Where the Giaour Gets Revenge

The Giaour: A Fragment of a Turkish Tale by Lord Byron
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

It's hard to find a nice, readable copy of this poem.

Kind of impossible.

The only things I could find were online versions--a terrible way to read poetry--and random collections, which in my opinion have more than the whiff of the classroom and are just about as sexy as a scribbled on circa-1970 middle school algebra textbook with the cover ripping off. It is its own thing; it deserves its own covers, rather than sharing them with unrelated works of every type.

So I had to copy and paste and format and print my own copy and sew it up and glue it between cardboard covers I wrapped in muslin that I dyed purple and let everything dry. It's pretty warped and wonky, but it's a book, about 50% mess, 50% cool.

Then I could read it.

I liked it, and I wished there was more of it. It tells an actual story in bits and pieces, out of order, and more context rather than less would have made it more easily comprehensible, but even as is I found it engaging and affecting. The Giaour is a man, a non-Muslim in (what I understand to be) Turkish-occupied Greece who falls in love with a beautiful woman in the harem of Hassan, a powerful man. The poem introduces us to beautiful Greece, then through the eyes of a fisherman we see the dangerous Giaour on horseback, on his way to killing Hassan. Then we have, out of order and from different POVs: Hassan's death at the hand of the Giaour; Leila dropped into the sea, drowned in a bag, by Hassan; Leila escaping the harem dressed as a Georgian page; the Giaour facing Hassan; and then the Giaour holed up in a monastery, living out the rest of his short life in a cell.

Nothing announces the shifts in time, forward and back, nor the change of POV, so it's a bit of a mystery. But there's a lot of power in his language, and I have always liked the rhythms that Byron gave his lines, even when I wasn't very interested in poetry in general. (Some people don't care for his "Destruction of Sennacherib," but I often used that in classrooms full of reluctant readers and it worked well. Especially with good narrators on youtube.)

A nice passage, in the Giaour's own words:

The cold in clime are cold in blood,
Their love can scarce deserve the name;
But mine was like the lava flood
That boils in Aetna's breast of flame.
I cannot prate in puling strain
of Ladye-love, and Beauty's chain:
If changing cheek , and scorching vein,
Lips taught to writhe, but not complain,
If bursting heart, and maddening brain,
And daring deed, and vengeful steel,
And all that I have felt, and feel,
Betoken love--that love was mine,
And shown by many a bitter sign.

The poem is dark and rhythmic and even a bit Gothic, with the suggestion that he might be cursed for his crimes to return as a vampire to destroy those he loves. Fortunately he loves no one...

It's not surprising to read that this inspired Poe to some degree. Poems like "Annabel Lee" or "The Raven," with their macabre and Gothic feel, their regular rhymes, and their powerful rhythms, seem like relatives to this one. There's a definite family resemblance.

This isn't a short poem, but at 1300 lines it's not terribly long, either. (It's about 60 short pages in my edition.) :) Definitely short enough and strange enough and cool enough that it should still be getting attention, IMO--and not just in dusty old textbooks.

Read if you like poetry with love and swords and danger and the ocean.

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