Chapter 3 - The Prisoner of Chillon

Summary

Looking back now, it is hard to recall all of the things that made me angry upon first reading Byron's poem The Prisoner of Chillon, but some of them remain clear. It wasn't the poem's romanticism, which might strike some now as sentimental or contrived (I find it neither). Perhaps it feels like just one more instance of “gloomy” romantic poetry. But I didn't care about any of that when I happened upon it as a 13-year-old girl in Southern California who had never really encountered poetry before (apart from A Child's Garden of Verses and the A.A. Milne collections of my early childhood). Byron's poem was included in what seems from this distance to have been a fairly ambitious freshman anthology required by my high school English class. I was a year younger than most, having learned to read at the age of 3 and starting high school when I was 13. My high school years were distinguished by a tendency to defy authority, based on what I now realize was probably a lot of not very successfully repressed anger. We were assigned three poems in the first semester: “The Road Less Taken” (Frost), “Mother to Son” (Langston Hughes), and “The Listeners” (Walter De La Mare). In a response typical of my angry teenage years, I resented the fact that we were being told what to read, and I was determined to choose my own poem out of the anthology. I chose the longest: The Prisoner of Chillon. Of course, I came back to the Frost, the Hughes, and the De La Mare, and like the Byron, all three have stayed with me all of my life in one way or the other. But they didn't affect me the way the Byron did because they didn't make me angry. And they didn't make me angry because they made such sense to me.

It is hard to understand the strength of my response from this distance, but I can still recall exactly what it was that made me so angry. The first was having to work at the poem in order to follow the narrative. I wanted the kind of ease I had found in Milne and then, eventually, Frost or Hughes, whose poetic language felt conversational. Byron's language struck me as difficult and remote, although when I read it now it seems fairly straightforward.