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Childe Harold ii and the ‘Polemic of Ottoman Greece’
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 November 2023
In these opening lines of the third Canto of The Corsair (1814), Byron sets the mood for his narrative of the tragic death of Conrad’s faithful wife, Medora, by means of a sunset evocation of Greece, as the radiant sun of antiquity sinks over a land no longer consecrated to the antique spirit. The fact that Byron ‘borrowed’ the bravura sunset passage in its entirety (1–54) from his ‘unpublished (though printed) poem’ (CPW, iii, p. 448), The Curse of Minerva, suggests that he was particularly wedded to the sublimity of sunset as a melancholy symbol of modern Greece. In the latter poem, the same lines introduce another betrayed female, the physically abused and insulted goddess Minerva, who curses Lord Elgin for despoiling her temple, as the shades of evening lengthen over the plundered ruins of the Parthenon. Byron’s recycling of his lines suggests a conscious connection between the values of Conrad’s apolitical love for the ‘housewifely’ Medora and the philhellenic ideology flagged by Minerva.
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