In 1821, only three years before his death, Byron wrote in his diary: "It is all a Mystery. I feel most things, but I know nothing except—." He then covered the page with a series of blanks. The best of Byron's poetry is variation on that theme. The theme assumes nearly as many different emphases as the poet assumed poses, but the recurring motif, from Childe Harold's Pilgrimage through the fragmented Canto XVII of Don Juan, asserts an essentially absurdist view of the world. In one sense, Byron was born out of phase with time. While Coleridge and Wordsworth affirmed the organic unity of life and the blessedness afforded one who participates in an ultimately benevolent process, Byron traced the shrineless pilgrimage of Childe Harold who searches relentlessly for he is not sure what. While Shelley—even in Byron's presence—found "flowering isles" in the "sea of life and Agony" (imaginatively, if not actually), Byron allowed Manfred to die out of an unbearable, guilt-ridden existence. While Keats was steeling himself against misery with his doctrines of disinterestedness and "soul-making," Byron prepared Don Juan to play cleverly and sometimes heartlessly with a world which shifted constantly beneath his feet. Unlike his contemporaries, who were capable of affirmation in the face of misery, Byron affirmed, then doubted his own affirmations. Unable to realize, intellectually or emotionally, the stability and sanctity of Wordsworth's and Coleridge's organically unified world, Byron faced a world in which there was yet no adequate defense against chaos.

Like T. S. Eliot one hundred years later, Byron felt the need to shore some fragments against his ruin. In his poetry he first explores a fragmented world, then builds a refuge against it. Byron spent the balance of his poetic career haunted by what Harold Bloom has called the "specter of meaninglessness" (The Visionary Company, 1961). He used the force of his poetic genius to deal with this specter, first by shouting defiance of the world, then by mocking it, laughing that he might not weep. Ironically, the power of Byron's opposition made the specter materialize; the poetry from Childe Harold's Pilgrimage through Don Juan progressively reveals an incoherent, essentially meaningless world.

Although there are moments in Childe Harold's Pilgrimage when the pilgrim seems to have found what he seeks, something of extraordinary beauty and value, most of the pilgrimage wanders from one disillusioning experience to another. From the beginning there is a poignant sense of burned-out life, of energy so purposelessly spent that only a void remains. In the very first stanza the poet sets the tone by denying himself a muse: "Nor mote my shell awake the weary Nine / To grace so plain a tale—this lowly lay of mine." This initial humility is the poet's, but the pilgrim will eventually realize it as well. No muse could elevate and inspire the poem, for the subject itself is base. From "Childe Harold's Good Night" till the end of Canto IV, the pilgrim wanders; less heroically than Tennyson's Ulysses, he defines his existence in terms of quest and new experience. Each new experience, though, disappoints. The shining, enchanting beauty of Lisbon seen from afar becomes the wretchedness and poverty of the city seen in close-up. Heroic and legendary Greece has a modern sculptor; an Englishman, Lord Elgin, hacks away at Grecian monuments, forcing Byron to write "The Curse of Minerva." Countless experiences and themes from the poem might be cited to support the claim that the poet is beginning to develop a nihilistic view of things: the lasting disparity between ideal and real, aspiration and achievement, imagination and reason; the sic transit gloria mundi theme which informs Cantos III and IV; the lonely soul theme which the alien Harold reiterates so boldly but sadly. But ultimately there is hope in Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. The poet found at least one way of dealing with a disappointing world: the creation of art. The fear of nothingness leads nowhere, so Byron seized, almost in desperation, the idea of living through imaginative structuring of experience:

'Tis to create, and in creating live
A being more intense, that we endow
With form our fancy, gaining as we give
The life we image, even as I do now….
(III, vi)

This concept, reinforced by the Shelleyan-Wordsworthian optimism that appears in the middle of the canto, suggests that Byron had reached despair but passed beyond it. Shelley's optimism, though, is unnatural to Byron, and there is a regression to bleakness in Canto IV. But the notion of living by creating gave Byron one defense against chaos; he finds another in Canto IV, a tremendous faith in the power of the human mind and will.

As Childe Harold enters Venice in Canto IV, Byron is still sustained by his newly achieved conviction that the creative imagination gives structure and meaning to the poet's existence. In an echo of the passage from Canto III, vi, Harold identifies "The Beings of the mind" as being of more than clay. They are "essentially immortal," and they afford us eventually a more "beloved existence" (IV, v). Eventually, though, the creations, the "Beings," yield importance to the mind itself. In stanza xxi Byron affirms an even greater strength in the mind:

Existence may be borne, and the deep root
Of life and sufferance make its firm abode
In bare and desolated bosoms: mute
The Camel labours with the heaviest, load,
And the wolf dies in silence—not bestowed

In vain should such example be; if they,
Things of ignoble or of savage mood,
Endure and shrink not, we of nobler clay
May temper it to bear,—it is but for a day.

The poet's eye is turning yet more inward, scanning the creations of the mind for their beauty and life, but praising the mind even more because it can will endurance for our mortal clay. No longer seeking to transcend bodily life by momentary engagement with the higher world of art, Childe Harold gradually adopts a quite acceptance of his unrewarding quest. In stanza cxxvii he says that it is "a base / Abandonment of reason to resign / Our right of thought—our last and only place / Of refuge…." This last proclamation reaffirms his suspicion, first voiced in stanza xxv, that perhaps the best he can do on his pilgrimage is "To meditate amongst decay." The very power of art to revitalize life depends upon the mind's receptivity; the mind itself is our last refuge.

Byron's belief in the shaping power of poetry undoubtedly influenced his notion of the indomitable force of the mind; poetry, which gives life to the poet, is of course a creation of the mind. But the Prometheus myth added another dimension to Byron's developing conviction that the mind itself is man's greatest resource. Prometheus had long fascinated Byron, enough so that he wrote an entire poem about the rebellious Titan. His defiance of Zeus, his opposition to a force supposedly greater than himself, made Prometheus attractive to Byron at this point in his development. The Titan epitomizes heroic volition, terrifying assertion of one's own will. Zeus stood as a judge who enforced illogical and indefensible laws. Through an act of will, Prometheus became the soul judge of himself by refusing to accept any external standard or law. He became a law unto himself, and it is to this same position that the poet himself came. Having failed to find coherence and stability in a world of orthodox standards and conduct, Byron concluded that coherence could at least be achieved within the individual mind. With this pervasive sense of individual order, Manfred was composed.

Simply stated, Manfred dramatizes the refusal of the mind to yield to anything outside itself. Manfred, then, at least in part, develops from Childe Harold whose last refuge is the mind itself. As did Childe Harold, Manfred sought for something more than the "humble virtues," "hospitable home," and "spirit patient" represented by the Chamois Hunter. But like Childe Harold, Manfred was destined to be an alien: "though I wore the form, I had no sympathy with breathing flesh" (II, ii, 56-57). Tormented by his sense of guilt for having loved "as we should not love" (II, i, 27), Manfred seeks forgetfulness. He is offered what he needs by the Witch of the Alps if he will only yield his will to her. Manfred's reply to the Witch of the Alps might be the poet's to the world:

I will not swear—Obey! and whom? the Spirits
Whose presence I command, and be the slave
Of those who served me—Never!
(II, ii, 157-159)

Even at the moment of death when the spirits come to claim him, Manfred asserts the supremacy of his own will:

I do not combat against Death, but thee
And thy surrounding angels; my past power
Was purchased by no compact with thy crew,
But by superior science—penance, daring,
And length of watching, strength of mind, …
(III, iv, 112-116)

Strength of mind, the impassioned assertion that the individual will is the most powerful of forces. Manfred's anguish came not from any external imposition, but from within—and so does his death. The common mind (the abbot), shaped by orthodoxy, is at a loss to understand Manfred's willful death. It is this same common mind, nourished by traditional values, which both Byron and Manfred repudiate. Childe Harold tentatively asserted the supremacy of the individual will; Manfred glorifies it.

Heroic defiance cannot last indefinitely. Either it must consume its possessor, as it does Manfred, or be consumed, leaving a void behind. The tone of the poetry after Manfred suggests that the latter may have happened to Byron, that at least in his art the will to command experience absolutely slowly diminished. In the best poems, especially in Don Juan, there is a resignation which accepts incoherent meaninglessness and deals with it. In his epic, Byron's outright defiance fades, and he doubts the sanctity of most things, the individual will and poetry included. Having lowered his two earlier defenses against ruin in the face of chaos, Byron adopted new ways of dealing with an essentially absurd world. Sentimental visions of innocence, shrineless pilgrimages, aesthetic imposition of order, heroic self-assertion, and Shelleyan transcendence all failed to uncover the coherent, ordered world he sought. By 1818, then, Byron concluded that no order was to be found. His consequent acceptance of chaos is even reflected in the form of his greatest works. The earlier poetry usually had been written in rhymed forms dignified by the weight of tradition. Pope and the heroic couplet stood behind English Bards, and Scotch Reviewers, supporting an interesting but lame satire. Spenser and all his imitators gave aged authority to the stanza form of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. Even the plays, although unique in many ways, show obvious indebtedness to the rich English and Greek dramatic traditions. But in English there was no ottava rima tradition, no precedent for the unlikely rhymes, the diversified metrics, sometimes Mil-tonic in grandeur, sometimes deliberately doggerel. Byron was on his own, free from serious concerns for propriety and structure. The rejection of most literary standards complemented his rejection of the idea of an ordered universe. With the freedom afforded by the ottava rima, Byron developed his last defense against incoherence. Childe Harold's quest and Manfred's peculiar knowledge had turned up relatively little to be celebrated in the world. The world, though, could be neither transcended nor ignored, but had to be faced. Laughter, even when it tended toward the hysterical, offered a way of coping without going mad.

A cursory look at Beppo confirms that Byron had begun to laugh. The material for an explosive melodrama is here. After years away, Beppo returns home to find his wife, Laura, keeping the company of a "Cavalier Servente." If Beppo had had Childe Harold's idealism and Manfred's grand passions, he could have turned his unexpected home-coming into an Italian domestic tragedy. The poem, though, gives nothing of the sort. The hero accepts his plight calmly, makes necessary adjustments. Laura occasionally enrages Beppo by henpecking him, but his fury is soon spent. Indeed, the Count, the "Cavalier Servente," and Beppo "were always friends." No heroic vengeance; no epic destruction of Penelope's suitors. Beppo simply accepts things as they are, and his acceptance resembles Byron's own; things may occasionally enrage him, but he is now amiable on the whole.

Mazeppa reaffirms the notion that nothing now is very important. Much of the poem approximates the emotional depths Byron had examined in Childe Harold's Pilgrimage and Manfred. The tale relates events of passion, violence, and revenge, and Byron seems to have exposed his pulse in public once again. But finally Mazeppa is an elaborate joke, a shaggy-dog story constructed in 868 lines leading to a punch line which deflates the serious tone of the narrative. The fact that the King, the intended audience, slept through the balance of the narrative implies that the poet's art is really a soporific. The poet may have participated in a greater world created by the imagination in Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (III, vi), but in Mazeppa poetry has become dull entertainment which may or may not reach the intended audience; it really does not matter, though, because the joke is for the poet's sake.

With the peculiar calm which resulted from his realization of nothingness in the world, and with the relaxed freedom afforded by the ottava rima, Byron wrote Don Juan. To demonstrate in this poem the despair at a meaningless world is easy. Indeed, the unlimited scope of the poem makes it likely that nearly anything can be proved by reference to the text. But the idea of nothingness permeates the poem because it appears at so many strategic and dramatic moments. For example, the following stanza might be cited as evidence of Byron's vision of nothingness:

Canto VII is of course one of the war cantos; consequently its dominant tone is seriously satirical. War is shown to be violent, and Don Juan, at least for a while, fights violently beside the best of the Russian troops. Yet the high seriousness of the tone and the subject matter is regularly undermined. While monstrous war goes on in Canto VII, in the next canto, after the Russians have besieged the city, the serious tone is interrupted by levity. In the best Roman-Sabine tradition, the raping begins:

The flippant couplet alone turns a sad situation into a comic episode. In the next stanza, though, the narrator points out "that some disappointment there ensued," and the following stanza tells why:

The nothingness which Byron holds up here is not the fact of war, but the inane responses to it. Against the cruelty of war and the subsequent inanity which informs man's response to war, Byron protects himself with laughter. On the whole, the war cantos reveal a depth of compassion and sense of the sanctity of human life. But to be only serious about such matters is again to invite despair. Byron chooses to laugh, and then to move on to the Court of Catherine the Great. Rapid movement and laughter becomes his defense against senseless cruelty and inane human behavior.

That laughter and acceptance of nothingness have replaced the earlier defense against ruin which Byron found in the creative act is reflected in his expressed attitude toward poetry in Don Juan. At the beginning of Canto VII the poet identifies his tale as a "versified Aurora Borealis / Which flashes o'er a waste and icy clime" (VII, ii). The light of his verse, though, is not to redeem or to elevate, but to lay bare a wasteland of a civilization that we may know it for what it is. The following passage tells what the Aurora Borealis elucidates:

Poetry now induces laughter; no longer does it allow its creator to participate in a better world of art, rather to live with his lesser world of factual nothingness—a "show." Among myriad possibilities, several stanzas from Canto XIV reflect the persistency of Byron's now casual attitude toward poetry. In stanza viii "Poesy" is "a straw, borne on my human breath." Whimsical by intent, it acts "according as the Mind glows." Like straw, poetry is essentially hollow, lacking the passionate emotion which surfaced so regularly in Childe Harold's Pilgrimage and Manfred. The couplet of stanza viii comments further on poetry:

And mine's a bubble, not blown up for praise,
But just to play with, as an infant plays.

After admitting in stanza x that "I can't help scribbling once a week," Byron expresses a defense of poesy that must have shocked his friend, Shelley:

Writing is like a pointless game of cards or is a soporific, like reading and drinking. It pacifies. All these passages, and countless other, suggest that Byron had become obsessed with emptiness and futility. Art became a game, played only as earnestly as suburban housewives might play bridge, to keep blankness away.

This affable but calloused appraisal of the world finally leads Byron to train his hero quickly for the insubstantial, hypocritical society he will find in the English Cantos. After several stanzas of cataloguing ignominious historical events and figures in Engliand's past and present, the poet instructs Juan in how to survive in the inanity of the English society Juan has entered:

All races and days in this society are transient, and Juan must learn self-annihilation and shape-shifting if he is to play in a frivolous world. This is self-annihilation, though, which is manifested in convenient refusal to be a person; Juan must always be whatever the situation demands. This capacity to disguise one's essential self while playing various roles is identified in Canto XVI as "mobility." While Lady Adeline entertains her husband's political supporters, she assumes her role so elegantly that Juan "began to feel / Some doubt how much of Adeline was real" (xlvi). Furthermore:

"Want of heart" is precisely what is wrong in the world Juan inhabits. Strong will and heart moved Childe Harold and Manfred through anguished existences, though, and Byron, like Juan and Lady Adeline, has learned that an emotional commitment to an essentially meaningless existence can only bring anguish. Don Juan will prosper in England; like Lady Adeline he learns to adjust to the moment at hand. Persistent and flippant inconsistency is the only way to deal with an insubstantial, incoherent world.

Don Juan is something of a labyrinth, though, and around each corner and at each dead-end is more evidence that the poet has determined existence itself to be an incoherent maze. Rather than proceed with more particular illustrations, perhaps it is better to look at three general points about the poem to show that it is finally about nothingness. First, the very fact that the poem concerns everything suggests that it is ultimately about nothing. Byron admitted in a letter to his publisher (April 23, 1818) that the poem "is meant to be a little quietly facetious upon every thing." A central theme is impossible to locate. At times the theme seems to be the old discrepancy between illusion and reality. Or perhaps it is, as several critics recently have argued, the theme of the Fall with elaborate variations. Or perhaps a desire to expose gross hypocrisy motivated the poem. Or perhaps. The possibilities are countless. The focus is finally nowhere. By being every-where, Don Juan is not anywhere—it is constantly in the process of becoming, but it never simply is, nor could have been until it ended, and it could end only with Byron's death. To look too closely at any single subject, or to narrate in a single tone of voice, would be to edge toward consistency, and consistency is more than the hob-goblin of small minds; it is madness. Byron's "mobility," though, allows him to keep playing opposites off against one another in a desperate defense against despair. If love becomes painful, it must be mocked. If war is violent and cruel, there must be women wondering when the raping will begin. If there is an Aurora Raby, there must be a Lady Adeline. Rapid movement with a shifting world is the only means of survival.

Secondly, the character of Juan himself demonstrates the emptiness of the world Byron inhabited. Mobility becomes the habit of Juan's soul. A reader spends an immense amount of time with Juan, but finally knows very little about his character. Even more important, Juan almost completely lacks the will which sustained Childe Harold and Manfred. As numerous critics have pointed out, the world acts upon him. Even his few willed acts, like the saving of Leila, are vague gestures that go nowhere. Like Auden's unknown citizen, "When there was peace, he was for peace; when there was war, he went." When there is an empress to pamper him, he lets her. But that is Juan's victory; the moment determines both his actions and his essence.

Finally, the essential formlessness of the poem reflects Byron's conviction that life is ultimatley incoherent and chaotic. The poem literally sprawls from Spain to Greece, from Greece to Turkey, from Turkey to Russia, and from Russia to England. Byron was too much an artist to try to impose strict, traditional artistry on Juan's meandering. He simply terminates episodes when they no longer interest him, and numerous digressions interrupt and defy a strictly coherent narrative. This formlessness, though, comes not from incompetence, but from Byron's understanding of how he had to operate within his world in order to stay sane. From one canto to the next he wrote what pleased him, how it pleased him. If he decided that the reader did not need to know how Juan escaped from the Seraglio, Byron did not bother to tell. If Leila, who was the occasion for Juan's one really heroic and compassionate act, virtually disappears from the poem though she remains with Juan, the poet does not care. What did it matter? The poem meant more to Byron as process than as achievement. With urbane laughter and the emotional detachment afforded thereby, Byron survived in his poetic world which earlier had nearly devoured him. Byron's own comment that parts of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage were written by a man much older than he would ever be is appropriate. Childe Harold's idealism-to-anguish journey tired the poet; the endless growth and process of Don Juan not only kept him young, but sustained him in a world which he intellectually knew and experimentally proved to be im-perfect.