"Maid of Athens, ere we part" is a poem by Lord Byron, written in 1810 and dedicated to a young girl of Athens. [1] It begins:
Maid of Athens, ere we part,
Give, oh, give me back my heart!
Or, since that has left my breast,
Keep it now, and take the rest!
Hear my vow before I go,
Ζωή μου, σᾶς ἀγαπῶ [2]— Stanza 1
Each stanza of the poem ends with the same Greek refrain, which Byron translated as "My life, I love you!". It may be viewed as an example of macaronic verse, although it lacks the humorous intent typical of that genre.
According to C. G. Brouzas, the subject of Byron's "Maid of Athens" was Teresa Makri, the 12-year-old daughter of Tasia Makri, at whose house Byron lodged briefly in 1809 and in February 1810. Byron claimed to be in love with the child; in a letter to Henry Drury the poet declares to be "dying for love of three Greek Girls at Athens", "Teresa, Mariana, and Kattinka", and wrote the poem for her before departing for Constantinople. On his way back from Turkey to the Morea, on 17 July 1810, he stayed at Makri's house for another ten days, during which time he offered her £500 for her daughter. [3]
Byron never met Teresa again. She eventually married James Black (1803–1868) and died impoverished in 1875 in Athens, Greece. [4]
The poem has been set to music by numerous composers, including Charles Gounod, William Horsley, [5] and Henry Robinson Allen. Isaac Nathan's rendition appears in an album "the best songs of the world".
Darby and Joan is a proverbial phrase for a married couple content to share a quiet life of mutual devotion.
Dionysios Solomos was a Greek poet from Zakynthos, who is considered to be Greece's national poet. He is best known for writing the Hymn to Liberty, which was set to music by Nikolaos Mantzaros and became the Greek and Cypriot national anthem in 1865 and 1966 respectively. He was the central figure of the Heptanese School of poetry. He is considered the national poet of Greece, not only because he wrote the national anthem, but also because he contributed to the preservation of earlier poetic tradition and highlighted its usefulness to modern literature. Other notable poems include Ὁ Κρητικός, Ἐλεύθεροι Πολιορκημένοι. A characteristic of his work is that no poem except the Hymn to Liberty was completed, and almost nothing was published during his lifetime.
Augusta Maria Leigh was the only surviving daughter of John "Mad Jack" Byron, the poet Lord Byron's father, by his first wife, Amelia, née Darcy.
This is a chronology of events in the life of George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron. Each year links to its corresponding "year in poetry" article:
Katharine Tynan was an Irish writer, known mainly for her novels and poetry. After her marriage in 1893 to the Trinity College scholar, writer and barrister Henry Albert Hinkson (1865–1919) she usually wrote under the name Katharine Tynan Hinkson, or variations thereof. Tynan's younger sister Nora Tynan O'Mahony was also a poet and one of her three children, Pamela Hinkson (1900–1982), was also known as a writer. The Katharine Tynan Road in Belgard, Tallaght is named after her.
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 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 Giaour is a poem by Lord Byron first published in 1813 by John Murray and printed by Thomas Davison. It was the first in the series of Byron's Oriental romances. The Giaour proved to be a great success when published, consolidating Byron's reputation critically and commercially.
In English literature, Don Juan, written from 1819 to 1824 by the English poet Lord Byron, is a satirical, epic poem that portrays the Spanish folk legend of Don Juan, not as a womaniser as historically portrayed, but as a victim easily seduced by women. As genre literature, Don Juan is an epic poem, written in ottava rima and presented in 16 cantos. Lord Byron derived the character of Don Juan from traditional Spanish folk legends; however, the story was very much his own. Upon publication in 1819, cantos I and II were widely criticised as immoral because Byron had so freely ridiculed the social subjects and public figures of his time. At his death in 1824, Lord Byron had completed 16 of 17 cantos, whilst canto XVII remained unfinished.
Nicolo or Nicolas Giraud was a friend of English Romantic poet Lord Byron. The two met in 1809 while Byron was staying in Athens. Giraud, who at that time of their relationship was a fourteen-year-old majordomo and then student at the Capuchin monastery in Athens, reportedly taught Byron Italian, and was his travel companion in Greece. Byron paid for Giraud's education and left him £7,000 in his will. Years after they parted company, Byron changed his will to exclude Giraud. Other than his involvement with Byron, little is known of Giraud's life.
Mazeppa is a narrative poem written by the English Romantic poet Lord Byron in 1819. It is based on a popular legend about the early life of Ivan Mazepa (1639–1709), who later became Hetman of Ukraine. Byron's poem was immediately translated into French, where it inspired a series of works in various art forms. The cultural legacy of Mazeppa was revitalised with the independence of Ukraine in 1991.
Clara Allegra Byron was the illegitimate daughter of the poet George Gordon, Lord Byron, and Claire Clairmont.
Teresa, Contessa Guiccioli (1800–1873) was an Italian noblewoman and the married lover of Lord Byron while he was living in Ravenna and writing the first five cantos of Don Juan. She wrote the biographical account Lord Byron's Life in Italy.
George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron, was an English poet and peer. He is one of the major figures of the Romantic movement, and is regarded as being among the greatest of English poets. Among his best-known works are the lengthy narratives Don Juan and Childe Harold's Pilgrimage; many of his shorter lyrics in Hebrew Melodies also became popular.
The Vision of Judgment (1822) is a satirical poem in ottava rima by Lord Byron, which depicts a dispute in Heaven over the fate of George III's soul. It was written in response to the Poet Laureate Robert Southey's A Vision of Judgement (1821), which had imagined the soul of king George triumphantly entering Heaven to receive his due. Byron was provoked by the High Tory point of view from which the poem was written, and he took personally Southey's preface which had attacked those "Men of diseased hearts and depraved imaginations" who had set up a "Satanic school" of poetry, "characterized by a Satanic spirit of pride and audacious impiety". He responded in the preface to his own Vision of Judgment with an attack on "The gross flattery, the dull impudence, the renegado intolerance, and impious cant, of the poem", and mischievously referred to Southey as "the author of Wat Tyler", an anti-royalist work from Southey's firebrand revolutionary youth. His parody of A Vision of Judgement was so lastingly successful that, as the critic Geoffrey Carnall wrote, "Southey's reputation has never recovered from Byron's ridicule."
The Bride of Abydos is a poem written by Lord Byron in 1813. One of his earlier works, The Bride of Abydos is considered to be one of his "Heroic Poems", along with The Giaour, Lara, The Siege of Corinth, The Corsair and Parisina. These poems contributed to his poetic fame at the time in England.
"Lachin y Gair", often known as "Dark Lochnagar" or "Loch na Garr", is a poem by Lord Byron, written in 1807. It discusses the author's childhood in north east Scotland, when he used to visit Lochnagar in Highland Aberdeenshire. It is perhaps one of the poet's most Scottish works, both in theme and sentiment.
The Maid of Scio: A Tale of Modern Greece is a poem written by Eleanor Snowden based on the Chios Massacre, which Snowden portrays in a tale of heroes, love and hate. It is a variation of the epic form. The poem was published in 1829 subsequent to Eugène Delacroix's artwork The Massacre at Chios which was completed in 1824, the same year of Lord Byron's death at Missolonghi during the Greek War of Independence. Snowden wrote six cantos and a short collection of notes at the end of the work. The poem received some critical reception from British periodicals and sold for 19s 4h from publishers. Although one publication described Snowden as having had "Byron too much before her in the composition of her poem", the general response was positive with a literature section in another English literary periodical describing her work as having 'evinced much poetic feeling'. The work and many others were unearthed in 1970 from the Corvey Castle Collection, the set of works is now named the Corvey Collection.
Byron's Memoirs, written between 1818 and 1821 but never published and destroyed soon after his death, recounted at full-length his life, loves and opinions. He gave the manuscript to the poet Thomas Moore, who in turn sold it to John Murray with the intention that it should eventually be published. On Lord Byron's death in 1824, Moore, Murray, John Cam Hobhouse, and other friends who were concerned for his reputation gathered together and burned the original manuscript and the only known copy of it, in what has been called the greatest literary crime in history.
Handsome Nell was the first song written by Robert Burns, often treated as a poem, that was first published in the last volume of James Johnson's Scots Musical Museum in 1803 (No.551) with an untitled tune. Burns recorded in holograph on page three of his first Commonplace Book that he wrote the song or Rhyme at the age of only fifteen whilst living at Mount Oliphant Farm, it is regarded as his earliest production, inspired by a farm servant aged fourteen, named either Nelly Kilpatrick or Nelly Blair. Some confusion exists as he also gave his age as 16 in his autobiographical letter to Dr. Moore; the autumn of 1774 is generally accepted.
Constance Smith, Mrs Spencer Smith - wife of a British diplomat John Spencer Smith, known as Florence in several Byron's poems.
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