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| Harold Norse by Allen Ginsberg |
“Mad, bad and dangerous to know,”
Wrote Lady Caroline Lamb in her diary
The night she first met Lord Byron. He
Had no used for prudes and said so—
He refused to compromise
With social reticence on sex.
(In Venice when Shelley asked
Why he was always surrounded by rough
Young men Byron replied: “What I earn
With my brains I spend on my arse.” Shelley
Left.) Byron’s memoirs were
Destroyed by his English publisher.
Too outrageous. Too obscene.
His journals and letters reveal that he
Had incestuous fun with his half-sister
And describe a party they both attended:
“Countesses and ladies of fashion left
The room in droves,” he wrote. But many
More threw themselves at his feet—wives
And daughters of the nobility,
Governesses and servant girls.
He threw himself at the feet
Of gondoliers and stable-boys.
Today only rock and film stars compare
With his effect on the public. Shelley
Wrote: “An exceedingly interesting person
But a slave to the vilest and most vulgar
Prejudices, and mad as the winds.”
By which, presumably, he meant
His undisguised love of working-class boys.
Shelley, alas, was a frightful prude
For all his anarchistic faith.
(And probably a closet-case too.)
Byron in every act and breath
Was a flaming iconoclast to the bone.
Revolutionary for human rights
Centuries ahead of his time.
Of poor Keats he wrote rather callously:
“A Bedlam vision produced by raw pork
And opium.” Matthew Arnold wrote
Of all three: “Their names will be greater than
Their writings.” Their memory lingers on.
Byron practiced what he preached:
“Ordered promiscuity.”
He found it most in Italy
The most sensual and sensible
Of Western nations, the country of love
In all its forms, and the country of beauty.
Oppose this to England, the country of duty
And you will understand Byron completely.
In the Coliseum he once invoked
Nemesis to curse his wife’s
Lawyer—with great success, it seems,
For the later man cut his own throat.
What all the biographies skirt
When they describe his exploits we
Can now fill in: when they write of his women
“With great black eyes and fine figures—fit
To breed gladiators from” they don’t
Tell us how much he enjoyed their sons,
The gladiators he went down on.
*
Anacreon, who “delighted in
Young men” confided, “I’m old,
There’s no denying it. So what?
Among young satyrs I can dance as well
As old Bacchus himself!” When asked
Why his poems were always about young boys
And not about gods he replied: “That
Is because young boys are our gods.”
He was a pleasure-loving, wine-loving
Boy-loving poet. “Whatever Plato
May say it is unlikely that
Handsome Alcibiades,
After sleeping beneath the same blanket
As Socrates, arose intact
From his embraces,” Lucian wrote.
Dying at eighty in the gymnasium,
His head on the knee of a boy, Pindar
Seemed happily asleep
When the attendant came to wake him.
Sophocles at fifty-five
Confessed that despite his age
He often fell in love with boys.
And Aristophanes wrote
That the favorite occupation
Of sophists and intellectuals
Was to make the rounds of gymnasiums
To pick up boys.
They went to their lessons
Accompanied by their little friends.
At twelve a boy already
Appealed to them, says the great playwright.
They considered him in the prime of life
Between sixteen and seventeen.
At eighteen he was over the hill.
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