Lara, like Conrad, is a portion of Byron himself, and the poem opens with his return to Newstead after some bitter experiences, at which he darkly hints:
‘Short was the course his restlessness had run,
But long enough to leave him half undone.’
He tells us that ‘Another chief consoled his destined bride.’ ‘One is absent that most might decorate that gloomy pile.’
‘Why slept he not when others were at rest?
Why heard no music, and received no guest?
All was not well, they deemed—but where the wrong?
Some knew perchance.’
In stanzas 17, 18, and 19, Byron draws a picture of himself, so like that his sister remarked upon it in a letter to Hodgson. After telling us that ‘his heart was not by nature hard,’ he says that
‘His blood in temperate seeming now would flow:
Ah! happier if it ne’er with guilt had glowed,
But ever in that icy smoothness flowed!’
The poet tells us that after Lara’s death he was mourned by one whose quiet grief endured for long.
‘Vain was all question asked her of the past,
And vain e’en menace—silent to the last.’
‘Why did she love him? Curious fool!—be still—
Is human love the growth of human will?
To her he might be gentleness; the stern
Have deeper thoughts than your dull eyes discern,
And when they love, your smilers guess not how
Beats the strong heart, though less the lips avow.
They were not common links, that formed the chain
That bound to Lara Kaled’s heart and brain;
But that wild tale she brooked not to unfold,
And sealed is now each lip that could have told.
********
‘The tempest of his heart in scorn had gazed
On that the feebler Elements hath raised.
The Rapture of his Heart had looked on high,
And asked if greater dwelt beyond the sky:
Chained to excess, the slave of each extreme,
How woke he from the wildness of that dream!
Alas! he told not—but he did awake
To curse the withered heart that would not break.’
On September 8, 1814, four months after Byron had finished ‘Lara,’ while he was at Newstead with his sister and her children—the little Medora among them—he wrote his fragment ‘Harmodia.’ The rough draft was given after his marriage to Lady Byron, who had no idea to what it could possibly refer. When the scandal about Augusta was at its height, this fragment was impounded among other incriminating documents, and eventually saw the light in ‘Astarte.’ Lord Lovelace was firmly convinced that it was addressed to Augusta Leigh!
Between September 7 and 15 Byron and Mary Chaworth were considering the desirability of marriage for Byron, and letters were passing between the distracted poet and two young ladies—Miss Milbanke and another—with that object in view. Although Byron was still in love with Mary Chaworth, he had come to understand that her determination to break the dangerous intimacy was irrevocable, so he resolved to follow her advice and marry. The tone of his letter to Moore, written on September 15, shows that he was not very keen about wedlock. He was making plans for a journey to Italy in the event of his proposal being rejected.