艺术的赞歌——拜伦诗歌《乐章》赏析

艺术的赞歌——拜伦诗歌《乐章》赏析

［Abstract］George Gordon Byron is an influential poet and a leading figure in the Romantic Movement. His most well-known short poem is “She Walks in Beauty”, and there are many other equally attractive short poems. “Stanzas for Music” is o ne of them. This poem conveys the inherent beauty of art. The analysis of the poem involves two aspects: the visual sights depicted by the various images and the audio effects created by the spirants ［s］/ ［z］, ［θ］/ ［］and nasals ［m］/ ［n］/ ［］. Ultimately the article explores the fantastic impact brought by the combination of the visual and audio factors, showing readers the charm and immortality of art.

［Key words］short poems,compliment,art,images,audio effects

I. Introduction

It has been widely accepted that George Gordon Byron is a good satirist, because despite the beauty and power in his works, they “have a tendency to destroy all belief in the reality of virtue” and he “offended the principles and shocked the prejudices of the majority, by his sentiments, as much as he delighted them by his talents” (Jeffery 413). What’s more, his poems do not appeal to the tastes of his contemporaries who were passionate about the spontaneous overflow of emotions of Wordsworth,

which is probably the reason why Arthur Symons thinks that Byron lacks “the magic of words” and is “conspicuous” of “the poverty of rhythm” (239). The great fame Byron’s long narrative verses such as Don Juan win for him mostly because they largely convey Byron’s intentions to “unmask the specious hypocrisy, and showed it in its native colors” (Guiccioli 22). However, his short poems do not win enough attention of the public, which actually are as good as his long poetries. His short poems are usually simple, fresh and vigorous, and very often contain a female figure or take her as the subject, the reason for which phenomenon cannot be convincingly revealed by Byron’s claim that “my brain is feminine” in Manfred (qtd. in McGanne 68). Instead, the female characters should be regarded as symbols of beauty and truth, which is the destination of art. In this sense, Byron’s high praise of females is actually a compliment to art, which is an eternal theme in his poem-writing. And this is just the case in one of his beautiful poems —“Stanzas for Music” dated 1816.

To begin with, it is necessary to clarify that the contention aims to object to the statement that “Stanzas for Music” is one piece of Byron’s works continuing “the Cavalier tradition of the elaborate development of a compliment to a lady” (Wu 80), and this assertion is quite superficial in judging the value of a poem. The invalidity of this assertion can also be proved by Byron’s own viewpoints in Canto XI of Don Juan: