Ada Byron

            On Wednesday at 6:00 I skipped song practice and got right to work on my essay in the hope of actually being able to submit it in class at 11:00. I worked steadily for four hours but it needed a few more. I figured that if I skipped class I could have finished it and still met the deadline by putting it in the drop box before 16:00 but I really didn’t want to miss class. Information online said that I would lose 3% for the first day late and so I calculated that putting it in the old mental slow cooker for another day would get me a much better mark than presenting it as it was.
            Construction has been going on for a long time at the site of Honest Ed’s and Mervish Village but I don’t see much that’s been built.
            When I approached the revolving doors at OISE I unconsciously reached for my keys as if I was about to enter the building where I live.
            Despite leaving home later than usual I was still early for class.
            When Professor Weisman came in she announced that she had a cold and urged everyone to keep a distance.
            I asked her to confirm that the late penalty for essays is 3% but she said it’s only 2%. I told her that I was going to have to work on it for another day.
            We had our last lecture on Lord Byron. She had asked us to paraphrase stanza six of canto three of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage:
           
‘Tis to create, and in creating live
a being more intense, that we endow
with form our fancy, gaining as we give
the life we image, even as I do now.
What am I? Nothing: but not so art thou,
soul of my thought with whom I traverse earth,
invisible but gazing, as I glow,
mix’d with they spirit, blended with they birth,
and feeling still with thee in my crush'd feelings’ dearth.

            I wrote that he’s saying to be an artist is to live a fuller life by making the creative imagination into living things that add to our own life. He travels with his muse but he is also talking about his daughter. To create life and art are the same.
            In this verse and some others he is speaking in propria persona or using his own voice.
            Why create art from thought?
            Endowing with form our fancy is what we have been discussing all along.
            The aesthetic experience of being in awe of the sublime creates a paradox because so many authors seek consolation from complex urban life by retreating into a mental landscape. Is it more intense to retreat?
            The soul of Byron’s thought is Childe Harold, but also his daughter Ada. However misanthropic, Harold becomes Byron’s daughter. Byron has no concrete contact with her and so he has to create Ada just as he creates Harold. He blends his regard for Ada and Harold. She has become a fiction but he is also an abstraction to her.
            We looked at stanza seventeen which uses the aftermath of Waterloo to explore violence and sacrifice.
            Because of her cold the professor had me read stanzas 17-19.
            Byron visited the site of the battle of Waterloo.
            Wordsworth and other poets praised the victory but Byron did not.
            From 1793 to 1813 England was at war. Byron is reminding the public of the toll of victory. The aftermath was a grim calamity. Like the French Revolution it did not result in liberty, egality and fraternity. The defeat of Napoleon only returns the monarchy to France. The military victory was a moral defeat. 50,000 died.
            Byron asks, “Is Earth more free?” We don't often see universalism like this in the poetry of the era.
            History is never far from Byron's mind. “Empire's dust” is a reference to the Roman Empire.                Napoleon could rule everything but his own passions. Napoleon is a fatal man like Manfred, a real life Byronic hero and Manfred is like Byron.
            Professor Weisman asked us, “What is the significance of the tension between fiction and external reality and how does Byron represent it?”
            I said that everyone creates their own myth of themselves, and when they are public figures others add to that myth. Everyone then is both artist and their own work of art.
            That wasn’t what the professor wanted though.
            Byron is undermining the myth of redemption arising from war and declaring that it is only carnage.
            Childe Harold sought beauty but now he is pulled into the vortex of history.
            Stanza 72 presents a transcendental idea of nature differentiated from the torture of cities.                    Stanzas 113-114 refer to not worshiping an echo. Think of how it relates to Shelley's “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty.
            “But let us part fair foes”.
            There had been a high school student sitting in on the class because she was off school for March break and checking out U of T.
            When we were the last ones there I told Professor Weisman that this would be the first time that I'd ever missed the deadline for a paper. She generously offered that if I emailed the essay to her by midnight she would still consider it to be on time. I thanked her and said I’d try to meet that deadline.
            I stopped at Freshco on my way home where I bought tomatoes, avocadoes, a watermelon and a jug of vinegar.
             After lunch I took a siesta for ninety minutes and then sat down to try to get my essay done before midnight. I got some good ideas while I was working but I still had only about six pages to show for it by midnight. I had to resign myself to handing it in a day late. I went to bed feeling pretty sure I could have it done well before the 16:00 deadline.