What Would Byron Do?

Two months before he died of fever in Missolonghi in western Greece, broken and legendary at 36, George Gordon, Lord Byron, staged an elaborate practical joke on a friend. Knowing that a recent earthquake had frightened the friend badly, Byron sent fifty men into the basement of the house where they were staying, with instructions to jump up and down. Meanwhile, other men were dispatched to roll cannonballs back and forth across the upstairs rooms. The friend fled the shuddering house, terrified.

This is the sort of anecdote to which I have subjected my sainted roommates on an hourly basis in the six days since I turned in my thesis about Byron. I have also, in that time, slept a lot, returned 43 books to Widener, washed my clothes, and knit half a scarf—all in the hopes of eradicating the Christmas-afternoon feeling that has been haunting me since 5 o’clock Tuesday. It hasn’t worked. I can still feel Byron, poor man, unhouseled and perching on my bookshelf. And so I try to exorcise him with anecdotes.

“Have you guys heard about the time, right after Byron’s exile, that his Swiss hotelier burst in on him, like, in flagrante delicto with a chambermaid, because the hotelier was convinced that Byron was getting it on with his wife?” They have.

I had imagined, writing my thesis, that I would feel great having turned it in. And of course it is nice, in some ways, to have it done: I no longer have a daily quota of pages to write, no longer have cause to visit Widener regularly, no longer consider the respective advantages of MLA and Chicago-style methods of citation. But I did not anticipate the emptiness of a life in which Byron has suddenly become superfluous.

There is an apposite Byron quotation for this feeling. (I have learned over the past months, as have my roommates, that there is an apposite Byron quotation for most emotions and events.) One night in February 1817, in the midst of the Carnival in Venice, Byron staggered back to his room and wrote a poem for his friend Thomas Moore: “So we’ll go no more a-roving/ So late into the night,/ Though the heart be still as loving,/ And the moon be still as bright.// For the sword outwears its sheath,/ And the soul wears out the breast,/ And the heart must pause to breathe,/ And Love itself have rest.” (Or, as glossed by a roommate, “Oh my God, I’m never drinking again.”) If you substitute “thesis-writing” for “a-roving,” the stanzas provide a nice synopsis of my post-thesis state. Love of Byron itself must have rest.

And so I am left with a collection of anecdotes and a sheaf of thesis paper. This act of forced renunciation cannot be all bad. More than Senior Week—which will, I fear, give me flashbacks to my high school senior spring, wherein many of my classmates waxed maudlin to the strikingly misconstrued soundtrack of Green Day’s “Time of Your Life”—finishing my thesis has prepared me for leaving Harvard. Come June, I suspect I will be left much as I am now: forlorn, with only anecdotes and sheaves of paper to show for all my work.

The third and final stanza of the poem Byron wrote to Moore runs, “Though the night was made for loving,/ And the day returns too soon,/ Yet we’ll go no more a-roving/ By the light of the moon.” If you once again replace “a-roving” with “thesis-writing,” Byron’s thoughts on completing one’s thesis are pretty clear. You may not feel ready to part from it—the night was made for loving!—but it is time to move on. We’ll finish our theses; we’ll graduate. For the sword outwears its sheath, and the soul wears out the breast. It is a lesson I will be absorbing, with difficulty, between now and June. In the meantime, though, I’d be glad to tell you about the time that Byron swam the Hellespont.

Phoebe Kosman ’05 is a history and literature concentrator in Winthrop House. Her column appears alternate Mondays.