Comments on: Happy Birthday, George Gordon, Lord Byron

By: Rishad Naoroji

Rishad Naoroji — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 04:34:14 +0000

Could you please assist me in finding a book on NATURE’S POEM BY LORD GEORGE BYRON
tHANKS

By: Alicia (AE)

Alicia (AE) — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 06:09:19 +0000

I suspect quite a lot of Byron doesn’t sound like “Byron.” Here he is in a letter to Thomas Moore:
“There is no such thing as a life of passion any more than a continuous earthquake, or an eternal fever. Besides, who would ever shave themselves in such a state?”
Don, I love that cat poem too and sometimes give it to students without an author name attached. They never guess it!
And I love all the animal elegies from the Greek anthology…

By: Don Share

Don Share — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 17:11:09 +0000

Not quite what’s under discussion, but I’ve been waiting for an excuse to post about Keats’s charming little ditty, “To Mrs Reynolds’s Cat” -
Cat! who hast passed thy grand climacteric,
How many mice and rats hast in thy days
Destroyed? How many tit-bits stolen? Gaze
With those bright languid segments green, and prick
Those velvet ears – but prithee do not stick
Thy latent talons in me, and up-raise
Thy gentle mew, and tell me all thy frays
Of fish and mice, and rats and tender chick.
Nay, look not down, nor lick thy dainty wrists -
For all thy wheezy asthma, and for all
Thy tail’s tip is nicked off, and though the fists
Of many a maid have given thee many a maul,
Still is that fur as soft as when the lists
In youth thou enteredst on glass-bottled wall.

By: Steve

Steve — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 16:24:03 +0000

That's a wonderful poem on the dog. It sounds more like Johnson (though it has none of Johnson's would-be terseness) than like the Byron, or the Byrons (extravagant and/or comic) that we know. If I can find it today (nobody seems to have put the whole thing online) I'll throw on one of my favorite recent responses to Byron, John Tranter's poem "Having Completed My Fortieth Year." Here's a long essay about the collection in which that poem appears; here's Byron's fine original, one of the last, if not the last, poems he wrote.