This document provides background information on Lord Byron and his poem "The Prisoner of Chillon". It discusses Byron's life, works, and status as a Romantic poet. It also analyzes the historical context, themes, symbols, and literary devices used in "The Prisoner of Chillon". These include isolation, exile, dichotomies between freedom and imprisonment, and figures of speech like simile, metaphor, paradox, and personification. The document quotes another author praising Byron's ability to convey authentic impressions and situations through his works.

1. THE
PRISONER OF
CHILLON
~ LORD BYRON
DONE BY,
ALEENA SHAJI

2. TABLE OF CONTENT
– 1. GEORGE GORDON BYRON
1.1 HIS LIFE
1.2 HIS WORKS
1.3 BYRON AS A ROMANTIC
1.4 BYROMANIA, BYRONISM AND BYRONIC HERO
– 2. PRISONER OF CHILLON- POEM
2.1 HISTORICAL BACKGROUND
2.2 SUMMARY
2.3 THEMES
2.4 SYMBOLS AND IMAGERY
2.4 FIGURE OF SPEECH

3. GEORGE GORDON BYRON (1788-1824)
 George Gordon Byron was born on January 22, 1788.
 He was the son of Captain John Byron and his second wife, the former
Catherine Gordon.
 He was sent to a private school in Dulwich, and in 1801 in Harrow. He
wrote several poems there.
 After school he went to Trinity College, Cambridge.
 At the age of 21, he became a member of House of Lords
 Byron’s mother, Catherine Gordon was a Scottish heiress descended
from Annabella Stewart, daughter of James I of Scotland and his father
Captain John ‘Mad Jack’ Byron accepted Scottish customs of his wife

4. – Byron was given his mother’s Scottish surname
– Byron’s father John Byron was a romantic philanderer, who courted Catherine and captured the heart
of wealthy Catherine and quickly spent her 17,000 pound inheritance. He died when Byron was just
three years old
– On August 1, 1811, Mrs Byron died.
– Like his father, Byron spent his youth in the pursuit of women just to impregnate them and abandon
them
– Byron married Annabella and they had one daughter Ada
– By birth he suffered from a deformity in his right foot. To prove himself a normal man he crossed the
Dardanelles in 1809.
– Byron travelled widely across Europe and joined the Greek War of Independence fighting the Ottoman
Empire( Greek National Hero)
– He died on April 19, 1824 from a contracted fever while championing the Greek cause against the
Ottoman Turks.

5. HIS WORKS
– Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812-18) [Autobiographical poem]- 4 cantos
– Don Juan
– Hours of Idleness
– The siege of Corinth
– Prometheus
– When We Two Parted
– Cain –tragedy
– English Bards and Scotch Reviewers- satire

6. BYRON AS A ROMANTIC POET
– He created an immensely popular Romantic hero- defiant, melancholy, and haunted by secret guilt-for which,
to many, he seemed the model.
– His multi faceted personality found expression in satire, verse narrative, ode, lyric, speculative drama,
historical tragedy, confessional poetry, dramatic monologue, seriocomic epic, and voluminous
correspondence written in Spenserian stanzas, heroic couplets, blank verse, terzarima, ottavarima and
vigorous prose.
– In his dynamism, sexuality, self-revelation and demands for freedom for oppressed people everywhere,
Byron captivated the Western mind and heart as few writers have done.
– He employed meter, anapest, iambs, blank verse, heroic couplets, Hudibrastic verse, terzain, quatrains and
rhyme royal in his diverse poetry.
– He mostly wrote epics and lyric poems.
– He has named himself as the embodiment of Romanticism.

7. BYROMANIA, BYRONISM AND
BYRONIC HERO
– BYROMANIA:- During his lifetime he enjoyed unlimited name, fame and fan following for his
writings and for being a confessional writer. The context of his quick fame after the publication
of Childe Harold Pilgrimage in 1812 is unimaginable. This was known as ‘Byromania’, a term
coined by his wife.
– BYRONISM:- Bertrand Russell, in his History of Western Philosophy, gives a chapter to Byron—
not because he was a systematic thinker, but because “Byronism”, established an outlook and a
stance towards humanity and the world that entered 19thcentury philosophy and eventually
helped to form Nietzsche’s concept of the Superman, the hero who stands outside the
jurisdiction of the ordinary criteria of good and evil.
A term used in literature to denote certain characteristics identified with Byron and his heroes
who are in some way extensions of his own self especially romanticism, rebelliousness melancholy
and melodramatic energy.

8. – BYRONIC HERO:- It represents an idealized, but flawed character whose attributes: great talent; great
passion; a distaste for society and social institutions; a lack of respect for rank and privilege being
thwarted in love by social constraint or death; rebellion, exile.

9. PRISONER OF CHILLON

10. THEMES
1) Isolation
2) Exile
3) Dichotomies between
 freedom and imprisonment
 life and death
 nature and human constructions
4) Man and the natural world
5) Principles

11. SYMBOLS AND IMAGERY

12. FIGURES OF SPEECH
1. SIMILE:- Simile is the comparison of two things usually belonging to different
classes, using ‘like’, ‘as’, ‘that’ or ‘so’.
– ‘As’
 As men’s have grown from sudden fears
 Finished as they had begun
 Dying as their father died
– ‘Like’
 Like a marsh’s meteor lamp
– ‘so’
 Which have not seen the sun so rise

13. 2. METAPHOR:- Metaphor is the comparison of two objects without the use of ‘as’ or ‘like’. It says that a
thing is some other thing instead of saying it is like some other thing.
 A sea of stagnant idleness
 And the whole earth would henceforth be
A wider prison unto me:
3. PARADOX:- A seemingly absurd or contradictory statement or preposition which, when investigated, may
prove to be well-founded, possible or true.
 And thus together-yet apart,
 Fettered in the hand, but join’d in heart,
4. OXYMORON:- A figure of speech in which apparently contradictory terms appear in conjunction.
• Have made– and like a living grave
• But with that pale and livid light
• Between me and the eternal brink,
• So softly worn, so sweetly weak,

14. 5. ALLITERATION:- The repetition of same consonant sounds in a series of words or in the stressed syllables of a line
of a poem.
– With marks that will not wear away
– Dungeons deep and old
– Dim with the dull imprison’d ray
6. ASSONANCE:- Assonance takes place when two or more words close to one another repeat the same vowel
sound but start with different consonant sounds.
 Are bann’d, and barred-forbidden fare
 Finished as they had begun
 But form’d to combat with his kind
7. CONSONANCE:- A stylistic literary device identified by the repetition of identical or similar consonants, usually in
the unstressed syllables (medial or end), in neighbouring words whose vowel sounds are different.
 My hair is grey, but not with years
 Nor grew it white
 Are bann’d and barred
 To him, with eyes as blue as heaven

15. 8. ANASTROPHE:- The reversal of syntax or word order for poetic or rhythmic effect.
• And in his natural spirit gay (Instead of ‘natural gay spirit’)
• I had no hope my eyes to raise (Instead of ‘to raise my eyes’)
• Fetter’d or fetterless to be – for (Instead of ‘to be fetter’d or fetterless’)
9. TRANSFERRED EPITHET:- Hypallage or transferred epithet is a figure of speech in which an epithet(or
adjective) grammatically qualifies a noun other than the person or thing it is actually describing. It often
involves shifting a modifier from the animate to the inanimate as in the phrases, “cheerful money,”
“sleepless night,” etc.
 And wanton in the happy sky
10. SYNECHDOCHE:- It is a literary device in which a part od something represents the whole or vice versa,
as in ‘wheels’ in place of a ‘car’.
o That even in death his freeborn breast {in place of ‘freeborn body’}
o The sweetest song ear ever heard {in place of ‘man ever heard’}

16. 11. HYPERBOLE:- It is the use of exaggeration or overstatement as a rhetorical device, though
not meant to be taken literally.
– And song that said a thousand things
12. HENDIADYS:- The expression of an idea by the use of usually two independent words
connected by and (as in ‘nice and warm’) instead of the usual combination of independent
wordand its modifier(nicely warm).
 But he, the favourite and the flower (instead of ‘favourite flower’)
13. PERSONIFICATION:- The attribution of a personal nature or human characteristics to
something non-human or inanimate, or the representation of an abstract quality in human
form.
 Proud of Persecution’s rage;
 That iron is a cankering thing,
For in these limbs its teeth remain,

17. Byron is emphatically a citizen of the world, who has
"not only painted the environs, but reflected the
passions and aspirations of every scene which he
visualizes." And it is this magic power of conveying
the authentic impression of an actual occurrence,
which renders his most recondite situations so
thrilling,—which breathes a Western vigour into the
scented air of the Orient, and thrills with poignant
pathos through the horrors of the Prisoner of
Chillon.
~May Clarissa Gillington, A Day With Lord Byron

18. THANK YOU..