Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte by Byron

ODE TO NAPOLEON BUONAPARTE

by Lord Byron with annotations from Peter Cochran

[Byron wrote the poem in several stages. The earliest manuscript (at Texas) was created on April 10th 1814, and contains stanzas 1, 4, 6-12, and 14-16; Byron then added stanzas 5, 13, 2, and 3 to it. Stanzas 17, 18 and 19 were written – so it used to be said – at the request of John Murray, to increase the size of the book and thus to avoid paying stamp tax on it. But Andrew Nicholson, in Napoleon’s ‘last act’ and Byron’s Ode, (Romanticism 9.1, 2003, p.68) writes that there was no such condition attached to stamp tax.
The Ode was published at high speed, first anonymously (with fifteen stanzas) on April 16th 1814. All editions from the third onwards have an additional stanza 5. Not until the twelfth edition does Byron’s name appear. Stanzas 17, 18, and 19 were not printed in Byron’s lifetime. Byron wanted to dedicate the poem to Hobhouse, but Hobhouse declined.]

 

“Expende Annibalem:—quot libras in duce summo
Invenies?——
JUVENAL, Sat.X.

“The Emperor Nepos13 was acknowledged by the Senate, by the Italians, and by the
Provincials of Gaul; his moral virtues, and military talents, were loudly celebrated; and those
who derived any private benefit from his government, announced in prophetic strains the
restoration of public felicity.
* * * * * * * * * * * * *
“By this shameful abdication, he protracted his life a few years, in a very ambiguous state,
between an Emperor and an Exile, till————
Gibbon’s Decline and Fall, vol. 6, p.220.

 

1.
’Tis done – but yesterday a King!
And armed with Kings to strive –
And now thou art a nameless thing:
So abject – yet alive!
Is this the Man of thousand thrones, 
Who strewed our earth with hostile bones,
And can he thus survive?
Since he, miscalled the Morning Star,
Nor man nor fiend hath fallen so far. –

2.
Ill-minded man! why scourge thy kind 
Who bowed so low the knee?
By gazing on thyself grown blind,
Thou taught’st the rest to see;
With might unquestioned – power to save –
Thine only gift hath been the grave 
To those that worshipped thee;
Nor till thy fall could mortals guess

12: “Put Hannibal in the scales: how many pounds will that peerless / General mark up today?” – tr.
Peter Green. The first of many references to historical and mythical over-reachers with which B. cuts
Napoleon down to size.
13: Julius Nepos, Emperor of the Western Roman Empire after it had ceased to exist. Killed by his own
men.
14: BYRON’S NOTE: Lucifer was Satan’s name before he rebelled and fell.
Ambition’s less than littleness! –

3.
Thanks for that lesson – it will teach
To after-warriors more 
Than high Philosophy can preach,
And vainly preached before.
That spell upon the minds of men
Breaks, never to unite again,
That led them to adore 
Those Pagod things of sabre-sway,
With fronts of brass, and feet of clay.

4.
The triumph, and the vanity,
The rapture of the strife * –
The earthquake-voice of Victory, 
To thee the breath of Life;
The sword, the sceptre, and that sway
Which Man seemed made but to obey,
Wherewith Renown was rife –
All quelled! – Dark Spirit! what must be 
The Madness of thy Memory!
* Certaminis guadia, the expression of Attila in his harangue to his army, previous to the
battle of Chalons, given in Cassiodorus.

5
The Desolator desolate!
The Victor overthrown!
The Arbiter of others’ fate
A Suppliant for his own!
Is it some yet imperial hope
That with such change can calmly cope,
Or dread of death alone?
To die a Prince – or live a slave –
Thy choice is most ignobly brave!

6.
He * who of old would rend the oak,
Dreamed not of the rebound;
Chained by the trunk he vainly broke –
Alone – how looked he round?
Thou, in the sternness of thy strength, 

15: Attila the Hun lost the battle of Challons (451 AD).
16: Received stanza 5 does not appear in the first editions.
17: Echoes Johnson, The Vanity of Human Wishes, 213-14: Condemn’d a needy Suppliant to wait, /
While Ladies interpose, and Slaves debate. A reference to Charles XII of Sweden, Johnson’s equivalent
to Juvenal’s Hannibal.
18: Napoleon attempted suicide while this poem was in proof stage.
An equal deed hast done at length,
And darker fate hast found:
He fell, the forest prowlers’ prey;
But thou must eat thy heart away!
* Milo.19

7.
The Roman, * when his burning heart 
Was slaked with blood of Rome,
Threw down the dagger – dared depart,
In savage grandeur, home. –
He dared depart in utter scorn
Of Men that such a yoke had borne, 
Yet left him such a doom!
His only glory was that hour
Of self-upheld abandoned power. –
And Earth hath spilt her blood for him,
Who thus can hoard his own!
And Monarchs bowed the trembling limb,
And thanked him for a throne!
Fair Freedom! we may hold thee dear,
When thus thy mightiest foes their fear
In humblest guise have shown.
Oh! ne’er may tyrant leave behind
A brighter name to lure mankind! 

11.
Thine evil deeds are writ in gore,
Nor written thus in vain –
Thy triumphs tell of fame no more,
Or deepen every stain:
If thou hadst died as Honour dies. 
Some new Napoleon might arise,
To shame the world again –
But who would soar the solar height,
To set in such a starless night?

12.
Weighed in the balance, hero dust 
Is vile as vulgar clay;
Thy scales, Mortality! are just
To all that pass away:
But yet methought the living great
Some higher sparks should animate, 
To dazzle and dismay:
Nor deem’d Contempt could thus make mirth
Of these, the Conquerors of the earth.

13.
And she, proud Austria’s mournful flower,
Thy still imperial bride;
How bears her breast the torturing hour?
Still clings she to thy side?
Must she too bend, must she too share
Thy late repentance, long despair,
Thou throneless Homicide? 
If still she loves thee, hoard that gem, –
’Tis worth thy vanished Diadem!
14.
Then haste thee to thy sullen Isle,
And gaze upon the Sea;
That element may meet thy smile –
It ne’er was ruled by thee!

22: Napoleon’s second wife, Maria Louisa, daughter of the Austrian Emperor.
23: Elba.
Or trace with thine all idle hand
In loitering mood upon the sand
That Earth is now as free!
That Corinth’s pedagogue hath now 
Transferred his by-word to thy brow. –

15.
Thou Timour! in his Captive’s cage *
What thoughts will there be thine,
While brooding in thy prisoned rage?
But one – “The World was mine!” 
Unless, like he of Babylon,
All Sense is with thy Sceptre gone,
Life will not long confine
That Spirit poured so widely forth –
So long obeyed – so little worth! 

* The cage of Bajazet, by order of Tamerlane.

16.
Or, like the thief of fire * from heaven,
Wilt thou withstand the shock?
And share with him, the unforgiven,
His vulture and his rock!
Foredoomed by God – by man accurst,
And that last act, though not thy worst,
The very Fiend’s arch mock; †
He in his fall preserved his pride,
And, if a mortal, had as proudly died!

* Prometheus.
† “The fiend’s arch mock—
“To lip a wanton, and suppose her chaste.”—
Shakespeare.29
There was a day – there was an hour, 

24: English naval victories, particularly those of Nelson, had destroyed French naval power.
25: Dionysus the Younger of Syracuse, the tyrant whom Plato tried to tutor, was expelled from the city
and set himself up as a schoolteacher in Corinth.
26: Nebuchadnezzar.
27: BYRON’S NOTE: Legend has it that, upon defeating him, Tamburlaine the Great imprisoned
Bajazet, the Turkish Emperor, in a travelling cage. Byron parallels Bajazet with Napoleon and
Tamburlaine with Wellington.
28: BYRON’S NOTE: Prometheus, who was punished by Zeus for stealing fire from Heaven and
giving it to Man. Fastened to a rock, he was visited daily by a vulture which ate his liver. B. wrote the
following at some time in 1814, addressed to Napoleon, and referring to Prometheus:
Unlike the offence, though like would be the fate,
His to give life, but thine to desolate;
He stole from Heaven the flame, for which he fell,
Whilst thine was stolen from the native Hell. (CPW III 269)
29: BYRON’S NOTE: Iago’s words at Othello, IV i 70-1.
While earth was Gaul’s – Gaul thine –
When that immeasurable power
Unsated to resign
Had been an act of purer fame
Than gathers round Marengo’s name
And gilded thy decline,
Through the long twilight of all time,
Despite some passing clouds of crime.

18.
But thou forsooth must be a King
And don the purple vest, 
As if that foolish robe could wring
Remembrance from thy breast.
Where is that faded garment? where
The gewgaws thou wert fond to wear,
The star,31 the string, the crest? 
Vain froward child of Empire! say,
Are all thy playthings snatched away?
19.
Where may the wearied eye repose
When gazing on the Great;
Where neither guilty glory glows, 
Nor despicable state?
Yes – One – the first – the last – the best –
The Cincinnatus of the West,
Whom Envy dared not hate,
Bequeathed the name of Washington, 
To make man blush there was but one!]

30: Napoleon won the battle of Marengo in 1800.
31: For second thoughts here, see On the Star of the Legion of Honour (printed below).
32: Lucius Quinctius Cincinattus was always being called from his farm to rule Rome, and always
returning. B. would have us see Washington as a similarly austere Republican hero, unlike Napoleon.
33: The following two spurious stanzas were printed in The Morning Chronicle of April 27th 1814:

20.
Yes! better to have stood the storm,
A Monarch to the last!
Although that heartless fireless form
Had crumbled in the blast:
Than stoop to drag out Life’s last years,
The nights of terror, days of tears
For all the splendour past;
Then, – after ages would have read
Thy awful death with more than dread.

21.
A lion in the conquering hour!
In wild defeat a hare!
Thy mind hath vanished with thy power,
For Danger brought despair.
The dreams of sceptres now depart,
And leave thy desolated heart
The Capitol of care!
Dark Corsican, ’tis strange to trace