Lord Byron pictures himself as old, still capable of desire but no longer an object of others’ desire. The fire and the drive that pulls him out of aging languor is freedom for Greece.
George Gordon, Lord Byron, born in 1788, died in Greece on April 19, 1824 — ill from the systematic abuse of his health in his frantic-paced life, a bad fever, and the misdoctoring of bloodletting. He was only 36, and he had found, for perhaps the first time in his life, a consuming goal: his fight to free Greece from rule by the Ottoman Empire. Establishing himself at the western Greek town of Missolonghi, he spent his fortune and his last days struggling to bring unity to the rival Greek factions whose division slowed the revolution against the Turks.
On January 22, 1824, in acknowledgement of his birthday, he wrote one of his last works — today’s Poem of the Day in The New York Sun. “January 22nd, Missolonghi: On this Day I Complete my Thirty-Sixth Year” is an interesting production. The poet pictures himself as old, still capable of desire but no longer a youthful object of others’ desire: “though I cannot be beloved, / Still let me love!” And the inspiration he declares, the fire and the drive that pulls him out of aging languor, is freedom for Greece: “Awake (not Greece — she is awake!) / Awake, my Spirit!”
Written in quatrains rhymed abab, the ten stanzas are formed by three four-beat lines followed by a sapphic-like shortened last line of two beats. And the poem ends with the poet’s calling himself to heroism and a hero’s death: “Seek out — less often sought than found — / A Soldier’s Grave . . . / Then look around, and choose thy Ground, / And take thy rest.” That April, less than three months later, Lord Byron died.
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