Childe Harold's Pilgrimage

Childe Harold's Pilgrimage: A Romaunt is a long narrative poem in four parts written by Lord Byron. The poem was published between 1812 and 1818. Dedicated to "Ianthe", it describes the travels and reflections of a young man disillusioned with a life of pleasure and revelry and looking for distraction in foreign lands. In a wider sense, it is an expression of the melancholy and disillusionment which was felt by a generation weary of the wars of the post-Revolutionary and Napoleonic eras. The title comes from the term childe, a medieval title for a young man who was a candidate for knighthood.

The poem was widely imitated. It contributed to the cult of the wandering Byronic hero who falls into melancholic reverie as he contemplates scenes of natural beauty. Its autobiographical subjectivity was widely influential, not only in literature but in the arts of music and painting as well, and was a powerful ingredient in European Romanticism.

The youthful Harold, cloyed with the pleasures of the world and reckless of life, wanders about Europe, making his feelings and ideas the subjects of the poem. In Canto I he is in Spain and Portugal, where he recounts the savagery of their invasion by the French. In Canto II he moves to Greece, uplifted by the beauty of its past in a country now enslaved by the Turks. Some stanzas of Canto II are dedicated to Harold's journey in Albania, describing its natural and manmade beauties, its history, and the traditions of the Albanians. Canto III finds him on the battlefield of Waterloo, from which he journeys up the Rhine and crosses into Switzerland, enchanted by the beauty of the scenery and its historic associations. In Canto IV Harold starts from Venice on a journey through Italy, lamenting the vanished heroic and artistic past, and the subject status of its various regions.