February 22, 2006
Washington's Birthday Posted by John Steele Gordon at 07:15 AM EST In January 1814, having published The Corsair, Lord Byron announced that he would not be writing any more poetry for at least a considerable period of time. And he actually stuck to this resolution for a few months. As late as April 9, 1814, he wrote in a letter, “No more rhyme for—or rather from—me. I have taken my leave of that stage, and henceforth will mountebank it no longer.” But that evening he learned of the abdication of the Emperor Napoleon at Fontainebleau on April 6. The man who had held all Europe, from Portugal to Moscow, in his grip, and dominated the life of the world in which Lord Byron (who was born in 1788) had lived, had fallen from power. Perhaps never in human history had a man risen so high so fast and then fallen so far. Napoleon was only 44 when he arrived at Elba to begin his short-lived exile there. Byron, of course, would not have been the very great poet that he was if he could have resisted writing about so extraordinary an event and so extraordinary a man. The very next morning he wrote his “Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte.” ‘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 strew’d our earth with hostile bones,
And can he thus survive?
Since he, miscalled the Morning Star,
Nor man nor fiend hath fallen so far. Byron goes on like that for eighteen verses, and well worth the reader’s time they are. But it is the nineteenth and last verse that interests me today, the 274th birthday of a Virginia planter who led a ragtag army to victory against one of the world’s great powers and then, having accomplished so singular a feat, happily laid down his sword and retired to his beloved farm. “Where may the wearied eye repose,” asked Byron at the end of his Ode, 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,
Bequeath’d the name of Washington,
To make men blush there was but one!
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