Poetry of Byron - 3 - Peter Orr

Eternal Spirit of the chainless Mind!
Brightest in dungeons, Liberty! thou art:
For there thy habitation is the heart—
The heart which love of thee alone can bind;
And when thy sons to fetters are consigned—
To fetters, and the damp vault's dayless gloom,
Their country conquers with their martyrdom,
And Freedom's fame finds wings on every wind.
Chillon! thy prison is a holy place,
And thy sad floor an altar—for 'twas trod,
Until his very steps have left a trace
Worn, as if thy cold pavement were a sod,
By Bonnivard!—May none those marks efface!
For they appeal from tyranny to God

The principal work here is ‘The prisoner of Chillon’ on the stock romantic theme of individual liberty. Despite its 16C setting this is a republican protest against the ancien regime then dominating Europe. A similar impulse is expressed in the dungeon scene of Beethoven’s Fidelio and in Goya’s ‘3 de Mayo’ - Go to - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Prisoner_of_Chillon, for the background to the poem.

Despite his liberal prejudices, Byron had sufficient whiggish broadmindedness to appreciate the irony that when the crowd stormed the Bastille on July 14th they could liberate only four forgers, two lunatics and a ‘deviant’ committed by his family (and that a few days before, the Marquis de Sade had walked free)

A pleasant, authoritative reading with certain donnish inflections. Note that a few words are pronounced as they would have been in the early 1800s. The sound is quite good though there is occasional tape echo. Kindly seed.

Treasury of George Gordon, Lord Byron

Spoken Arts [SAC 8025] read by Peter Orr [1966]


01 The prisoner of Chillon
02 When we two parted
03 Stanzas for music (There's not a joy the world can give).
04 Stanzas written on the road between Florence and Pisa
05 Stanzas for music (There be none of beauty's daughters)
06 Don Juan, Canto I (selections)
07 Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Cantos III, IV (selections)
08 & 09 The destruction of Sennacherib