knowledge And

    Network Map of Knowledge And

    Humphry Davy George Grosz Patrick Galvin August Wilhelm von Hofmann Mervyn Gotsman Peter Blake Willa Cather Norman Vincent Peale Hans Holbein the Elder David Bomberg Hans Lewy Mark Ryden Juan Gris Ian Stevenson Charles Coleman (English painter) Mauritz de Haas David Drake Donald E. Westlake John Morton Blum Yehuda Amichai Stephen Smale Bernd and Hilla Becher Vitsentzos Kornaros Maxfield Parrish L. Sprague de Camp Derek Jarman Baron Carl von Rokitansky John LaFarge Richard Francis Burton Jamie Hewlett George Sterling Sergei Winogradsky Federico Halbherr Jean-Léon Gérôme William M. Bass Roy Lichtenstein Jacob Isaakszoon van Ruisdael Tony Cliff Julia Margaret Cameron Arnold Sommerfeld Adrian Willaert Olga Arsenievna Oleinik LeMoine Fitzgerald Christian Krohg Wilfred Thesiger Jean-Joseph Benjamin-Constant Eva Hesse `Abd Allah ibn `Abbas Him Mark Lai Clark Ashton Smith Clint Eastwood Therkel Mathiassen Bettie Page Frank DuMond Peter Whittle Salvador Espriu Gaetano Fichera William Cubley Jean Tinguely Amado Nervo Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay Ferdinand Hodler Françoise Sagan Dave Meltzer Anton Julius Carlson Bela Cikoš Sesija John Cleese Kan Nyunt Charlotte Lamb Benjamin Silliman Howard Hendricks Jim Russell (cartoonist) Kate Chopin Gary Becker Harvey Kurtzman Michel Tapié John C. Maxwell Stan Pitt Henry Lawson Gustave Boulanger Wayne Shorter Irshad Kamil Joseph Greenberg Dungeons & Dragons Serbian epic poetry Adrian Ludwig Richter Eliseu Visconti Albert Maignan Syed Nazeer Husain Hakushu Kitahara Lim Cheng Hoe David Brin Bernard Ogilvie Dodge Star Wars Karel Capek Hudson River School Alfred Hitchcock Vladimir Colin Robert Kroetsch Shah Abdul Latif Bhittai Stephen Sondheim Robert Ludlum Frank Frazetta Walter Tevis Sax Rohmer Rafael Sabatini Ralph Nader Manon Gropius Aristide Maillol Ed Roth Jonathan Dordick Abdur Razzaq (Professor) John W.
  • 1 Byron: Six Poems of Separation

    1 Byron: Six Poems of Separation

    1 Byron: Six Poems of Separation edited by Peter Cochran If one’s marriage were to collapse in humiliating, semi-public circumstances, and if one were in part to blame for its collapse, one’s reaction would probably be to maintain a discreet and (one would hope) a dignified silence, and to hope that the thing might blow over in a year or so. Byron’s reaction was write, and publish, poetry about it while it was still collapsing. The first two of these poems were written in London – the first is to his wife, and the next about and to her friend and confidante Mrs Clermont – before he left England, on Thursday April 25th 1816. The next three were written in Switzerland after his departure, and are addressed to his half-sister Augusta. The last one is again to his wife. They show violent contrasts in style and tone (the Epistle to Augusta is Byron’s first poem in ottava rima), and strange, contrasting aspects of Byron’s nature. That he should wish them published at all is perhaps worrying. The urge to confess without necessarily repenting was, however, deep within him. Fare Thee Well! with its elaborate air of injured innocence, and its implication that Annabella’s reasons for leaving him remain incomprehensible, sorts ill with what we know of his behaviour during the disintegration of their marriage in the latter months of 1815. John Gibson Lockhart was moved, five years later, to protest: … why, then, did you, who are both a gentleman and a nobleman, act upon this the most delicate occasion, in all probability, your life was ever to present, as if you had been neither a nobleman nor a gentleman, but some mere overweeningly conceited poet? 1 Of A Sketch from Private Life , William Gifford, Byron’s “Literary Father”, wrote to Murray: It is a dreadful picture – Caravagio outdone in his own way.
  • Illuminating the Darkness: the Naturalistic Evolution of Gothicism in the Nineteenth-Century British Novel and Visual Art

    Illuminating the Darkness: the Naturalistic Evolution of Gothicism in the Nineteenth-Century British Novel and Visual Art

    University of Nebraska - Lincoln DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research: Department of English English, Department of 8-2013 Illuminating the Darkness: The Naturalistic Evolution of Gothicism in the Nineteenth-Century British Novel and Visual Art Cameron Dodworth University of Nebraska-Lincoln Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/englishdiss Part of the Literature in English, British Isles Commons Dodworth, Cameron, "Illuminating the Darkness: The Naturalistic Evolution of Gothicism in the Nineteenth- Century British Novel and Visual Art" (2013). Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research: Department of English. 79. https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/englishdiss/79 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the English, Department of at DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln. It has been accepted for inclusion in Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research: Department of English by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln. ILLUMINATING THE DARKNESS: THE NATURALISTIC EVOLUTION OF GOTHICISM IN THE NINETEENTH- CENTURY BRITISH NOVEL AND VISUAL ART by Cameron Dodworth A DISSERTATION Presented to the Faculty of The Graduate College at the University of Nebraska In Partial Fulfillment of Requirements For the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Major: English (Nineteenth-Century Studies) Under the Supervision of Professor Laura M. White Lincoln, Nebraska August, 2013 ILLUMINATING THE DARKNESS: THE NATURALISTIC EVOLUTION OF GOTHICISM IN THE NINETEENTH- CENTURY BRITISH NOVEL AND VISUAL ART Cameron Dodworth, Ph.D. University of Nebraska, 2013 Adviser: Laura White The British Gothic novel reached a level of very high popularity in the literary market of the late 1700s and the first two decades of the 1800s, but after that point in time the popularity of these types of publications dipped significantly.
  • GEORGE GORDON, LORD BYRON: a Literary-Biographical-Critical

    GEORGE GORDON, LORD BYRON: a Literary-Biographical-Critical

    1 GEORGE GORDON, LORD BYRON: A literary-biographical-critical database 2: by year CODE: From National Library in Taiwan UDD: unpublished doctoral dissertation Books and Articles Referring to Byron, by year 1813-1824: Anon. A Sermon on the Death of Byron, by a Layman —— Lines on the departure of a great poet from this country, 1816 —— An Address to the Rt. Hon. Lord Byron, with an opinion on some of his writings, 1817 —— The radical triumvirate, or, infidel Paine, Lord Byron, and Surgeon Lawrenge … A Letter to John Bull, from a Oxonian resident in London, 1820 —— A letter to the Rt. Hon. Lord Byron, protesting against the immolation of Gray, Cowper and Campbell, at the shrine of Pope, The Pamphleteer Vol 8, 1821 —— Lord Byron’s Plagiarisms, Gentleman’s Magazine, April 1821; Lord Byron Defended from a Charge of Plagiarism, ibid —— Plagiarisms of Lord Byron Detected, Monthly Magazine, August 1821, September 1821 —— A letter of expostulation to Lord Byron, on his present pursuits; with animadversions on his writings and absence from his country in the hour of danger, 1822 —— Uriel, a poetical address to Lord Byron, written on the continent, 1822 —— Lord Byron’s Residence in Greece, Westminster Review July 1824 —— Full Particulars of the much lamented Death of Lord Byron, with a Sketch of his Life, Character and Manners, London 1824 —— Robert Burns and Lord Byron, London Magazine X, August 1824 —— A sermon on the death of Lord Byron, by a Layman, 1824 Barker, Miss. Lines addressed to a noble lord; – his Lordship will know why, – by one of the small fry of the Lakes 1815 Belloc, Louise Swanton.
  • BYRON, SHELLEY and KEATS

    BYRON, SHELLEY and KEATS

    THE ROMANTIC AGE THE SECOND GENERATION OF ROMANTIC POETS: BYRON, SHELLEY and KEATS - they all left England, visited Italy and died young - return to complex forms of versification and richer language - interest in the world of ancient Greece - more interest in Politics (especially Byron) - different view of Nature (less idealistic) George Gordon Byron 1. Life (1788 – 1824) • In 1809 he set out on a tour of Spain, Portugal, Malta, Albania, Greece and the Middle East. • After his return to England in 1812, he published the first ‘two cantos’ of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. • He became a literary and social celebrity, but then he left England in 1816, never to return. • He lived in Geneva, where he became a friend of the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. • He moved to Venice, where he began his masterpiece, the mock-epic Don Juan. • In 1819 he moved to Milan where he became involved H. Meyer, Lord Byron, 1816, Victoria in the patriotic plots against Austrian rule. and Albert Museum, London • He committed himself to the Greek struggle of independence from Turkey. • His heart is buried in Greece, his body is interred in England. Performer - Culture & Literature George Gordon Byron 2. Main works • Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812-1818). • The Giaour (1813), The Corsair, and Lara (1814): a series of verse narratives. • Manfred, a tragedy (1817). • Don Juan (1819-24). Jonny Lee Miller is Byron, in the BBC drama Byron. Performer - Culture & Literature George Gordon Byron 4. The Byronic hero • A moody, restless and mysterious romantic rebel. • Hides some sin or secret in his past.
  • 1815 1817 George Gordon, Lord Byron 1788-1824

    1815 1817 George Gordon, Lord Byron 1788-1824

    http://www.englishworld2011.info/ GEORGE GORDON, LORD BYRON / 607 (by which last I mean neither rhythm nor metre) this genus comprises as its species, gaming; swinging or swaying on a chair or gate; spitting over a bridge; smoking; snuff-taking; tete-a-tete quarrels after dinner between husband and wife; conning word by word all the advertisements of the Daily Advertiser in a public house on a rainy day, etc. etc. etc. 1815 1817 GEORGE GORDON, LORD BYRON 1788-1824 In his History of English Literature, written in the late 1850s, the French critic Hip- polyte Taine gave only a few condescending pages to Wordsworth, Coleridge, Percy Shelley, and Keats and then devoted a long chapter to Lord Byron, "the greatest and most English of these artists; he is so great and so English that from him alone we shall learn more truths of his country and of his age than from all the rest together." This comment reflects the fact that Byron had achieved an immense European rep- utation during his own lifetime, while admirers of his English contemporaries were much more limited in number. Through much of the nineteenth century he contin- ued to be rated as one of the greatest of English poets and the very prototype of literary Bomanticism. His influence was manifested everywhere, among the major poets and novelists (Balzac and Stendhal in France, Pushkin and Dostoyevsky in Russia, and Melville in America), painters (especially Delacroix), and composers (including Beethoven and Berlioz). Yet even as poets, painters, and composers across Europe and the Americas struck Byronic attitudes, Byron's place within the canon of English Bomantic poetry was becoming insecure.
  • World Literature According to Wikipedia: Introduction to a Dbpedia-Based Framework

    World Literature According to Wikipedia: Introduction to a Dbpedia-Based Framework

    World Literature According to Wikipedia: Introduction to a DBpedia-Based Framework Christoph Hube,1 Frank Fischer,2 Robert J¨aschke,1,3 Gerhard Lauer,4 Mads Rosendahl Thomsen5 1 L3S Research Center, Hannover, Germany 2 National Research University Higher School of Economics, Moscow, Russia 3 University of Sheffield, United Kingdom 4 G¨ottingenCentre for Digital Humanities, Germany 5 Aarhus University, Denmark Among the manifold takes on world literature, it is our goal to contribute to the discussion from a digital point of view by analyzing the representa- tion of world literature in Wikipedia with its millions of articles in hundreds of languages. As a preliminary, we introduce and compare three different approaches to identify writers on Wikipedia using data from DBpedia, a community project with the goal of extracting and providing structured in- formation from Wikipedia. Equipped with our basic set of writers, we analyze how they are represented throughout the 15 biggest Wikipedia language ver- sions. We combine intrinsic measures (mostly examining the connectedness of articles) with extrinsic ones (analyzing how often articles are frequented by readers) and develop methods to evaluate our results. The better part of our findings seems to convey a rather conservative, old-fashioned version of world literature, but a version derived from reproducible facts revealing an implicit literary canon based on the editing and reading behavior of millions of peo- ple. While still having to solve some known issues, the introduced methods arXiv:1701.00991v1 [cs.IR] 4 Jan 2017 will help us build an observatory of world literature to further investigate its representativeness and biases.
  • Don Juan from Norton.Pdf

    Don Juan from Norton.Pdf

    http://www.englishworld2011.info/ DON JUAN / 669 [MANFRED expires.] ABBOT He's gone—his soul hath ta'en its earthless flight- Whither? I dread to think—but he is gone. 1816-17 1817 Don juan Byron began his masterpiece (pronounced in the English fashion, Don Joo-nn) in July 1818, published it in installments beginning with cantos 1 and 2 in 1819, and continued working on it almost until his death. Initially he improvised the poem from episode to episode. "I have no plan," he said, "I had no plan; but I had or have materials." The work was composed with remarkable speed (the 888 lines of canto 13, for example, were dashed off within a week), and it aims at the effect of improvisation rather than of artful compression; it asks to be read rapidly, at a con- versational pace. The poem breaks off with the sixteenth canto, but even in its unfinished state Don Juan is the longest satirical poem, and indeed one of the longest poems of any kind, in English. Its hero, the Spanish libertine, had in the original legend been superhuman in his sexual energy and wickedness. Throughout Byron's version the unspoken but persistent joke is that this archetypal lady-killer of European legend is in fact more acted upon than active. Unfailingly amiable and well intentioned, he is guilty largely of youth, charm, and a courteous and compliant spirit. The women do all the rest. The chief models for the poem were the Italian seriocomic versions of medieval chivalric romances; the genre had been introduced by Pulci in the fifteenth century and was adopted by Ariosto in his Orlando Furioso (1532).
  • Manfred Lord Byron (1788–1824)

    Manfred Lord Byron (1788–1824)

    Manfred Lord Byron (1788–1824) Dramatis Personæ MANFRED CHAMOIS HUNTER ABBOT OF ST. MAURICE MANUEL HERMAN WITCH OF THE ALPS ARIMANES NEMESIS THE DESTINIES SPIRITS, ETC. The scene of the Drama is amongst the Higher Alps—partly in the Castle of Manfred, and partly in the Mountains. ‘There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.’ Act I Scene I MANFRED alone.—Scene, a Gothic Gallery. Time, Midnight. Manfred THE LAMP must be replenish’d, but even then It will not burn so long as I must watch. My slumbers—if I slumber—are not sleep, But a continuance of enduring thought, 5 Which then I can resist not: in my heart There is a vigil, and these eyes but close To look within; and yet I live, and bear The aspect and the form of breathing men. But grief should be the instructor of the wise; 10 Sorrow is knowledge: they who know the most Must mourn the deepest o’er the fatal truth, The Tree of Knowledge is not that of Life. Philosophy and science, and the springs Of wonder, and the wisdom of the world, 15 I have essay’d, and in my mind there is A power to make these subject to itself— But they avail not: I have done men good, And I have met with good even among men— But this avail’d not: I have had my foes, 20 And none have baffled, many fallen before me— But this avail’d not:—Good, or evil, life, Powers, passions, all I see in other beings, Have been to me as rain unto the sands, Since that all—nameless hour.
  • Mary Shelley

    Mary Shelley

    Mary Shelley Early Life Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelley was born on August 30, 1797, the daughter of two prominent radical thinkers of the Enlightenment. Her mother was the feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, and her father was the political philosopher William Godwin, best known for An Inquiry Concerning Political Justice. Unfortunately, Wollstonecraft died just ten days after her daughter’s birth. Mary was raised by her father and stepmother Mary Jane Clairmont. When she was 16 years old, Mary fell in love with the Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, who visited her father’s house frequently. They eloped to France, as Shelley was already married. They eventually married after two years when Shelley’s wife Harriet committed suicide. The Writing of Frankenstein In the summer of 1816, the Shelleys rented a villa close to that of Lord Byron in Switzerland. The weather was bad (Mary Shelley described it as “wet, ungenial” in her 1831 introduction to Frankenstein), due to a 1815 eruption of a volcano in Indonesia that disrupted weather patterns around the world. Stuck inside much of the time, the company, including Byron, the Shelleys, Mary’s stepsister Claire Clairmont, and Byron’s personal physician John Polidori, entertained themselves with reading stories from Fantasmagoriana, a collection of German ghost stories. Inspired by the stories, the group challenged themselves to write their own ghost stories. The only two to complete their stories were Polidori, who published The Vampyre in 1819, and Mary Shelley, whose Frankenstein went on to become one of the most popular Gothic tales of all time.