With all its sinful doings, I must say, That Italy’s a pleasant place to me, Who love to see the sun shine every day, And vines (not nail’d to walls) from tree to tree… I love the language. that soft bastard Latin, Which melts like kisses from a female mouth, And sounds as if it [...]
Of all the places where the Carnival Was most fecetious in the days of yore,… Venice the bell from every city bore… They’ve pretty faces yet, those same Venetians, Black eyes, arch’d brows, and sweet expressions still, Such as of old were copied from the Grecians,… And like so many Venuses of Titian’s… Her husband [...]
“Oh! that the desert were my dwelling place,… that I might forget the human race, and , hating no one , love but only her!” is how Childe sums up his feelings about the human race. For him “There is a pleasure in the pathless woods, there is a rapture on the lonely shore, there [...]
“But where is he the pilgrim of my song, the being who upheld it through the past?” the poet Byron asks and answers “Methinks he cometh late and tarries long”. Childe sees “Afar the Tiber winds, and the broad ocean laves the Latian coast where sprung the Epic war ‘Arms and the Man’, whose re-ascending [...]
“While stands the Coliseum, Rome shall stand; when falls the Coliseum, Rome shall fall; and when Rome falls – the world” are the thoughts of Childe Harold as he views “Simple erect, severe, austere, sublime’ “Rome, and her Ruin past Redemption’s skill,…”. “Majesty, Power, Glory, Strength, and Beauty, all are aisled in this eternal art [...]
Childe Harold stands in contemplation of “The azure gloom of an Italian night, where the deep skies assume hues which have words, and speak to ye of heaven,…”.And to “Time, the avenger! unto thee I lift my hands, and eyes, and heart, and crave for thee a gift….”. He boasts a little “But I have [...]
Child talks of “Oh Love! no inhabitant of earth thou art – an unseen serph, we believe in thee,…..”; he thinks “Of its own beauty is the mind diseased, and fevers into false creation…..”. He even goes so far as to say “Who loves, raves – ’tis youth’s frenzy – but the cure is bitterer [...]
“Because the deadly days that we have seen, and vile Ambition,… are grown the pretext for the eternal thrall which nips life’s tree, and dooms man’s worst – his second fall” is something that Childe has learned on his pilgrimage but he hopes “So shall a better spring less bitter fruit bring forth”. Over the [...]
“Oh Rome! my country! city of the soul!” as Childe Harold falls in love with the destination of his pilgrimage, he finds “A world is at our feet as fragile as our clay”. His pilgrimage has taught him ” We but feel our way to err; the ocean hath his chart, the stars their map,…” [...]
Childe, reminded of Rome’s greatest defeat by Hanibal, “Is of another temper, and I roam by Thrasimene’s Lake, in the defiles fatal to Roman rashness,…”; but following that he comes to “But thou, Clitumnus! in the sweetest wave of the most living crystal that was e’er the haunt of river nymph, … a mirror and [...]
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