It is to the year which saw the work of the Congress of Verona that Byron’s secondary title, Annus haud Mirabilis, obviously refers. In a striking passage in the beginning of the poem, he pays a tribute to the mighty dead, contrasting, by implication, the leaders of the Congress with the departed heroes: Pitt and Fox, buried side by side in Westminster Abbey; and Napoleon,
“Who born no king, made monarchs draw his car.”
The summary which Byron presents of Napoleon’s career is full of admiration for the fallen emperor’s genius, and of resentment at the indignities which, according to contemporary gossip, he had been compelled to undergo on St. Helena. The man “whose game was empires and whose stakes were thrones” was forced, says the poet, to become the slave of “the paltry gaoler and the prying spy.” The passage is both an appreciation and a judgment, wavering, as it does, between sympathy and condemnation for the conqueror who burst the chains of Europe only to renew,
“The very fetters which his arm broke through.”
The reference to these giants of the past leads Byron naturally to a glorification of such liberators as Kosciusko, Washington, and Bolivar, and to a joyful heralding of revolutions in Chili, Spain, and Greece:
“One common cause makes myriads of one breast,
Slaves of the east, or helots of the west;
On Andes’ and on Athos’ peaks unfurl’d,
The self-same standard streams o’er either world.”
Under the influence of this enthusiasm he prophecies a liberal outburst which will end in the regeneration of Europe.