On This Day I Complete My Thirty-Sixth Year

 A decade or so ago, when this blog was in its relative infancy, I remember reading through some collection of Lord Byron's poetry and being reminded of the existence of one piece entitled (or sub-titled, in some editions): "On This Day I Complete My Thirty-Sixth Year." 

The thought briefly occurred to me: "Someday, when I turn thirty-six, I should use this line as a title for a post." 

But as soon as I had this thought, I also despaired of it. Turning thirty-six seemed, at that time, so impossibly far in the future that I did not trust myself to remember the idea. When I tried to imagine myself in ten years, that person seemed a stranger. Who knew what I would be like, or if I would even still be writing this blog—let alone remember this stray thought. 

Well, here I am. I turn thirty-six today. I still write this blog. And that decade seemed to speed by in no time at all. It was not in fact very difficult to remember my idea about using the Byron poem, since it now seems that it occurred to me barely yesterday. 

The days when I was twenty-six or twenty-seven don't seem like the distant past to me, but maybe a fortnight or so ago—even as my current self seemed to my younger self then like I was impossibly aged. 

But having remembered my plan for the Byron poem—what is it exactly that I wanted to say about it? 

The poem laments the passage of youth, then chides its author memorably to set aside dreams of beauty and passion, and instead to go and seek a "Soldier's Grave" in Greece. 

Such lines have an eerie note of prophecy, given what we know about Byron's future. Thirty-six was in fact the last birthday he would live to see. He would die a few months later in Missolonghi, from which he wrote the poem, in the course of trying to rally troops to support the Greek struggle for independence. 

One could find it an eerie synchronicity that Byron would write this elegiac, autumnal poem shortly before his demise in Greece. Or, one could say that Byron's prophecy was perhaps in part self-fulfilling: he went to Greece expecting full well to die in the course of supporting their freedom struggle. And so he did. 

Either way, it's a heavy thought to me that I am now almost as old as Lord Byron ever became. I've long since passed the Shelley milestone. Hitting the Byron one too makes me feel a little weak in the knees. One can only picture Shelley as young, after all; whereas his Lordship appeared to achieve a kind of autumnal middle age before his death. 

So I feel old. And it's not helping my sense of maudlin identification with the poet that we both have January birthdays. 

I do not find myself, however—on my own thirty-sixth birthday—particularly haunted by visions of lost youth; or lamenting the dying embers of romantic passion. It is more the political context of Byron's poem that feels on-point at this moment—his vision of perishing in some struggle against despotism and imperialism. 

What would be the Greece of our day, trying to throw off its own Ottoman yoke? Ukraine's heroic struggle to defend its existence from Russian aggression certainly comes to mind. Lord Byron (who also wrote a poem, by the way—"Mazeppa"—dear to Ukrainian nationalists) would surely have favored the Ukrainian cause, and maybe even perished in it. 

But—who knows?—with this week's news we may also soon find ourselves having to defend Copenhagen from U.S. aggression. Our own government appears to be set on acting in the spirit of the Ottomans toward the innocent and unoffending inhabitants of Greenland and Denmark. One knows where Byron would have stood on that question as well. 

Through the last two centuries, people have constantly pilloried Byron for a host of alleged or suspected personal offenses. But if you rely on the actual published work—all you will ever find is a man of almost impeccable political conscience. 

I'm not aware of any instance in which Byron was on the wrong side of an issue. Everywhere, every time, he was on the side of liberty and justice. 

William Hazlitt had the best final word on him in this regard. In his character sketch of Byron in "The Spirit of the Age," he goes on for a time about his Lordship's personal arrogance and other failings. But then—he tells us—even as he was writing this passage, news came to him from Greece of Byron's demise. 

We had written thus far when news came of the death of Lord Byron, and put an end at once to a strain of somewhat peevish invective, which was intended to meet his eye, not to insult his memory, Hazlitt writes. 

He decides to let stand what he had written up to that point, but concludes with immortal praise for all Byron stood for—particularly for his final political act as a friend to Greek freedom. 

Lord Byron is dead: he also died a martyr to his zeal in the cause of freedom, for the last, best hopes of man. Let that be his excuse and his epitaph! Hazlitt writes. 

Hazlitt's essay obviously precedes by decades Abraham Lincoln's use of the phrase "last best hope"; for all I know, the latter may have gotten it from Hazlitt (as he is known to have found many sonorous phrases in Theodore Parker and others). 

Either way—let that be Byron's epitaph indeed. It is the best that any of us might aspire to, whether we perish at thirty-six or eighty-six. Would that we could all go down in service of the last, best hopes of human freedom.